Warp Two Hundred!

THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN issue no. 27 (and a bunch of other stuff!)

In celebration of my two-hundredth Marvel Time Warp post (“wow,” if I do say so myself), I thought I’d make it a giant-sized affair. So it makes sense to kick it off with the January 1978 issue of Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan magazine. Because Marvel’s 1978 magazines were a little larger and significantly lengthier than their standard comic books.

This issue of Savage Sword of Conan kicks off with a 44-page story, “The Children of Jhebbal Sag,” which is a continuation of the adaptation of Conan creator Robert E. Howard’s Beyond the Black River novella from the previous issue. The meat of the story has Conan and an ally named Balthus attempting to save some folks from an invasion of vicious Picts (these are fictional Picts, not to be confused with actual historical Picts).

The Picts are being lead by a sorcerer, Zogar Sag. I haven’t read the previous issue, but the story here gets a little repetitive, with Conan and Balthus in a cat-and-mouse game with a whole bunch of Picts. Conan and Balthus run, then they hide, then they fight… and then they repeat that cycle a few times. Our heroes also face a giant snake, a sabretooth tiger, a regular-tooth leopard, and a regular-tooth panther. But the coolest non-human in the story is a dog named Slasher. Slasher is the survivor of an earlier Pict attack, and he holds a grudge. So he teams up with Conan and Balthus and takes out more than his fair share of Picts.

Late in the story, a red-eyed, goblin-looking demon shows up, seemingly out of nowhere. Conan kills the demon, which also kills the sorcerer Zogar Sag, because Zogar summoned the demon and the two were mystically bound. It’s like the old saying… live by the evil magic, die by the evil magic. After Zogar dies, the Picts lose interest in fighting and retreat.

Up next in this issue of Savage Sword of Conan is “Conan the Syndicated,” a short article about the then-new Conan the Barbarian syndicated newspaper comic strip. I was familiar with the Conan newspaper strip — I’ve even read some of it, thanks to reprints. The article mentions the new Conan strip is from the same folks that were doing the Spider-Man newspaper strip, which I was also familiar with as it ran well into the 21st century. But the article also mentions a Howard the Duck newspaper strip, which I now desperately want to read, but which has apparently never been reprinted. Such a bummer!

The article also mentions the at-the-time forthcoming Conan movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is pretty cool as that movie wouldn’t hit theaters for another four-and-a-half years.

An article about Conan creator Robert E. Howard’s swashbuckling El Borak character, a fan-mail column, and a fan-art column (very good art, from fans I’d guess were at least semi-pro artists) round out the issue. As usual, it’s a lot of bang for the (at the time) one buck cover price.

The Human Fly no. 8

I started Marvel Time Warp when I realized that I could read basically all of the books Marvel released in 1978 (the year young me started reading comic books) online, thanks to services like Marvel Unlimited and Comixology. And also thanks to fan-made digital scans of old books. Which are “gray market” at best, but I think the fan-made scans are important because many digital reprints don’t feature the original colors or non-story material like ads and fan-mail pages.

It wasn’t long before I started hitting the back issue bins at comic shops and cons looking for original paper copies of some of these books. I’ve been surprised at how affordable some of the books are (two bucks for a 45-year-old comic book!) and how expensive some others are (fifty dollars for this book my mom paid 35 cents for when I was a kid?!). But it’s fun (to me, at least) looking for, basically, anything Marvel published in 1978, as opposed to trying to get a complete run of a single title.

The Human Fly is one of Marvel’s 1978 books with back issues that are generally still affordable. So it’s not surprising it’s the first one I have all of the 1978 issues of — issues 8 – 19 to be specific. I also have all of the ’78 issues of the Fantastic Four reprint book Marvel’s Greatest Comics, but that was a little easier because it was a bi-monthly book in ’78, so I only had to find six issues of that title.

This issue of The Human Fly (titled “The Tiger and the Fly!”) starts like many issues of Fly do, with a stunt. (The Human Fly character is loosely based on a real, Evel Knievel-type 1970s stuntman.) It’s a rocket-powered skateboard stunt for “inner city” kids outside a museum. After the stunt is completed successfully, the Human Fly, his entourage, and all of the kids go inside for a tour of the museum.

Also in the museum is Hector Ayala, AKA the White Tiger, AKA the “world’s first Latino superhero.” White Tiger was also showing up as a regular guest in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man at the time. And there’s a super-villain in the museum, too, an armored guy who hisses when he talks, called Copperhead. Fighting super-villains isn’t usually the Human Fly’s gig, but he ends up having to protect the kids from Copperhead when Copperhead tries to steal a gigantic urn from the museum. The story ends on a decent cliffhanger, with White Tiger apparently down for the count after being shot with Copperhead’s poison darts, and the Fly and the kids trapped in a flooded subway tunnel beneath the museum.

The Plot Thickens

When determining what books to read for Marvel Time Warp, I’ve been going by the Fandom.com Marvel wiki. Specifically the “Comics issues released on…” pages. Like this one for the first week of 1978. But! After almost a year of reading books for Marvel Time Warp, I just discovered a problem with the “released on…” pages — for some of the books in the wiki, there isn’t any data for release date, there’s just data for the cover date.

What’s the difference? That’s a reasonable question with a not-so-obvious answer. Basically, in an attempt to keep their comic books in stores for longer, publishers would post-date the cover date two or three months after the actual on-sale date. So when I’m reading Marvel comic books released in January of 1978, the cover date on those books would be April 1978.

The Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books blog (which has been doing a Marvel Time Warp kind of thing since way back in 2015!) explains it in a bit more detail. But it is a lot easier to figure out the cover date for an old comic book than the actual on-sale date, because the cover date is right there on the cover (or at least right there on the bottom of page one). That’s probably why the Fandom.com wiki is missing the on-sale date info for some books. And, unfortunately, books with no on-sale date don’t show up on the “released on…” pages I’ve been using as my guide to Marvel’s 1978 books.

Sigh.

On the bright side, I think most of the books I’ve been missing are ones I would be skipping anyway. For example, the UK weekly reprint book Super Spider-Man (great title, by the way) hasn’t been showing up for me because its listings in the wiki are missing on-sale dates. (It was my discovery of the existence of the UK Super Spider-Man book that led me down this Fandom.com Marvel wiki rabbit hole.) Ironically, it’s easy to determine the publishing dates of the weekly books — because they are weekly, they don’t have post-dated cover dates like the monthly books.

Going forward, I’ll be double-checking the wiki and will hopefully catch any books without on-sale date info before they fall through the cracks.

Pizzazz Magazine no. 7

Marvel’s Pizzazz magazine is one of the books that I’ve been missing because of missing on-sale date info on the Marvel wiki. Pizzazz wasn’t a comic magazine like Savage Sword of Conan, it was more of a regular pop culture and news magazine aimed at kids and teenagers (that did include a few pages of comics — more on that in a bit). So I probably won’t be been reading every issue from 1978, even now that I know about Pizzazz. But I did read issue no. 7, the issue I am guessing was on sale in January of 1978.

Grown-up me digs this magazine more than Marvel’s Crazy magazine (another Marvel book I don’t generally cover). And 1978 me would have loved Pizzazz. I remember a kid’s magazine called Dynamite from this era, but I managed to miss Pizzazz back then, and that’s a shame. This issue opens with a news story about the new-at-the-time space shuttle program and NASA space probes. Outer space stuff was my jam in 1978 and is still my jam today. After that we get card trick tips (“More Magic Secrets From Dr. Strange”), music and movie reviews (Aerosmith! Return From Witch Mountain!), a short prose fiction piece, some word puzzles (yes, I did the Thor-themed crossword), an advice column, and a sports column (“Baseball 1978”). There are also plenty of (now wonderfully retro) ads for stuff like remote-controlled airplanes and Milton Bradley electronic games.

Since this is a Marvel publication, there are also a few pages of comics features — a one-page Young Tarzan strip and a three-page Star Wars strip. Plus there are a couple of half-page Sunday-newspaper-style humor strips. OK, I take it back — even if I don’t read all of the 1978 issues of Pizzazz cover-to-cover, I will at least read all of the Star Wars comic strips in 1978 issues of Pizzazz.

Laff-a-Lympics no. 2

Another book that I have totally missed because of the on-sale date wiki issue is Laff-a-Lympics, from Marvel’s late-1970s line of books based on cartoon characters licensed from Hanna-Barbera. A little research reveals that Laff-a-Lympics was a monthly book, as opposed to the other Hanna-Barbera books that (I think) were all bi-monthly at the time. So I have several issues of Laff-a-Lympics to catch up on.

Not sure why Laff-a-Lympics got the monthly treatment. Apparently there was a Laff-a-Lympics TV show on the air at the time, so that probably helped. Also, Laff-a-Lympics features a ton of Hanna-Barbara characters competing in sporting events, so maybe the all-star nature of the book encouraged Marvel to publish it more frequently than other H-B titles.

One of my gripes with the other Marvel Hanna-Barbera books I’ve read is they each contain multiple short stories instead of one book-length (minus ads, of course) story. Which is good for the younger readers these books were aimed at, but it’s less good for grown-up me. If this issue of Laff-a-Lympics is any indication, this title bucks that multiple-short-stories trend in favor of book-length stories.

The story in this issue starts with Snagglepuss the lion and Mildew Wolf the wolf (I’m not familiar with the latter character) getting fired from their jobs as Laff-a-Lympics sportscasters and being replaced by a Howard Cosell look-alike, Roger Rankle. Rankle is an insufferable jerk, so Yogi Bear hatches a scheme to get Rankle fired and get Snagglepuss and Mildew re-hired.

As is usual with Marvel’s Hanna-Barbera books, this issue of Laff-a-Lympics features a one-page “Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera” article about the making of Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons. This one is a profile of Daws Butler, an actor who did the voices for several H-B characters, including Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound.

The Complete Fantastic Four no. 15

The Complete Fantastic Four is a Marvel book I did know about but had been skipping, because it was a UK-only book that wouldn’t have been available to 1978 US-only me. But I decided to finally read an issue in celebration of my 200th Marvel Time Warp post.

Based on a little research, it looks like Marvel was selling two types of comic books in the UK in the late 1970s. The first type were simply the same comics Marvel made for the US market. They were printed in the states, but the covers were slightly altered, with the iconic “Marvel Comics Group” banner replaced with a “Marvel All-Colour Comics” banner, and the US cover price replaced with a price in British pounds.

The Complete Fantastic Four was a book of the second type, a cheaper (10p, which I think was about 19 US cents at the time), black-and-white comic book with basically no ads. Apparently, the cheaper/no ads/black-and-white style was more in line with comic books that UK readers were accustomed to at the time, so Marvel made reprint books like Complete Fantastic Four (and Super Spider-Man that I mentioned earlier) in an attempt to appeal to those readers.

Even lacking the four-color glory of Marvel’s US books of the time, The Complete Fantastic Four does deliver a lot of bang for the 10p. It includes a complete reprint of “The Sub-Mariner Strikes” from Fantastic Four no. 147, plus the second half of “Prisoners of Kurrgo, Master of Planet X,” from Fantastic Four no. 7. The former story involves Sue Richards, AKA the Invisible Woman, leaving her husband Reed (AKA Mr. Fantastic) for sometimes hero/sometimes antihero Namor, the Sub-Mariner. Now that’s some mighty Marvel melodrama! The latter story sees the Fantastic Four abducted by Kurrgo (the titular master of Planet X) in hopes they can help him save his planet from a collision with another planet.

That’s 32 pages of comic book content, plus a fan-mail page, and only two ad pages (an interior ad for a UK-based comic book seller and a back-cover ad for a couple of Marvel’s Star Wars-related books).

Thanks For Reading!

If you’ve read all two hundred of these Marvel Time Warp posts, please take a minute and say “hi” in the comments. You can also leave a comment if you’ve read most of these posts or only this one post! I am having a great time reading all of these crazy, forty-plus-year-old comic books, and I hope that you are having fun reading Marvel Time Warp.

Next time — I’ll be back Tuesday with Godzilla, or Kull, or Captain America. Or maybe the ever-lovin’, blue-eyed Thing!