MY FAVORITE COMICS - "Tales of Asgard" from The Mighty Thor # 97-145

Since I've been on a sort of Jack Kirby's Thor high lately here on the blog, I might as well save the best for last : the Tales of Asgard back-up. I loved how these regular five page short-stories expanded the world of Thor and tied up the current incarnation of the norse god of thunder to its original mythic roots with inventive abandon and creativity. My all-time favorite of the bunch? Why, the "The meaning of..Ragnarok"/"Aftermath!" two-part conclusion to the epic quest through the Sea of Fear. Grandeur unleashed!

MY FAVORITE COMICS - "The Scourge of the Super Skrull" from The Mighty Thor #142

This one gets a place on this pantheon merely on the virtue of the splash page and the following couple of pages. Thor on a race against a biker!? This is what made marvel so famous way back when: the surreal contrast between the mundane and the majestic... and Jack Kirby, of course :-)  

MY FAVORITE COMICS - "The Wrath of Replicus" from The Mighty Thor #141

Unforgettable! Everything falls so perfectly in place on the mere sixteen pages within which this comic takes place... Slugger Sykes... Mrs. Garden... Dr. Donald Blake. Don't let yourself be deceived by the violent splash page - this is one of the best examples of a morality tale played out within the superhero genre confines without subverting its conventions.

MY FAVORITE COMICS - "To become an Immortal!" from The Mighty Thor #136

The fact that many of my favorite comics from back when I was a kid were reprints from earlier times probably says something not only about my tastes but also about the enduring quality of those same comics. This one hits the motherload! We get Jack Kirby's art and storytelling at the height of his creative power and vision, Vince Colleta's scratchy ink lines, Stan Lee's verbose diarrhea, old cheap four color printing on pulp paper and a tale chronicling the final moments of the forbidden romance between a beautiful mortal girl and the norse god of thunder. What else could a seven year old kid possibly want?

MY FAVORITE COMICS - Captain America #169-176 "The Secret Empire Saga"

  When I was a kid, american comics reached me via brazilian translated editions. Usually these compiled two or three of the original editions in a single comic with somewhere between forty to eighty pages. Such was the format under which I got acquainted with Captain America and what later came to be known as "The Secret Empire Saga". Again, as when I first discovered Spider-Man comics, I was perplexed. Here was a story where apparently the hero kills a man and becomes wanted by the authorities! This was too much for my small child mind. I still remember that I couldn't quite understand what was going on but it certainly was disturbing enough to pick my curiosity and make me to want to learn more. And what can I say of Sal Buscema's electrifying art? Its energy, exaggeration and dynamism were the perfect complement for the paranoid feeling of these comics. To this day, his depiction of Steve Rogers - handsome, noble, strong - still is the default archetype male superhero.image I seen in my mind's eye.

MY FAVORITE COMICS - Marvel Treasury Edition The Astonishing Spider-Man #18

This one was my gateway into the Marvel universe way back in the late 1970s and I must say I was scared. I still couldn't read but I was smart enough to follow the story though the drawings and they generated strong emotions in me. Nowadays I'd probably list this as horror fiction and like the best horror it made me feel simultaneously repulsed and attracted to this strange world. I already knew Spider-man from the animation tv series with the catchy intro song (Spider-man, Spider-man, does whatever a spider can ...) and all the related merchandise but seeing him on print felt different: I found him scary! The guest-heroes on this book (the original X-Men, the Werewolf, Ghost Rider, Iron Fist) seemed like monsters and the villains... well, if the heroes were scary, then the villains were the stuff of nightmares. To this day I can still remember the unmasking of The Orb, villain on the Ghost Rider adventure, and the strange fate of Drom, the Backwards Man, villain on the Iron Fist segment. There are so many images from this comic that I still find haunting like the covers by Bob Budiansky and Ernie Chan or the initial splash page of the X-Men crossover, pencilled by Gil Kane and featuring Peter Parker having a nightmare with Morbius the Living Vampire. Imagination unbound!