Doug: Only two more installments in our retrospective of the superhero features contained within the youth magazines
Smash and
Dynamite - look for the final one in a couple of weeks. Today we're excerpting from
Smash's "
Fantastic Foes" series with 3-page spreads on the Red Skull and Loki. As you've done in the past, feel free to comment on the art, the source material, and the magazines. We're happy that you've been enjoying these relics!
I was surprised to see Bloodstone as a major Cap villain. I barely remember him but he must have been popular at the time. Nice nostalgic review.
ReplyDeleteThey picked some nice Kirby and Buscema art for those illustrations! The Red Skull pages are the King at his finest.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I don't remember "Smash", it would have stuck with me if I'd seen it. Any occasion to admire some superheroic coolness was always welcome, from a newspaper article (usually prefaced by "Wham" and "Pow") to seeing a schoolmate with a Spidey lunchbox...
I don't remember Smash either, but these are pretty cool; nice to see some bad guys featured for a change!
ReplyDeleteMike Wilson
What?! No Gullin the hammer-wielding warthog in Thor's greatest enemy gallery? For shame. Also, I'm finding the texts mildly amusing, e.g. Loki is a "pain in the Asgard to Thor." Heh.
ReplyDeleteMartinex: I had the same reaction to Moonstone! Embarrasslingly enough I am not familiar with this incarnation of the character. The Moonstone that I know was female and I wanna say she was a Defender.
ReplyDeleteI do not remember Smash; we got Dynamite in my hood.
John, yep, I've only read stories with the female Moonstone - mainly when she was a member of Zemo's Masters of Evil in Avengers. Didn't she later changer her identity and become one of the Thunderbolts? I think I read that somewhere...
ReplyDeleteJohn and Edo --
ReplyDeleteThis iteration of Moonstone is from what would have been the then-recent Secret Empire storyline (see our review of that entire arc in our Library of Reviews linked at the top of the main page). I would certainly agree that he's not one of Cap's "greatest" foes, as evidenced by this very example of his staying power in our collective conscience.
Doug
Edo you are correct. The female Moonstone joined the initial Thunderbolts as Meteorite. Karla Sofen was a fairly interesting character as the team straddled the line between heroics and villainy, she was a master manipulator and I would say one of the best female villains maybe ever. The first twelve issues of that series are definitely worth a read.
ReplyDeleteMartinex, I've been curious about the Thunderbolts for years; it's something I completely missed when it started (during my longest hiatus from comics in the 1990s), but I've read quite a few positive assessments of that initial run of issues. The fact that Busiek wrote that initial run makes it all the more intriguing to me.
ReplyDelete