The Marching Society in 1976

As long as I’m thinking back to 1976, I’ll highlight the Mighty Marvel Bicentennial Calendar.

This was published before I read more than a handful of comic books, so I didn’t see it at the time. The “’Taint the Meat…It’s the Humanity!” blog has a thorough overview.

The Stan Lee Papers at the University of Wyoming hold memos from Marvel Comics editor Tony Isabella to different artists, commissioning them to create the pictures for each month. (Start on page 37 of this digitized file.)

For example, to Gil Kane in January 1975:

Gil, this scene should show Conan and some Minute Men fighting British troops at Lexington. The British troops are wielding bayonets. I’m enclosing some reference (an old engraving) for you to (what else) refer to and whatever information on the battle at Lexington I can dig up. We’ll try to get you some additional reference before the end of the week.

Deadline for sketch: IMMEDIATELY!

That image ended up not showing any British troops at all, just the Cimmerian warrior urging on the Minute Men as they fired from behind a rather flat stone wall.

Isabella linked pictures to events in each month of 1776 (or 1775) where he could. January shows the Invaders of World War 2 with a man supposed to be Commodore Esek Hopkins, sailing out with the first Continental Navy. Isabella sent artist Frank Robbins “a pretty bad French engraving” of Hopkins. The result looks dimly like the engraving. But that engraving probably looked nothing like Hopkins, whom the artist in Europe had almost certainly never seen.

It’s rather funny to see the company’s effort to be historically accurate while inserting giant green monsters and flaming men into the Revolutionary War.