Marvel Premiere

Marvel Premiere is an American comic book anthology series published by Marvel Comics. It ran for 61 issues from April 1972 to August 1981.

The series was originally intended to be a testing ground for new characters and the re-introduction of characters who no longer had their own titles.. After a final appearance as "Him" in Thor #165-166 (June–July 1969), writer and then Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas and penciler Gil Kane significantly revamped Him as the allegorical Messiah Adam Warlock in Marvel Premiere #1 (April 1972). The name Adam meaning man and Warlock for magician, was basically how him was renamed, although in the first issue, he just called Warlock by The High Evolutionary. The High Evolutionary, a master of genetics, evolved Him to a more advanced state of being and rechristened the character "Adam Warlock" in Marvel Premiere #2 (May 1972). In 2009, Thomas explained he had been a fan of the soundtrack to the musical Jesus Christ Superstar and sought to bring the story to comic books in a superhero context: "Yes, I had some trepidation about the Christ parallels, but I hoped there would be little outcry if I handled it tastefully, since I was not really making any serious statement on religion ... at least not overtly." Choosing to use a preexisting character while keeping the series' locale separate from mainstream Marvel Earth, he created Counter-Earth, a new planet generated from a chunk of Earth and set in orbit on the opposite side of the Sun. Thomas and Kane collaborated on the costume, with the red tunic and golden lightning bolt as their homage to Fawcett Comics' 1940s-1950s character Captain Marvel. It was successful in this endeavor to some extent by featuring Doctor Strange beginning with issue #3 and Iron Fist in issue #15, written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Gil Kane. Other, less successful, introductions include the Legion of Monsters, Paladin and Woodgod. The comic also featured the first appearance of the second Ant-Man (Scott Lang) and the first comic book appearance of rock musician Alice Cooper. Another feature that would spin off into its own title was Seeker 3000, but this only happened twenty years after its first appearance in Marvel Premiere #41 (1978), with a four-issue miniseries published in 1998.

Later on in the title's run, Marvel Premiere was also used to finish stories of characters who had lost their own book or feature. One example of this was the Man-Wolf two-parter in #45-46, which continued the story from Creatures on the Loose #37. Another was the three-issue Black Panther series.