Comics when I turned fourteen

      The comics fan challenge of the past day (based on the posts I've seen) appears to be to post four comics one read (and presumably thought highly of) when you were fourteen. Eleven, twelve or thirteen (age, not number of comics) would have been better for me, as by fourteen there had been some significant financial and creative changes in the wrong direction, but the assignment's the assignment. Around this time the financial struggles for the publisher had led to them quietly dropping the story page count to 18 as they were in a long fight to hold the cover price of a standard monthly comic to 25 cents.
      I decided to narrow it to what I was picking up the month I turned 14, so that would have been comics newly-arrived to the spinner racks that April, which would have had July as their cover dates.
     Working within this narrow band, I decided to go with:

Defenders 25: "The Serpent Sheds Its Skin" I really loved this era of Defenders, with Steve Gerber and Sal Buscema (the cover is a Gil Kane one with some Romita alterations) doing such an excellent job of it, and the team's loose roster blurring the line concerning guest stars. Here the heroes' diversity plays especially well against the Marvel U's surrogate KKK, the Sons of the Serpent. This was part of a conflict that had been rolling since issue #22. This concluding issue of the story had the reveal of who was behind the group's latest moves, and, unrelated to the story and unknown to the heroes, featured a double homicide by Gerber's Elf with a gun.

Around this time Marvel had been running a series of Giant-Size comics for several of their main titles. While some of them were just cash-grab, reprint-filled, spinner rack stuffers - part of a publishing war going on at the time - most of them were new and directly part of the continuity. (The program was (though we didn't know it at the time) coming to close.) So it was that this same month we also had:

Giant-Size Defenders #5. This story immediately followed

the main title's #25, and led into #26, bringing the original Guardians of the Galaxy into the story and setting up a new arc in a less than inspiring way. ("Eelar"? Really?) The cover is a less-than-inspiring Ron Wilson/Al Milgrom combination (apologies to their fans; there's no absolute right or wrong to it, we each have our tastes), and for some reason saw series writer/scripter Steve Gerber joined by co-plotters Gerry Conway, Roger Slifer, Len Wein, Chris Claremont, and Scott Edelmen, in what I at least like to speculate was a fun session by a group of fans turned pro. Interiors were pencils by Don Heck with a mix of inks by Jim Mooney, Mike Esposito and Dave Hunt. Being a prickly, picky bastard of a fan, this was one of many "not my choice" art teams. YMMV. Still, this kicked off another fun story arc, with the time-displaced Guardians stuck in the 20th century.

Avengers 137, which still had Steve Englehart at the helm (though the Romita cover and Tuska/Coletta interiors are and were far, far from my favorites to see), which was another of those roster shake-up tales (the title, "We Do Seek Out New Avengers!" tips that hand), with the significant recruit here being Hank McCoy, the Beast.
     So, mainly chosen for the writer and the potential brought in by having another Hank on the roster.
     Yeah, even a year earlier, when I was 13, I'd have more enthusiastic choices.

Fantastic Four #160: The plus sides included a single issue of John Buscema interiors (not represented by the Kane/Milgrom cover), and this being the kick-off of the multi-part Three Worlds War story. That brought in some alternate timeline versions of characters, and would include multiple continuity call-backs -- all of which very much appealed to series writer at the time, Roy Thomas. 
     Fortunately, they appealed to me, too. A cosmetic downside to this issue is that after several years of my being unhappy with the change to the series cover title "Fantastic Four" style (which they'd changed from the classic original back in issue #119 at the end of 1971) it was as if they said, "Okay, okay. You thought that was bad? Here's one to make you think that second one was really classic and stylish!" So with this issue we were given a flat, italicized style cover title that I can't imagine inspired anyone other than whoever cashed the check for designing it. The new logo was flanked by dull head shots of the quartet, each of whom seemed to be about as thrilled as I was to be anywhere near that logo. Well, someone must have liked it, or they were just stubborn or lazy, because they kept it until issue #218, early 1980, when they finally went back to the Stan and Jack era classic style.

     (I could look around some more, but in this instance I'm letting nostalgia dive the selections -- what I most enjoyed at the time -- and I'm going to restrict it to four because I have way too many things to do before I get tired enough to nod off again. Besides, Blogger is still refusing to allow me to include embedded/uploaded graphics into my posts in my main blog editing area, so I've been having to create it elsewhere (in the area I share as part of a group blog) and then paste it in. The bulk of this was done off-hand as a facebook post, but the length makes it much more appropriate for a blog setting.)

     Also worth noting is that at that point, in 1975, I wasn't reading anything from DC. In later years I'd retroactively tap into some it, but not right then. It was a combination of fan loyalty and limited budget.