Doug: Hey, friends -- I'm back with another peek at some wonderful memories from elementary school. Near the beginning of the month I gave you a look at the comic book features found in Smash magazine. Today we're looking at one of Smash's competitors, Dynamite. The latter may be more familiar to several of our readers. But in regard to the comics-related material, I always found myself a bit partial to the content and lay-out of the Smash articles. I particularly enjoyed the villain pages at the conclusion of each reprinted comic adventure. As you'll find below, Dynamite went with a sort of Q&A or FAQ format for their third page. It's OK, and for the novice was probably quite nice. But for the budding comics savant that I was at the ripe old age of 9, those pages were just a wasted opportunity to show some more art.
I'm thinking I may have seen the Captain America feature below before Jack Kirby had come back to the Cap monthly mag. As such, I am sure I thought the Tales of Suspense #63 reprint in this feature was awesome. Man, I did not care for Kirby's Marvel art in the high Bronze Age. I'm still not its biggest fan, although I have warmed to some of it. But this -- this is really exciting, and if memory serves was my introduction to Cap's origin (although I may have seen it on reruns of the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon -- can't recall).
You can check out the third page for yourself; I'd love to hear some opinions as to its merits, especially as compared to the villains' bios we saw a few weeks ago.
Below is the first DC feature I've shown (so far -- more to come). I'm not sure I'd have identified Carmine Infantino as the artist here. Tough to say if he was at Marvel by this time, and my overall knowledge of DC's Silver Age was certainly lacking in the Bronze Age. As I said above in regard to Kirby's 70s Marvel art, I was also not a fan of Infantino's 70s Marvel work. And, also as I remarked, I have warmed to some of it since. But what really strikes me about the contents of the feature below is the costume on Elongated Man. At this point I'd owned a smattering of Dick Dillin-drawn Justice League of America issues, but had no idea that ol' Ralph Dibney had once worn gray. News to this 4th grader!
The content of the final page for this feature differs from the Cap material above. Opinions on this more focused approach? Is more (above) better?
