The Superhero Women Cover by John Romita

In the 1970s, both DC and Marvel released comic book collections into the mainstream book market. Marvel released a number of trade paperback volumes through Fireside Books beginning with The Origins of Marvel Comics in 1974, and their form factor was very close to the trade paperbacks we read today.

In 1977, this volume was released containing stories starring Medusa from The Inhumans, Robert E Howard’s Red Sonja, Sue Storm Richards – The Invisible Girl – from The Fantastic Four, Carol Danvers – Ms Marvel, Hela from Thor, Greer Grant Nelson – The Cat, Janet Van Dyne – The Wasp, Lyra the Femizon, Shanna the She-Devil, and Natasha Romanova – The Black Widow.

The published cover was a painted illustration by John Romita, but he also produced an ink lineart version, and that’s what I’m working with in this post. New colour and packaging by myself.

As published.

Original art scan from Heritage Auctions. The art is in such good shape there’s absolutely no wow factor in showing you the production-ready version. So we’ll move straight on to the colour versions.

Colour version.

Giant-Size colour version.