Posted By Dan Greenfield on Aug 15, 2025 | 8 comments

FRANCO’s FREE-FOR-ALL FRIDAYS!

By FRANCO

With San Diego and TerrifiCon now behind me, I like to take a day or two to decompress before jumping back into work. I did get a chance to look through some old comics from dealers while in Connecticut. I decided that I hadn’t read anything from the yesteryears in a while and picked up a couple issues.

Then I thought it might be fun to do a kind of retro review every once in a while of these great old books and there you have it:

IT CAME FROM THE BACK ISSUE BIN!

But then I thought, maybe I would do my own homage image to the book that I just read. Sort of like a “What if I had done some artwork for this book?” Might be fun to do my own cover art recreation (or change), or maybe a panel redone from the interior of the book or just some plain old fan art.

Let me know what you think of this idea. Something you dig or even any ideas you may have about the issue.

So here we go:

I picked up Captain Marvel #49 from March of 1977 (published in Dec, 1976). With a whopping cover price of 30 cents!

Opens with Captain Marvel jumping Rick Jones into the Negative Zone! Yowza! Why would he do that? They switch on and off being Captain Marvel and Rick Jones but this can’t be happening! (All of this explained thanks to a fever dream Rick wakes up from.)

I love that Rick Jones calls him “Marvie.”

There’s a Kree scientist Rick wakes up to and she needs Cap’s technological mind to help repair her crash-landed ship — but before that can happen, it’s insinuated that there’s some hanky panky.

Later at breakfast: the real reason they need Mar-Vell! Seems this lady and the other Kree, Mac-Ronn, have Ronan the Accuser (yup, that one from the Guardians of the Galaxy movie) tied up on their ship and he’s gonna escape!

But then a Kree sentry and the Cheetah show up as they were apparently just in the area causing property damage. They were summoned to distract Marvel so Ronan could free himself — and guess what! Ronan is now free! (Oh no!)

Ronan goes full Ronan — SPOILERS FOR A 49-YEAR-OLD COMIC — killing Tara, causing Mac-Ronn to declare he loved her. (But did she know that? Y’know that thing with Rick before? Hmmm.)

Needless to say this annoys Captain Marvel and KERWANG! Then Ronan dies of madness from the virus of the spirit that infects all Kree except… you guessed it, Captain Marvel!

Haven’t read Marvel’s spaceborn hero, Captain Marvel, in a long while.

Al Milgrom pencils with Terry Austin inks. And Scott Edelman writing.

Fun issue and lots of exposition adeptly front loaded in the beginning to catch you up.

Too many elements in here for my taste, story-wise, though. Loved the fight sequence with Rick taking on the Negative Zone’s most powerful villains, but alas, ’twas but a fever nightmare. But it does set up what Captain Marvel is fighting. A good time, but leaves questions (obviously) and I don’t think it does anything for the overall story arc they were going for.

That said, this did bring me back to the smell of old books and that was cool, as was getting reacquainted with an old friend in Captain Marvel.

Decided to draw something from the interior. Full disclosure: As a kid trying to learn how to draw, I would often do something like this. Draw out the different poses in a book of the different characters. So this brought me back to those days when I got a new comic and would devour it. Story, art, the whole thing. I couldn’t decide between the two panels above, at first. But decided to go with the solo shot of the transformation into Captain Marvel. Here’s my version, affectionately after Al Milgrom:

Until the next time we dive into the back issue bin… Happy Friday!

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MORE

— FRANCO’s Groovy Cut-Paper SPIDER-MAN Art Is the Bee’s Knees. Click here.

— Here’s the Skinny on AW YEAH COMICS’ Deal With PAPERCUTZ. Click here.

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Franco and his forehead have traveled the world and he writes and draws stuff. Franco is the creator, artist and writer of Patrick the Wolf Boy and Aw Yeah Comics! Franco has worked on books/comics, including Tiny Titans and Superman Family Adventures. Franco was also a high-school teacher and is one of the principal owners of Aw Yeah Comics retail stores. Dan made Franco add that he has won three Eisners.