1963

Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Rick Veitch & others 1963 (1993)

From where I was stood at the time, 1963 looked like Image Comics experimenting with the possibility of printing something that wasn't shit - which was fairly surprising. It took the form of six comic books, all written by Alan Moore, all different titles purportedly belonging to a shared continuity which was obviously a satire on the Marvel universe as it had been in the sixties. It was deliberately hokey, emphasising the more amusing aspects of the caped sixties - the occasionally rabid patriotism, the pathological fear of commies, the casual misogyny and so on. It was hardly an original idea, having been done in Mad magazine about every three or four months*, usually with a version of Wolverine sprouting knives, forks and spoons from his knuckles - amongst other side-splitters doubtless thrashed out during a few hours on the golf course; and of course Grant Morrison reckons it was all inspired by that issue of his Doom Patrol, which seems unusually narcissistic even by his standards.

The point of this was not quite satire, or not exclusively so, but that the six titles would interconnect, culminating in an eighty-page special wherein Mystery Inc., Tomorrow Syndicate and the rest battle it out with the horrible then contemporary Image characters with ninja swords and too many angry lines on their faces - Deathstabber, Kill Squad and those guys; and thus would we learn that the gritty realism of 1993 was but the kid fuel of 1963 seen from a different angle, or summink. No-one seems to agree on what the point was, or would have been had the special ever seen print, and it's difficult to tell from these six existing comic books. As to why the series was never wrapped up as intended, no-one seems able to agree on that either. This was the point at which Alan Moore decided he'd had enough of superheroes, and you can kind of tell, but it doesn't seem to be entirely his fault that the engine ran out of steam.

Whatever the case may be, and ignoring rumours of various persons other than Alan Moore having readied the missing final piece for imminent publication, 1963 reads - as stated - as a satire on sixties Marvel, without quite slipping over into parody. The individual issues are mostly enjoyable enough in their own right without it all feeling entirely cynical, excepting Horus, Lord of Light which is simply dull, dull, dull by terms which could never be levelled at the Mighty Thor upon which it provides a tangential commentary. It helps that the style is familiar more than the characters, so we have N-Man who, for example, is spun from nuclear accidents which inexplicably bestow strange powers, but he can't really be mistaken for the incredible Bulk or any of those other creaking parodies; but the more one reads into this, additionally delving into the faux text articles, adverts, and letters pages, it begins to feel pretty much like a rant against Stan Lee and the comic book industry in general; and while the rant may well be justified, it gets fucking boring because the overpowering alliteration and digression just ain't that funny and it begins to feel like an embittered fist shaken at clouds, or even Moore's little gang sniggering amongst themselves. So 1963 was sort of self-defeating in that for all that it does, it wasn't actually anywhere near so much fun as, off the top off my head, Roy Thomas' All-Star Squadron from approximately the same era, likewise harking back to a golden age, and so rigorously square as to make 1963 seem like the work of Marcel Duchamp.

Shame.

Mind you, we got a couple of pin-ups from Melinda Gebbie, so that was a scoop, obviously.

*: It probably wasn't but it felt that way, and I'm possibly thinking of Frantic.

The Death of Captain Marvel

Jim Starlin, Stan Lee, Steve Englehart & others
The Death of Captain Marvel (1982)
I may be wrong, not least because I don't care enough to bother looking it up, but I think The Death of Captain Marvel may have been the first graphic novel, or at least the first comic book to be labelled as such on the grounds of being square bound with fancy paper and a higher price tag, although really it's still a comic book. The idea that it might be aimed at a more mature audience, by some definition, came later, but I'll return to that.

This being a 2018 reprint, we also get five or six issues of the comic book as background to himself snuffing it during the main feature. This is good news because we get three issues worth of the first Captain Marvel story written by Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, and drawn by Gene Colan. It's superheroism as space opera, more or less, or arguably Superman rewritten as superheroic space opera given the detail of our man - an alien who passes for human - finding himself unusually enhanced once arriving on our planet. It's nothing life changing but has retained a certain power through the art of Gene Colan - surely one of the most underrated comic book artists of our time - who duplicates Kirby's monumental dynamism with his own expressionist realism to equally great effect. If his art seems hastily rendered, it doesn't seem to matter given the depth of the mood and that the reader can pretty much feel every punch and explosion.

Later issues included here date from the mid-seventies period of the comic book having grown up, as demonstrated in Jim Starlin's thoroughly peculiar Warlock and Rich Buckler's Deathlok the Demolisher - to name but two; except it didn't quite extend to Captain Marvel. Doug Moench and Pat Broderick's version is not without a certain screwy charm, but it's not Starlin's Warlock by a long shot, and, strangest of all, Starlin's Death of Captain Marvel isn't Starlin's Warlock by a long shot either. It pulls some of the same cosmic moves which were doubtless very much appreciated by one's older brother and his doobie rolling pals, but the art is anatomically clunky in places, pretty much top end fan stuff - and I've never regarded the term fan art as a compliment - suggesting as it does that this person 1) has never taken a life drawing class and 2) probably listens to a lot of Yes. Starlin, much as I love the man's work, compensates with fussy lines and an excess of detail, but it doesn't really help.

Also, particularly when compared to Warlock, the story could almost be an episode of Star Trek with more capes. It's one of those deals attempting to answer the question of why Superman doesn't end world hunger, but thanks to all the space fags and the fact of Tales from Topographic Oceans having been stuck to the turntable since October, it's a fairly safe, conservative, and even self-involved version of the question: what if Captain Marvel had cancer, just like in the real world? The answer is pretty much incorporated in the title, in case you were wondering, meaning we get scenes of the entire pantheon of Marvel superheroes all stood around the Captain's bed looking sad, interspersed with bouts of crying and the Beast asking why, Lord why? He had so much to live for.

It's not the worst thing you'll ever read, but it's burdened with the emotional sophistication of an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man and lacks the flair to capitalise upon its own essentially ludicrous narrative, even before we get to the art not being anything like so mind-blowing as Starlin's otherwise much deserved reputation might promise. Somehow, Gene Colan drawing Captain Marvel punching a giant robot who says things like know you this: he who would oppose me - - must be annihilated! has a lot more soul.

Essential Defenders volume one

Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema & others

Essential Defenders volume one (1974)

My guess would be that someone at Marvel noticed all those extraneous superheroes they had laying around making the place look untidy and decided to hoover a few of them up into brand new superteams, just like the Avengers, so as to maximise something or other. Then a couple of years later they reprinted this one in black and white weekly instalments in a UK comic called Rampage. I'd recently experienced something of an epiphany for the form, having discovered 2000AD just a few months earlier. I'd always felt well disposed towards Marvel from afar, but there were too many titles and most of them had been going for yonks. Rampage therefore represented an opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Each week featured half an issue of the Defenders plus reprints from the Nova comic book. It was pretty great as I recall, but went monthly after less than a year, changed format and lost me to the extent that I almost forgot all about it - which was weird. When John Byrne introduced Xemnu the Titan to his run on She-Hulk at the end of the eighties, I knew the guy looked sort of familiar but had no idea where I'd seen him.

So I picked this up partially as an experiment to see how much I could remember forgetting, if you see what I mean, and partially because I'm a middle aged man who is screened for colon cancer to a yearly schedule so it seems only natural that I should be purchasing seventies superhero comics aimed at twelve-year old boys.

Marketing aside, the premise of the Defenders was the assemblage of supertypes who otherwise tended to go it alone - Dr. Strange, Prince Namor, and the Hulk for starters, meaning a lot of what transpires is usually the other two trying to explain things to the big green thickie in hope that he'll thump someone. This big fat paving slab additionally kicks off with issues of solo comics which foreshadow events in the initial run of the Defenders, and it makes for a surprisingly satisfying and thematically consistent whole. Additionally, it's all quite revealing in terms of what made Marvel tick in the early days, or at least what made it so much more appealing than all those frowning boy scouts and hall monitors over at the distinguished competition. Marvel's roots, at least on the evidence of this lot, seem to lay with all those horror comics that Wertham had pulled from the shelves. Marvel's superheroes always seemed to have a bit more texture to me, and it seems because they're mostly Gods and monsters, misfits who could never have held down normal jobs as mild-mannered reporters; and thus do we open with a sixties issue of Dr. Strange which quotes H.P. Lovecraft and introduces the Nameless One, a two-headed extra-dimensional tosspot who seems very clearly descended from the weird fiction of the twenties and thirties. In fact, even once we fully ease into the era of men in tights, or at least the era of a percentage of those men present wearing the same, the Defenders remains satisfyingly odd and quite difficult to predict.

The art is mostly top shelf, and is particularly striking in black and white, and Ross Andru and Bill Everett's work on A Titan Walks Among Us! from Marvel Feature #3 is downright gorgeous even aside from being the place where I obviously first met Xemnu - and boy, some of those panels leapt right off the page to kiss me in the centre of the forehead.

Additionally we have the Avengers-Defenders war, which drags on a bit, but is probably significant in foreshadowing all those headachey multi-title and allegedly sense shattering crossovers of the eighties, Secret Crisis and all that; despite which, this thing is still very much to be recommended. I thought it would probably be at least an interesting curiosity, but it's fucking magnificent for the most part.

West Coast Avengers

John Byrne & others West Coast Avengers (1990)
More eighties superhero comics, but nothing to do with comfort food this time - these made the list because they were written and drawn by John Byrne and are therefore the bollocks. I say these rather than it because this is a run of comic books rather than the same collected as a - cough cough - graphic novel; and even if they were, it still wouldn't be a graphic novel, it would be a collection of comic books, and it would be a collection of comic books because there's nothing wrong with comic books, even comic books which haven't grown up.

I'm sure we all know who the Avengers are by now. This title dates from an era during which there were so many Avengers that they had to siphon a few of them off into a separate team with its own title; and what distinguishes this one is that it was, as already stated, written and drawn by John Byrne, a man with an unusually profound understanding of what makes this sort of thing work, namely the soap opera aspect combined with the juvenile love of things in sets which can be mixed and matched. Caped types foiling bank robberies had begun to look a bit comical by this point in comic book history, hence the soap aspect with an assortment of fantastic beings pitched against one another, or else pulled apart to see what makes them tick. Byrne pulled the Vision apart during his tenure, to memorable effect, then messed with the Scarlet Witch by revealing that her children were imaginary constructs brought about by her ability to manipulate probabilities.

Byrne's comics tend to succeed on their own terms, rather than by, for example, giving Spiderman a dose of the clap. He combines solid, surprisingly conservative storytelling with truly screwy ideas and genuine magic is born of the contrast while remaining faithful to the form, juvenile though it may well be. Byrne takes scrappy throwaway concepts and retells them with the gravity of legends, and should probably be mentioned in the same sentences as the likes of Kirby and others, even if we're mainly talking about the art.

Unfortunately, the baroque intertwined narrative he'd built up here came to an abrupt end with issue fifty-seven due to a disagreement with his editor, following which he downed tools in protest. I'm told Roy Thomas wrapped it all up a few issues later, but I think I prefer the truncated genius of Byrne's run with all of the loose ends left hanging. Considering all which has been sold in the name of the Avengers over the last three decades, I really wonder if it was ever again as good as this.

Scarab

John Smith, Scot Eaton & Mike Barreiro Scarab (1994)
This one apparently wasn't sufficiently popular for a collected edition, obliging me to rebuy the original eight-issue series of which I think I read two or maybe three at the time. It seemed interesting, but I was going seriously off the boil with comics in general, and then I missed an issue and I couldn't be bothered to hunt down the rest. My more recent purchase came in the mail padded out with other comics the seller had given up trying to flog, thus defining them as pulp in the true sense of the term. One of these comics was the not conspicuously collectible first issue of DC's Blackhawk by Martin Pasko and Rick Burchett, which I mention as it seems vaguely relevent to Scarab.

This Blackhawk was the 1989 revival of something which had been popular in the forties, a practice which DC had really been hammering into the ground for much of the eighties - lame golden age also-rans which had worked fine in their day but looked otherwise ridiculous in the era of Watchmen. Of course, Watchman had been the same basic reinvention of vintage superheroes, the key to which was the reinvention - doing something which hadn't been done before rather than just digging the reader in the ribs and asking who remembers Tootsie Rolls with a cheeky wink. Some titles took the latter route with cornball stories, big grins, and stars and stripes aplenty; but All-Star Squadron seemed retarded even to me - a developmentally stunted teenager who would happily read almost anything featuring a flying guy with a cape, so God knows how it must have read to the eight-year olds for whom it had presumably been written. There's probably a limit to how much nostalgia a child born in the seventies is likely to feel for Lawrence Welk, women in cloche hats, and prohibition. The eighties Blackhawk looked dull beyond my imagining even at the time, and sure enough...

It's the big patriotic grin like a single tooth filling the full width of the hero's mouth, jazz on the radio, and a version of that eternal war against the Nazis which can never quite decide whether it's ironic or not. The original Blackhawks were a freelance team of fighter pilots accompanied by Chop-Chop, an absurd conglomeration of racist stereotypes - a buck-toothed yellow monkey who speakee rike this. I find it really difficult to see how anyone could have been left with much of a post-coital glow by the thing unless they somehow popped their cherry whilst reading an issue, which seems unlikely on the face of it; and yet here it was again like a Two Ronnies sketch that had taken itself too seriously, corny tips of the hat to an imaginary audience of OAPs alternating with scenes of the revisionist Blackhawks reading their own comic exploits and finding themselves appalled at both the racism and the political naiveté. The whole endeavour screams look, maybe someone will buy it...

My point is that I don't know what the point was.

Scarab began life as a revised Dr. Fate, Dr. Fate being a mystical superhero of the forties of the kind characterised by amusingly portentous dialogue and adventures involving pyramids. More recently he turned up in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing in which capacity he was reasonably entertaining. John Smith's proposed narrative was full of shagging and even some bumming, which I guess DC comics saw as being at odds with whatever nostalgia might be tapped by the revival of yet another caped dude of yesteryear, so Smith switched the plates and came up with this.

Scarab is as intriguing as I remember, and better read in a single sitting than monthly instalments during which all momentum becomes bogged down with imagery. Smith was going, I presume, for a sort of atmospheric overload with vivid Burroughsian text scattered across the pages in something approaching stream of consciousness, using artwork to dilute the onslaught as much as illustrate it. The word count is high, and not all of it is to be taken as a literal reference to anything. At least some simply establishes mood, even the dialogue:

The screech of fingernails on a blackboard... skinny boys salivating over broken glass... love amongst the set squares and protractors...

For the sake of argument, you might call it John Smith doing a Doom Patrol, although he was always very much his own writer. The problem with Scarab, and I suspect why it never went further than these eight issues, is that with John Smith being very much his own writer, they really should have just let him loose on Dr. Fate; because it reads as Dr. Fate with the serial numbers filed off, but we're stuck with a new and unfamiliar dude resembling H.R. Giger's idea of a superhero which is a lot more distracting than a warped version of something familiar would have been. The narrative seems almost at odds with its star, particularly when out of costume he's just another body builder with a mullet and not much in the way of personality beyond a love of justice 'n' shit. We're left with the impression that Smith felt the same way by the end, particularly when he throws in a couple of characters from his Indigo Prime strip in 2000AD, possibly as a means of keeping himself interested.

Scarab is potentially as rich as any novel I've read, but remains forever hamstrung by the creative identity crisis surrounding its main character, which is a great shame because I'm sure it could have been as big as Moore's Swamp Thing. Maybe with a bit more time, it would have found its stride.

Star Wars: A Long Time Ago...

Archie Goodwin, Carmine Infantino & many, many others
Star Wars: A Long Time Ago...
Doomworld (1978)
Dark Encounters (1980)
Resurrection of Evil (1981)
This time it was J.G. Ballard boring me shitless, in combination with which a load of personal aggravations - significantly one of the cats breaking her leg - conspired to reduce my attention span as applied to literature which is probably important and good for you but isn't much fun to actually read; and these three collections were just sat there promising comforting retreat into a less troublesome past, so...

I was twelve when Star Wars came out, and naturally I was excited about the whole thing before I'd even seen it. I'd read the two giant-sized Marvel specials - weird collectors editions the size of tabloid newspapers - and I'd read that first issue of Starburst, and a couple of those other tie-in making of magazines they just couldn't get into the newsagents fast enough. I was excited because this was a film which looked like real life rather than special effects, even Gerry Anderson special effects. The robots seemed like real robots, as did the spacecraft; and I know we had 2001: A Space Odyssey, but no-one ever really understood what the hell happened in that film, and the adventures of Luke Skywalker promised to be significantly more exciting. Star Wars didn't disappoint when it arrived, although on close inspection I realised it somehow lacked the bite of the strips I'd begun to follow in 2000AD comic; and neither did the action figures disappoint, nor Star Wars Weekly which reprinted the two collectors editions and then went off somewhere else altogether, following its own trajectory.

These three volumes collect the first fifty or so issues of the American comic, as reprinted in shorter weekly helpings in the English version. Star Wars Weekly was never anything like so essential as 2000AD for me as a kid, although some of the back up strips came fairly close - Warlock, Guardians of the Galaxy,  Micronauts and so on. The main feature seemed variable, and suffered from each episode having been broken down into awkward lengths for the sake of a weekly schedule, but it still had its moments, or so I recall, although nostalgia has bitten me in the ass before...

A New Hope as it has since become known, adapted by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin - apparently drawn using a nail on a sheet of hardboard - is pleasant enough, and interesting for its featuring the first version of Jabba the Hut as played by Graeme Garden of The Goodies. With the adaptation out of the way, the story takes a brief detour through a slightly shite but hugely enjoyable Han Solo version of The Magnificent Seven, before really getting into gear with Archie Goodwin and Carmine Infantino at the controls. But for a few digressions and fill-in issues, the first two volumes of these collections more or less represent a continuing story, one which deftly avoided doing too much which could be contradicted when The Empire Strikes Back came out. The story is nicely paced, laying down intriguing plot points far in advance of their being required to explain anything, and delivering regular big ideas sufficient to keep it interesting. Of course, one problem with the comic is that it tends to expose Star Wars lack of any actual characters, or at least no-one deeper than they killed his mum and dad and now he wants revenge, or the rough and ready outlaw with a heart of gold and the like. This isn't really a problem in the film, at least not in the first one, given that scale and spectacle were the main point; and it did both pretty well, so all you really needed from anyone was at the level of the lowly farm boy who had a date with destiny. Whilst the comic strip could never really hope to achieve the scale of the celluloid, it had the next best thing in the form of Carmine Infantino's weird angular style, a sort of Vorticist translation of traditional Japanese art. Doomworld - set around a city-sized sailing ship rigged together from the trunks of underwater trees on a planet without dry land - impressed the shit out of me when I was a kid, and amazingly it has stood the test of time, albeit as something patently angled towards younger teenagers; and subsequent episodes of Luke and pals battling representatives of the House of Tagge actually work better than I remember them doing, possibly benefiting from being read over a few more concentrated sittings. Inevitably there's a degree of clunk and cliché because it's Star Wars, but I swear Carmine Infantino's art could be some of the most beautiful stuff Marvel have ever published, regardless of yer Kirbys and yer Ditkos, so it seems churlish to roll one's eyes at yet another creaking instance of C3PO testily pointing out that R2D2 has just made him look a right cunt.

Sadly it wasn't to last. Al Williamson's art on the adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back is beautiful but, as with the film, the fucking thing doesn't actually have a story.

Luke is over here, then he's over there.

Let's hope he doesn't run into Darth Vader.

Oh shit - look what they did to Han Solo.

The End.

Even as an easily satisfied teenager I thought it was bollocks and stopped buying the comic, which seems to have been the right choice going by the remainder of the third volume. Having adapted Empire, it's as though the story fell and hit its head and was never quite the same again. Carmine Infantino's beautiful art gets buried beneath the linework of a roster of lesser talents, Archie Goodwin drops in and out of the mix, and we get a succession of shorter, less ambitious adventures, essentially filler material. Luke and Leia guest in a dinosaur-infested Doug McClure vehicle, or a story from the 1974 Star Trek annual, or Larry Hama's impressively dire The Third Law in which her nibs goes to the banking planet to take out a loan so the rebels can buy more X-Wing fighters; and oh what a coincidence, Darth Vader just happens to be there as well, making a loud farting noise as Leia meets with the chancellor, waving a hand in front of his face and commenting, 'I would say there was a Brussels sprout on the end of that one, your royal highness.'

That doesn't happen, but it comes close in places. The Third Law isn't actually a Davy Jones strip from Viz, but it could have been.

Never mind. Nothing lasts forever, and the point to remember is just how good the first two volumes are. Apparently they're not considered Star Wars canon, but really - who gives a shit? I'd still take Doomworld over almost anything which has appeared on the big screen since the first one.

Essential Warlock

Roy Thomas, Jim Starlin, Gil Kane and others Essential Warlock (2012)
Know you this, that Marvel's Adam Warlock comic got off to an impressive start as an ambitious parable of a Christlike superhuman saving an alternate Earth from both its wrathful creator and his errant fallen angel, the wolfish Man-Beast, the proverbial serpent in Eden and source of all this world's ills. It began in obvious homage to Jack Kirby's cosmic scale, written with an assumption of intelligent readership, and pulling no Marvel Shakespearian punches with plenty of lo, yonder, and yet where words may fail of hearing may not soundless rage prevail?

Where such affectations sometimes come off as just plain ridiculous, Roy Thomas makes them work with lines favouring genuine gravitas over mere pomposity - including at least two words I actually had to look up - and with such aplomb that even when the inevitable group of denim clad 1970s teenage sidekicks show up, whilst the integrity of the strip bends a little under the strain of the more prosaic dialogue of I dig and don't crowd me, Dave, the whole remains strong, perhaps even a little richer for the contrast. With Gil Kane's fantastic Kirby-inspired artwork, the earliest issues seem very substantial, even referencing black power and Chicano issues without going all Ben Elton, and generally carrying themselves with the dignity of good quality children's fiction - the stuff an adult can read without wincing or looking like a complete cock. Dammit - the opener is so good you don't even mind that the snake-headed guy is named Kohbra.

Unfortunately, after the first few issues, Roy Thomas and Gil Kane handed over the title to lesser talents and the book lost its distinguishing qualities, recycling the same story over and over - always Warlock's battle against the Man-Beast or his minions, teenage sidekicks serving mainly as hostage opportunities, and with the Marvel Shakespearian now seeming faintly absurd: the orchestra had begun to regret the kebabs consumed the previous evening, but luckily the Cockney Rejects were available to fill in on the second act of Die Walküre - if that makes any sense whatsoever.

Then along came Jim Starlin, alternately influenced by Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby and Michael Moorcock, transforming Warlock into a weird and wonderful superhero space opera which I suspect may borrow somewhat from Kirby's Fourth World, except I'm unfamiliar with Kirby's Fourth World aside from a few slightly underwhelming issues of Mister Miracle by which I recognise the villainous Thanos as an obvious stand-in for Kirby's Darkseid. This Starlin version of Warlock was reprinted in the UK in Star Wars Weekly which is where I first encountered it, as one of a number of back-up strips that were slightly more engaging than the title feature. Even with my being no stranger to the nutty stuff thanks to Tom Baker on the telly and 2000AD comic, Starlin's Warlock struck me as particularly weird - vampiric soul gems, a wisecracking troll, an ally who falls in love with death and hopes to win her over by destroying the universe, anatomically bizarre aliens, and the main villain being Adam Warlock's future self just like in The Trial of a Time Lord more than a decade later; all drawn in the spirit of an age of concept albums recorded by bands dressed as wizards.

Returning to these stories forty years after they first appeared, whilst not quite so amazing as they seemed to my twelve year old self - art and script trying just a bit too hard on occasion - they remain nevertheless impressive, and certainly superior to all but possibly the initial Roy Thomas and Gil Kane run. Additionally, I'd wager at least one testicle on this version of Warlock being a significant influence on the young Grant Morrison. All those elements of his early Gideon Stargrave strips not directly inspired by Moorcock seem to have come from Starlin; and whilst we're here, with hindsight even Alan Moore's Roscoe Moscow carries more than a faint whiff of the same.

Unfortunately, once Adam Warlock rejoined the wider Marvel universe in the last few issues reprinted here, it all went back to extended fight scenes with assorted superheroes explaining the plot to one another in Marvel Shakespearian as the Beast exclaimed oh my stars and garters whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. It's a sad end to a story which, for at least a few issues, managed to raise itself up above the standard Marvel landfill of the time.

Reprinting no less than twenty-seven 1970s comics in a single volume as thick as a housebrick and retailing for mere pennies, Essential Warlock is well worth a look - mostly classic material, and the filler at least provides an insight into why X-Men was such a hit when Chris Claremont took over in 1975.