Episode 5 - Murdock and Marvel: 1967

This year we begin to see the backlash against superheroes as the Batman TV show enters its 3rd and final season, and many comic companies began to feel the effects of a contracting market and superhero fatigue.

Preshow

• Announcement: Murdock and Marvel moves back to Wednesday Starting Next Week
• Marvel Unlimited Show will be moving to Fridays

The Year in Comics

Key Happenings

Best Selling Books... and Marvels

The Year in Marvel

While the rest of the comic world was losing ground, the Marvel Comics juggernaut kept rolling.  Marvel’s sales continued to surge, and many Marvel books were now ready to challenge DC’s top offerings.

New Titles

New Characters

Big Moments

Who's in the Bullpen

• ROOKIE OF THE YEAR: Herb Trimpe

The Year in Daredevil

Appearances: Daredevil Issues #24-35, Strange Tales #156 and Daredevil Annual #1

• Stan Lee and Gene Colan are credited with all of these stories
• After helping Ka-Zar, the Jungle Lord at his Castle in Europe. Daredevil returns to New York
• Spider-Man sends a letter to Murdock revealing he knows that Murdock is Daredevil – that letter is read by Nelson and Page – so to cover, Murdock invents a twin brother, Mike Murdock, who is actually Daredevil.
• We learned that the Masked Marauder was Mr. Farnam, Nelson and Murdock’s office landlord.
• Daredevil takes on the Emissary of Evil (headed by Electro) in his first Annual.
• Marauder joins forces with Stiltman (yes, we had a return of Stiltman) but the two together still aren’t enough to take down Daredevil (who got lent a hand from Spider-Man) Marauder is killed in the process.
• Daredevil, while giving a lecture at Carter College, fights an alien race of beings called the Queega who have come to earth to take its natural resources.
• Daredevil decides to dress up as Thor to flush out some bad guys he recently defeated and ends up fighting it out with the real god of thunder.
• Mr Hyde realizes that Daredevil is blind after he really does become blinded by the villain's plan
• Daredevil must save some precious jewelry at the 1967 World's Fair in Montreal
• Daredevil finishes off the year facing off with the Trapster who’s out to get The Fantastic Four. Sue Storm ends the issue as the bait for a bomb in this cliffhanger.

New Powers, Toys or Places

This Week's Spotlight: Daredevil #28 May 1967 “Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Planet”

Recap

Why We Picked This Story

The Takeaway

Comics can’t survive on superheroes alone.

Questions or comments

We'd love to hear from you!  Email us at questions@comicsovertime.com or find us on Twitter @comicsoftime.

------------------

THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING CREATORS AND RESOURCES

Music: Our theme music is by the very talented Lesfm.  You can find more about them and their music at https://pixabay.com/users/lesfm-22579021/.

The Grand Comics Database: Dan uses custom queries against a downloadable copy of the GCD to construct his publisher, title and creator charts.

Comichron: Our source for comic book sales data.

Man Without Fear: Kuljit Mithra’s Daredevil site contains a staggering collection of resources about our hero, including news, interviews and comic details.

The American Comic Book Chronicles: Published by TwoMorrows, these volumes provide an excellent analysis of American comics through the years.  Because these volumes break down comic history by year and decade they are a great place to get a basic orientation on what is happening across the comic industry at a particular point in time.

Joshua and Jamie Do Daredevil: A fantastic podcast that does a deep-dive into Daredevil comics.  This ran from 2018-2020, and covered most of the first volume of Daredevil, and was a fun way to get an in-depth look at each issue of Daredevil from 1-377.

My Marvelous Year: This is a reading-club style podcast where Dave Buesing and friends chose important or interesting books from a particular year to read and discuss.  This helped me remember some fun and crazy stories, and would be a great companion piece to Murdock and Marvel for those who want more comic-story-specific coverage.

BOOKLIST

The following books have been frequently used as reference while preparing summaries of the comic history segments of our show.  Each and every one comes recommended by Dan for fans wanting to read more about it!

Licari, Fabio and Marco Rizzo.  Marvel: The First 80 Years: The True Story of a Pop-Culture Phenomenon.  London: Titan Books, 2020.  This book is sort of a mess, as the print quality is terrible, and Titan doesn’t even credit the authors unless you check the fine print.  It’s like this was published by Marvel in the early 60s! But the information is good, and it is presented in an entertaining fashion.  So its decent, but I would recommend you see if you can just borrow it from the library instead of purchasing.

Wells, John.  American Comic Book Chronicles: 1960-1964.  Raleigh: Two Morrows, 2015.  Not cheap, but a fantastic series that is informative and fun to read.

Wright, Bradford.  Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.  This is the revised edition.

Marvel Year By Year: A Visual History.  New York: DK Publishing, 2022.  The academic in my rails at using information from any work that doesn’t have an author credit, but this is a decent (if very surface) look at each year in the history of Timely / Marvel from 1939 to 2021.

Cowsill, Alan et al.  DC Comics Year by Year: A Visual History.  New York: DK Publishing, 2010.  Because its nice to occasionally take a peek at what the Distinguished Competition is up to.

Dauber, Jeremy.  American Comics: A History.  New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2022.  An excellent, relatively compact history of the domestic comic industry from its 19th century origins through to recent 21st century developments.  An excellent successor to Bradford Wright’s Comic Book Nation.