This is "Look Back," a brand-new feature that I plan to do for at least all of 2019 and possibly beyond that (and possibly forget about in a week, who knows?). The concept is that every week (I'll probably be skipping the four fifth weeks in the year, but maybe not) of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue in terms of a larger scale (like the series overall, etc.). Each week will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first week of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second week looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third week looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth week looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago.

This is the first time that I've hit a month with five weekends in it, so I have decided to just pick some other year from a year divisible by 10. You know, 60/40/30/20, etc. Today, we look at a classic Wolverine and Punisher match-up that helped solidify Jim Lee as a budding superstar artist.

A comic book creator who doesn't get NEARLY as much credit as he deserves as a finder and developer of talent is Carl Potts. Potts was a longtime editor for Marvel and he didn't just find creators, he found a way to help DEVELOP them into the stars they later would become. A famous story (well, famous enough for me to do a Comic Book Legends Revealed on it) involved Carl Potts moving into his new office when he succeeded Al Milgrom as an editor at Marvel and finding some Arthur Adams pages and basically saving them from the trash. Potts then gave Adams an assignment on a Defenders fill-in issue...

(you can see more of those unused pages in Eric Nolen-Weathington and George Khoury's Modern Masters Vol 6.: Arthur Adams at TwoMorrows.com)

Potts' assistant, Ann Nocenti, then got Adams involved in a new project and it became the book known as Longshot, which worked out for everyone involved...

Potts helped Mike Mignola in Mignola's early years at Marvel and Potts gave Whilce Portacio his first Marvel work. However, Potts will likely always be best known for being the guy who gave Jim Lee his first regular art gig and helped him develop into a superstar. Potts was the editor on Alpha Flight and it was there that Jim Lee first began to draw the book regularly in 1988.

Then, Potts and Lee launched the Punisher spin-off series, Punisher War Journal. Lee was clearly a major talent, but he was still early in his career, so Potts would actually do the layouts for the series and then Lee would do pencils and then ink them. This helped a lot in terms of teaching fundamental storytelling skills to the young artist but it also helped to keep the book on time, schedule-wise (it was also on an unusual "every six weeks" schedule)

It was a great pairing, as Lee's stylistic flourishes and dynamic pencils that made him such a star are all there, but they're also sort of grounded with Potts' layouts...

The intercut flashbacks on the bottom are a nice touch.

Okay, then things got REALLY real with Punisher War Journal #6 (out roughly March 1989 - the every six weeks thing makes me unsure if maybe this was, like, the last day of February or whatever)...

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='That guy draws one mean Wolverine!']

Right off the bat, what a cover!

Early in the story, Wolverine is introduced and boy, it is one heck of a dynamic image...

The concept is that there are some poachers in the Congo and Punisher and Wolverine both come out to stop them and Wolverine mistakes Punisher for a poacher when Punisher is attacked by a gorilla and so the two have a brutal fight, showing off Lee's dynamic artwork...

They have a re-match in the next issue (probably technically April, but with the six weeks schedule, who knows? Maybe THIS issue was in March!)

Pretty awesome fight once again...

It turns out that this was all a mission to find dinosaurs (presumably from the Savage Land)...

This story was so big that it was collected into a trade paperback later this same year!!

And by the end of the year, Lee was on Uncanny X-Men alternating with Marc Silvestri and by the next year, Lee was the regular artist on Uncanny X-Men and was probably the most popular comic book artist on the planet...

This storyline played a major role in that launch to stardom. It would have obviously eventually happened anyways, but this was the big kickstarter. And Carl Potts was involved all the way!

If you have any suggestions for April (or any other later months) 2009, 1994, 1969 and 1944 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. For the 75 and 50 year old comics, the cover date is three months ahead of the actual release date (so July for a book that came out in April) while the 25 and 10 year old comics have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so June for a book that came out in April). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.