This week’s F.O.O.M. Friday rockets ahead to F.O.O.M. #9, with a Jim Starlin cover and a subject focus that blew my twelve-year-old mind back in 1974.

I liked Silver Surfer and (especially) Captain Marvel before receiving this issue of Marvel’s in-house fan magazine, but it was the first time I thought of these characters as belonging to a specific genre.

The mag even coined a term for this new comics genre with a clever bit of wordplay:

I loved thinking of these stories as “cosmics,” rather than “comics” — it made the stories seem so much bigger, and more consequential. This clever bit of branding helped bind me to Marvel’s cosmic heroes for decades to come … and it is an obsession that continues to this day, as one look at this list of the many “cosmic” subjects I’ve tackled here at Longbox Graveyard will attest!

• #2 The Micronauts: They came from inner Space!
• #11 Captain Not-So-Marvelous: Go Cosmic with Jim Starlin’s Captain Marvel!
• #21 Warlock: Jim Starlin’s 1970s outer space superhero epic!
• #25 This Female Fights Back!: Ms. Marvel deserved better!
• #27 Silver Age Gold: How the Silver Surfer is like a Broadway musical.
• #46 Avengers — Kree/Skrull War: Remember your superhero history!
• #53 Thanos & The Infinity Gauntlet: Killing half the universe for grins.
• #59 Killraven’s War of the Worlds: 1973 — A Space Oddity!
• #79 Out Of The Holocaust … A Hero!: Mar-Vell deserves your respect.
• #86 Star-Lord: The black & white original, warts and all!
• #93 Guardians of the Galaxy: Superheroes in Spaaaaace!
• #110 The Power And The Prize! The Silver Surfer confronts … Satan?

The articles in this particular issue of F.O.O.M. weren’t especially memorable, but that cover is as fresh today as when I plucked it from my mailbox almost forty years ago. Yeesh! I’m getting as old as The Watcher!

See you back here next week for another F.O.O.M. Friday!

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