COMICS HISTORY | 13th Dimension, Comics, Creators, Culture

Sep27

Dig These 13 Great BRONZE AGE COMICS That Should Have Been

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Sep 27, 2023

Dig These 13 Great BRONZE AGE COMICS That Should Have Been

DAKOTA ALEXANDER strikes again! Like Steve Rogers, Dakota Alexander is a man out of time: He’s a DIY artist who, if this were, say, 40-45 years ago, would have been a star for Marvel and/or DC. I really believe that. Anything he posts on Facebook — much of which we’ve shown off at 13th Dimension — stops me in my tracks. He’s an outstanding, clever artist who is able to channel Bronze Age artists without ripping them off. He recently completed his 13th faux Bronze Age cover, so in hitting that milestone, he magically unlocked the key to another feature here. So, dig these 13 GREAT BRONZE AGE COMICS THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN, along with a brief intro and commentary from Dakota: — Hi, folks! Thanks always for the support of my work as well as the support for 13th Dimension. A quick note on some of the pieces you’ll see. Many of them started out as regular pieces, but I found that they would also work well as covers. Also, they are mostly Marvel. Nothing against DC. Excelsior! — Dakota This is one of my first attempts at making covers. I really love Halloween and every year I do a few spooky-themed pieces. This was also my first big try at the vintage weathered look. — This is actually a fairly old piece that I recently made into a cover. Wolverine is one of the few characters who is just as iconic out of costume as he is in costume. I wanted him in his home element and Wendigo just seemed like the perfect foe. — Another piece that started as a pin-up. It is actually kind of hard to fit the entire FF evenly on a single page, and then to put them in some kind of suspenseful situation to feel compelling — so I went with the metaphorical angle. When I converted it into a cover, the tagline title became pretty obvious. — John Romita Sr. is huge inspiration for me and directly influences any classic Spidey I draw. I wanted something with Spidey really filling the whole cover and yet still in danger. — — This started out as me just wanting to see Marvel and DC duke it out with their swamp characters. The EC element kind of just came to me after the...

Sep27

RETRO HOT PICKS! On Sale This Week — in 1983!

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Sep 27, 2023

RETRO HOT PICKS! On Sale This Week — in 1983!

Scott and Dan hit up the comics racks from 40 years ago… This week for RETRO HOT PICKS, Scott Tipton and I are selecting comics that came out the week of Sept. 27, 1983. Last time for RETRO HOT PICKS, it was the week of Sept. 20, 1985. Click here to check it out. (Keep in mind that comics came out on multiple days, so these are technically the comics that went on sale between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30.) So, let’s set the scene: The world almost ended. No, really, it did. On Sept. 26, amid severe Cold War tensions — the USSR had shot down a South Korean passenger jet earlier in the month — a Soviet nuclear early warning system signaled the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile, with four more behind it, coming from the United States. (Hawkish Ronald Reagan was president.) The warnings were suspected by Soviet Air Defense Forces Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov to be a false alarm. Rather than immediately relaying the warning to his superiors, he decided to wait for corroborating evidence — and none arrived. His remarkable stoicism in the face of potential annihilation is seen as having prevented a retaliatory strike that would almost certainly have led to World War III and global nuclear devastation. An investigation found the system had, yes, malfunctioned. The terrifying incident remained unknown to the public until 1998. Meanwhile, life in an unaware America went on. The top movie at the box office was the charming but dated Mr. Mom, starring Michael Keaton. (It was this role that primarily chagrined fans when his casting as Batman was announced several years later.) Released this week was Toronto Film Festival darling The Big Chill, an enormously influential drama/comedy that holds up very well 40 years later. Despite its flaws, I love it now as I loved it then. Watched it a million times at the movie theater I worked at. On television, the big news was the premiere of AfterMASH (which I just realized is a play on the word “aftermath”). The first episode, which aired Sept. 26, ranked first in the Nielsens, as did the following week’s installment. The series, which showed what happened after the Korean War to Col. Potter, Klinger and Father Mulcahy, is now largely forgotten and overtly ignored by many MASH fans. It actually...

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