My Favorite Len Wein Stories

To comics readers raised on the Bronze Age, writer and editor Len Wein was a ubiquitous name. He passed away yesterday, age 69, and was, by all accounts a very nice man. Like a lot of Bronze Age work horses, his star waned in the 90s and beyond, and while he continued to get work, was considered by most a little too old-fashioned for contemporary tastes. And yet, this was the trail blazer who co-created Wolverine, the All-New All-Different X-Men, Lucius Fox, the Human Target, and Swamp Thing. And then others would take those characters and make themselves famous by pushing them to greater heights. Frank Miller. Chris Claremont. Alan Moore. They all built their huge reputations on his foundation (Moore especially, since Watchmen was Wein's editorial project). From the 90s on, the number of times his work was reprinted was pretty much off the charts.

To pay tribute to someone who should rightly be called a comics legend, allow me to present some of my favorite Len Wein stories (and I really wish I'd been reading comics in the 70s because of lot of his great comics were written during that decade):

Thor #244 "This Is the Way the World Ends!" - When I was a kid, and could only read French, we used to get these Jumbo books that had black & white translations from a variety of comics, from all companies thrown together willy-nilly. I don't have them anymore, sadly, but a few of them fired my imagination and still loom large in my memory. One of these is this issue of Thor, where he goes up against time-manipulating beings. How they could age you to dust or send you back to before you existed terrified the young me.

Fantastic Four #186 "Enter: Salem's Seven!" - This issue of FF, fighting the very cool Salem's 7, was another. And looky here, both were written by Len Wein!

Blue Beetle #8 "Henchman" - Probably my favorite single Len Wein story, this change of pace - and perspective - in the middle of a perfectly fun series, looks at a superhero adventure through the eyes of a henchman with very human concerns.

Swamp Thing #9 "The Stalker from Beyond!" - Not the most obvious choice from the original Swamp Thing series, but I reread it a few times recently for the Invasion Podcast, so I'm using it as a stand-in for that first run.

DC Comics Presents #61 "The Once-and-Future War!" - Wein wrote a lot of team-ups over the years, eve starting the Thing's run in what would become Marvel Two-in-One. One of my favorite team-ups, that I recently covered on FW Team-Up, is this Superman/OMAC tale that predates and prefigures The Terminator!

DC Comics Presents #64 "The Resurgence of Blackbriar Thorn!" - Another of my early purchases, leading to a life-long love of the Demon and of Joe Kubert's art. Blackbriar Thorne was a pretty cool villain too.

Teen Titans #18 "Eye of the Beholder!" - Wein's first published work was a modernization of the Teen Titans (that I covered HERE), co-written with Marv Wolfman. The two would team up many times, most famously on Crisis on Infinite Earths and my next choice.

Who's Who #1-13 - Wein edited and wrote many pieces of the first half of the original "definitive directory of the DC Universe", which just so happens to be one of my favorite comic book things ever.

Batman: The Animated Series "The Demon's Quest" - Wein also wrote four episodes of Bruce Timm's Batman, the best of which is surely the two-parter that introduced Ra's al Ghul  and Talia to the animated DCU. Reviewed HERE.

I know I missed a lot of great stuff. Tell me what yours are. Tell me about your love of the Basilisk. Or of how the Hulk fell in love. Or of his JLA/Golden Age crossovers. His great Batman stories. The return of the Green Goblin. His horror work. His westerns. His Star Trek stories. There's a lot to love. And a lot for me to still discover.