Marvel Age #19
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeMarvel Age #19 (cover-dated October 1984) is one of the most content-dense single issues of Marvel's long-running promotional magazine, packing three historically significant editorial threads into one package. Its uncredited in-house account of the collapsed Avengers/JLA crossover — titled 'Behind The Lines: Special Report: The Story Behind the Avengers/JLA Team-Up Controversy' — became a primary source document that comics historians, journalists, and even DC executive editor Dick Giordano were still actively arguing about for years afterward; Giordano issued a formal public rebuttal in DC's own 'Meanwhile…' column in January 1985. The issue also carried the origin story of Marvel's newly launched Star Comics imprint just as that all-ages line was opening its doors, making the issue a rare first-person launch document for a significant publishing initiative. And for readers tracking the Flag-Smasher character, the issue contains an early pre-debut teaser of the villain — then operating under the working name 'Flag-Breaker' — months before his first canonical appearance in Captain America #312.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
Marvel Age was conceived as a promotional comic-book-format magazine, functioning essentially as an expanded, stand-alone edition of the Bullpen Bulletins pages that Marvel ran inside its monthly comics. The series launched in 1983 under an initial cover price well below Marvel's regular line, making it accessible as a direct marketing tool for both the readership and the direct-market retailer base. Issue #19 carried interior work written and illustrated by Fred Hembeck — a recurring humor cartoonist throughout the run — with the cover supplied by Warren Kremer, the veteran Harvey Comics artist who had been brought over to help staff the new Star Comics imprint and whose work on characters like Richie Rich had defined an entire generation of all-ages comics. The uncredited Avengers/JLA controversy article was drawn upon extensively by subsequent journalists and historians piecing together the infamous broken crossover, cementing this otherwise promotional issue as an inadvertent piece of the public record.
Trivia · 7 facts
- Cover art drawn by Warren Kremer, the Harvey Comics veteran who co-created Richie Rich and was then serving as a key artist for the newly launched Star Comics imprint — the cover features Spider-Man in his black costume.
- Interior strip writing, penciling, inking, and lettering all handled by Fred Hembeck, who contributed a recurring 2-page humor strip throughout the Marvel Age run; coloring by Paul Becton and George Roussos.
- Contains an uncredited article titled 'Behind The Lines: Special Report: The Story Behind the Avengers/JLA Team-Up Controversy,' which presented Marvel's account of why the planned 1982–83 JLA/Avengers crossover — to have been drawn by George Pérez — collapsed; this piece was cited as a primary source in subsequent oral histories and provoked a public rebuttal from DC's Dick Giordano in his January 1985 'Meanwhile…' column.
- Carries the origin story of Marvel's Star Comics imprint, which launched in 1984 as an all-ages line filling the market gap left when Harvey Comics and Gold Key both ceased children's publishing in 1982–83; the imprint's first comic was a three-issue adaptation of The Muppets Take Manhattan.
- Contains an early teaser of the villain Flag-Smasher, identified at that stage under the working name 'Flag-Breaker,' ahead of his first canonical appearance in Captain America #312 (December 1985).
- The issue also includes an article on Fraggle Rock and an interview with editor Tom DeFalco, reflecting Star Comics' strategy of licensing children's media properties alongside superhero content.
- Marvel Age ran for 140 issues plus four annuals between 1983 and 1994; issue #19 falls in its second full year of publication and is among the earliest issues to function as a significant historical document rather than purely promotional copy.
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Reprints
Reprinted in Star Wars: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus #3 (2015), Star Comics: Planet Terry - The Complete Collection #[nn] (2019), Marvel Masterworks: The Fantastic Four #25 (2023), Marvel Age Omnibus #1 (2023)
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