Pizzazz (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Pizzazz magazine hit newsstands in 1977, published by Marvel Comics and aimed squarely at the youth culture of the era. It ran for 16 issues before folding in 1979. On the surface it looked like any other teen pop magazine: celebrity photos, rock star profiles, movie coverage. But inside its pages Marvel had slipped something that would quietly become a landmark in science fiction publishing history. How did a short-lived youth title from a comic book company end up producing the very first original Star Wars stories ever put to print? And what else was hiding in those 16 issues that made Pizzazz a strange and singular artifact of the late 1970s?

• 2. A Magazine of Its Moment

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  Shaun Cassidy appeared on six covers of Pizzazz, more than any other figure. The Hulk managed five, Spider-Man four, and Peter Frampton three. That lineup alone captures the magazine's peculiar identity: part fan magazine, part superhero showcase. Covers mixed actual photographs of celebrities with photo-realistic drawings of both real people and Marvel characters. The topics covered inside ranged from the original Star Wars film to Grease, from Meat Loaf to Battlestar Galactica, and from the film adaptation of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to Superman: The Movie. Regular columns gave the magazine its own recurring texture. "Dream Dimensions" analyzed readers' dreams, and "Dear Wendy" handled reader questions in advice-column style. Once the readership established itself, the editors added a full-page illustration of a crowded scene in which the names of letter-writing readers were hidden, a puzzle feature that invited the audience to hunt for themselves on the page.

• 3. Harvey Kurtzman and Amy Carter

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  Harvey Kurtzman contributed a one-page comic to the back of each issue, typically a "Hey Look!" piece he had originally drawn for Timely Comics, the Marvel predecessor company, back in the 1940s. The appearance of this archival material in a youth-targeted magazine was an unusual editorial choice. On another recurring page, Pizzazz ran a comic strip about Amy Carter's life as the President's daughter. Together these two features sat at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum: a comedic strip recycled from decades past, and a topical strip built around the sitting president's young daughter.

• 4. The Star Wars First

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  The 1977 installments of the serialized Star Wars comic in Pizzazz hold a specific distinction in publishing history. They are the first original Star Wars stories not directly adapted from the films to appear in print anywhere, arriving before the original stories in Marvel's own Star Wars comic series and before the 1978 novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye. The first story arc, "The Keeper's World", was produced by Roy Thomas, Howard Chaykin, and Tony DeZuniga. Dark Horse Comics later reprinted it. The second arc, "The Kingdom of Ice", assembled a larger creative team: Archie Goodwin wrote it, with art by Walt Simonson, Klaus Janson, Dave Cockrum, and John Tartaglione.

• 5. An Unfinished Galaxy

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  "The Kingdom of Ice" was designed to conclude across issues 17 and 18 of Pizzazz. The magazine was canceled after issue 16. Those two final chapters were never published in the American edition. The story reached its conclusion on another continent instead. Marvel UK ran the complete arc in their Star Wars Weekly comic, with the concluding chapters appearing in issue 60, in April 1979. For readers in the United States, the ending existed only in a British weekly published months after the American magazine ceased to exist.