I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

Zeitgiest: 15 December 2025

Almost exactly thirty years ago, I moved to NYC. This meant moving into smaller digs, and also combining households with the woman I would eventually marry. Some things would need to be left behind. One of those things was a bunch of comic books.

I'd started collecting comics in the late 70s, and worked at least part-time at a branch of Mile High comics for most of the 80s, first at 'Fantasy Works' in Aurora, then 'Time Warp' in Boulder. I bought a lot of comics. When we moved to NYC, we weren't sure it would stick. So I asked my parents if I could store the comics with them. They had the space and agreed. I went cold turkey on collecting, and we packed up and drove to New York. As it turned out, we never moved back to Colorado, staying in New York for a good long time, and then moving to England.

Times change, though, and my parents needed to move, and the question of what to do with the comics came up. The answer was, after thirty years, to reunite me with the comics. (Re-unite! That's the word.) We contacted a shipper (the excellent BLUEmove, highly recommended) to move 19 comic boxes, plus a footlocker loaded with surprises from my parents, from the middle of the US to the UK.

Those boxes are here. I've been reunited with 18 years(ish) of comics that I've not seen in thirty. Naturally, I'm going to read them. The boxes are organised by title, with Marvel, DC, and indies separated. A box labelled 'Amazing Ad - Doctor Strange' so I thought I'd start there.

'Amazing Ad' meant 'Amazing Adventures,' and there were four issues in there. A little later, I discovered another box labelled 'Zatara - Amazing Ad,' which had the tail end of the DCs before starting on the Marvels. Which means I was going to start with Marvel's

'Amazing Adventures'
numbers 18-39
featuring
War of the Worlds
starring
Killraven

This run started in 1973 and finished in 1976. That's before I started collecting comic books, which means I had to actively acquire these after the fact. Why did I seek them out? I can't be sure, but knowing the way my mind works, I suspect that what happened was this: in the early 80s Marvel started releasing graphic novels, and by then, I was working at Fantasy Works. In '83, a Killraven graphic novel came out, which I bought, read, and realised that there was backstory I didn't have. That would be enough to kick the collector gene into gear, and impel me to collect the Amazing Adventures run.

Is that 100% true? Who knows? It's plausible, though, and versions of that story will appear again and again, with variations, as I continued to collect.

The story is this - after the original War of the Worlds, the Martians came back a hundred years later, only vaccinated this time. Earth fell, and the Martians oppressed, enslaved, and started to eat the defeated remnants of humankind. Young Jonathan Raven is trained as a gladiator, takes the name Killraven, escapes, and leads a group of freedom fighters in a picaresque wander across a devastated USA, fighting Martians, mutants, and so on.

It's impossible to read these now without seeing them as cultural artifacts. Setting aside for the moment the actual text and story, the physical objects themselves are interesting. For one thing, they are full of advertisements. The ads tell us who was buying comics in the early 70s, or, at least who some companies thought were buying them.

There are a lot of ads that one might expect: novelty toys or hairpieces, practical jokes, movie tie-in memorabilia (most for horror movies), opportunities for small scale jobs (sell Grit magazine! Make 7 cents on each copy!) and other things that might be targeting teenage boys. There are also some ones that seem a bit strange at first glance. Quite a few ads for body-building programs (like Charles Atlas or something similar), and a surprisingly large number of ads for martial arts or self-defense courses. Then there are the ads which are clearly targeting young men, but adults: learn drafting, start your own locksmith business, get into electronics repair, and the like.

The Vietnam War ended in 1975. Several of the ads specifically target men just coming out of military service. Were these young men reading comic books when they were drafted, and still reading them when they returned home? Obviously some companies or training programs saw an opportunity, since the ads are there. An offer to teach young vets electronics is on one page and on the facing page is an ad for plans to build a giant cardboard robot. On other page is an ad for 'Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Superhero,' an album of Spider-Man themed songs with narration by Stan (the man) Lee.

Moving on to the story. It's very episodic, which was the case with most comics of the day. Single issue stories were the norm, with some multi-issue arcs. Killraven has an overarching narrative, but the issues themselves are nearly stand-alone. The writing, mostly by Don McGregor, is pretty good, and the social commentary is there, as it so often is in science fiction. Unlike the superhero comics of the time, there's quite a bit of death. It's more like some of the contemporary swords and sorcery comics, like Conan. Monsters and guards are dispatched with abandon. It also featured, I understand, the first interracial kiss in colour comic books, some six years after Star Trek's famous Kirk and Uhura kiss. (Wikipedia calls it a 'non-satirical interracial kiss' for what that's worth.)

And it's grim. This is a comic from the early 70s, remember, so the horrors of war are very real in peoples' minds. The enemy is alien, and is literally raising humans as food. (Standard sci-fi tropes, to be sure.) But the action takes place across a ruined USA. Iconic landmarks are fallen, or re-used by the invaders for their own purposes - the Lincoln Memorial turned into a slave market is a bit heavy-handed, but still effective. The poignancy of the characters have been rendered bereft of their own histories allows for commentary on a wide variety of subjects.

The art is solid and features a couple of names in particular that stood out to me on this reading: P. Craig Russell and Howard Chaykin. I always associate Russell with Elric, particularly the 1982 graphic novel. Chaykin was one of my favourites in the 80s: 'American Flagg!' with First Comics - for a while I collected everything First published, 'Time2,' 'Black Kiss,' and a few odds and ends that I picked up because of his name.

Overall, Killraven has quite a few good points, and re-reading them brought back some memories, but the key point is - they had gone and it brought them back. I've not thought of Killraven in years, and that means that it will not make the cut of comics I will be keeping. Although it's good, it regrettably will go in the 'to-be-sold pile.'