This fifth Wednesday, the Iron Age boys throw a bit of a curveball by taking a look at an obscure fantasy series from the early 1980s! Designed to serve what was perceived as an untapped audience for Marvel and entice toy manufacturers to create a line of licensed tie-in action figures, The Saga of Crystar, Crystal Warrior throws a few curveballs of its own with a somewhat conceptually abstract central conflict and an antagonist who's more of a victim of circumstance than your standard unambiguous bad guy. We discuss the comic, the toys, and the Marvel Universe guest stars (who never again mentioned their adventures on Crystar's planet)!

Artist Mike Mignola made his first foray into creator-owned work with Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, a 1994 miniseries for Dark Horse’s Legend imprint. In time, Mignola would be responsible for every aspect of Hellboy’s adventures, turning him and the B.R.P.D into a miniature comic book industry, but for this initial story, Mignola turned to Iron Age stalwart John Byrne to help with the scripting. We’ll talk about Mignola and his cohorts in the Legend imprint, the horror and pulp influences that went into this series, and the historical Rasputin before discussing how Hellboy took Hollywood.

When up-and-coming writer Joe Kelly got the keys to Deadpool’s first solo series, he subverted fan expectations by downplaying the character’s connections to the larger X-franchise. Similarly, he decided to fulfill the constant requests for the Merc with a Mouth to team-up with Spider-Man in a way nobody expected. We take a look at the innovative, Forrest Gump-inspired techniques used to insert a time-traveling Deadpool into a semi-obscure issue of Amazing Spider-Man by Stan Lee and John Romita, Sr. and discuss whether this oversized issue’s jokes about Norman Osborn’s weird hair and Gwen Stacy hold up today.

Forget whatever you think you know about Hawkman! Tim Truman’s 1989 prestige format miniseries Hawkworld drew from inspirations including cop shows, Vietnam War movies, and The Count of Monte Cristo to update the winged warrior’s Silver Age origin for a grittier, more grounded era. The result is a science fiction adventure offering a critique of imperialism and class inequality that resonates just as strongly today. We’ll also dig into the confusing tangle of Hawkman’s post-Crisis continuity, but rest assured that Hawkworld itself won’t require you to be an expert in Thanagarian lore before or since.

With the Avengers and Fantastic Four temporarily outsourced to Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee in 1997, Marvel touted the ostensibly brand-new heroes of the Thunderbolts as the next big thing to a somewhat skeptical comics readership. The legendary twist ending to the first issue made the book into an overnight success but sometimes overshadows the work Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley did on the rest of the series, making this comic worth a re-examination. We’ll discuss the origins of the concept, the first year of the series, and how the creators refreshed Silver and Bronze Age superhero tropes while developing a bunch of C-list villains into vibrant, interesting characters.

The first issue of the web-slinger's quarterly fifth-week title kicked off the 1993 14-part crossover "Maximum Carnage," but Spider-Man Unlimited #1's supersized page count left room for two whole backup stories as well. We talk plenty about the main feature's giant fang monsters and unconvincing serial killers, but also dig into the very nature of the anthology superhero comic and ponder what it could be capable of.

Before they were a multimillion-dollar media and licensing franchise, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were just a funny idea that two young artists in Western Massachusetts introduced in a black-and-white book with a 3,000-copy print run. For one of your hosts, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s original series is a longtime favorite by a pair of hometown heroes; the other is coming in fresh, having only ever seen the cartoon and movie adaptations. We’ll read the three-issue arc that kicks off the series, consider the Turtles in the context of the Black-and-White Boom (and Bust), and discuss how the creators’ idiosyncratic vision and artistic chops elevate the comic beyond a one-joke parody of Frank Miller and various other influences.

At a time in the mid-1990s when the Avengers franchise struggled for attention against the industry-defining X-Men and Image titles, Mark Waid and Ron Garney somehow pulled off one of the most celebrated Captain America runs of all time…until it was cut short to make way for Rob Liefeld’s “Heroes Reborn” revamp. We look at this creative team’s opening arc, “Operation Rebirth,” which used propulsive, slam-bang action plotting to try to maintain Cap’s relevance in the grim ‘n’ gritty ‘90s and reinvent a long-lost supporting character along the way. We’ll also touch on Waid’s broader superhero-writing career and why there’s more to his work than simple Silver Age nostalgia.