History
The magazine was initiated under editor Rick Marschall in 1979 under the title Odyssey, and originally set to launch as an issue of Marvel Super Special, Marvel's early graphic novel line. After Marschall learned of at least seven other magazines titled Odyssey, the project was renamed Epic Illustrated and launched as a standalone series. Marschall was replaced by editor Archie Goodwin in the autumn of 1979, several months before the first issue was published.
The anthology featured heroic fiction and genre stories, primarily fantasy and science fiction, but in a broad range of styles. Established mainstream-comics talents as X-Men's Byrne-Austin pencil-ink team, John Buscema, and Jim Starlin, were featured, as well as independent-press creators as Wendy Pini and The Studio's Jeffrey Jones, M.W. Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Berni Wrightson. Goodwin commissioned stories by many new artists, including Steve Bissette, Pepe Moreno, Jon J. Muth, Rick Veitch and Kent Williams. The full-color magazine format, which was a first for Marvel, allowed for a broader range of color than the traditional three-color printing process, and many of the stories, and all the covers, were painted. Fantasy artists who did not normally work in the comics field, such as Richard Corben, Frank Frazetta, The Brothers Hildebrandt, and Boris Vallejo contributed covers.
Epic Illustrated also included an occasional Marvel Comics protagonist, such as the first issue's Silver Surfer story by Stan Lee and John Buscema, and Vanth Dreadstar, who first appears in issue #3.Each issue usually featured a main story, a number of regular serials, and anthological shorts.
Read more about this topic: Epic Illustrated
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)