24 Pages

You Can't Go Back... to the Future Ravage 2099 #1 writer: Stan Lee          penciller: Paul Ryan                   inker: Keith Williams colorist: Paul Becton   * If you were flipping through the September 1990 issue of your favorite Marvel title, you might have come across a fascinating tidbit in Stan Lee’s semi-regular “Stan’s Soapbox” column on the Bullpen Bulletins page. Here, Marvel’s beloved publisher revealed he was working with John Byrne on a project “featuring a never-before-seen superhero world.” In subsequent columns over the next few months, he unveiled a working title of "The Marvel World of Tomorrow," and raved about Byrne’s artwork for the project. He also revealed the hero would be a character called Ravage.   When I read this, it seemed too good to be true: The co-creator of the Marvel Universe and my then-favorite artist working a story about s...

Conjuring a Phenomenon It’s not an exaggeration to say that the comics industry as we know it only exists because of the intense passion of its fans. Every medium needs fans, obviously, but there are few others for which the fans have played such an outsized part in how it operates.   The origin of superhero comics is closely intertwined with the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s;  Amazing Stories , Detective Story Magazine , Doc Savage Magazine , and the like. The origin of superhero comics fandom is also tied up in those pulps. The pulps had letter pages, and fans writing into the magazine soon began writing to one another, and this led naturally into the creation of fan-produced news bulletins sharing reviews, recommendations, news, and classifies. These became known as fanzines, and in those way pre-Internet days, it was one of the only ways for fans to connect with one another. Not surprisingly, the first fanzine was centered on sci-fi.  And superhero comics as w...