The World According To Comics No.9

A long time ago, I had a good friend called Rob. He was on the same course as me at University, and he was one of the people who helped nurture my interest in experimental and unusual music, for which I should belatedly thank him.

 

One of Rob's many eccentricities was that he would refuse to own certain records on the grounds that the situations in which he first heard them were so unique and special, that being able to listen to them any time would be to cheapen and belittle his fondly held memories.

 

So how does this relate to comics?

 

Here's how...

 

 

In a similar vein to Rob's concept, I have no intention of ever owning this album. And to take it a stage further, I have no intention of ever listening to it.

Why?

Because I already know what it sounds like.

 

In fact, anybody who grew up in the 1970's and has just read this advert can make a reasonably shrewd guess as to how this album will sound.

 

So don't mistake this for my usual default embittered position, that I never had it as child therefore I don't need it now, thank you very much and damn those kids nowadays who can find it all online at the push of a button anyway.  

 

No, I'm genuinely afraid that "Rock Reflections of a Super-Hero" won't live up to what I imagine it to be, so I must forever deny myself the pleasure of hearing it.

 

Anyway, it's currently available on CD, so don't let me put you off checking it out.

 

 

Rob and myself lost touch the instant I left university, mainly due to a short series of unrelated incidents which I'm really not going to go into just now.

However, I do miss the friendship of somebody who could instantly understand the weight of accumulated cultural reference whenever I uttered the remark "All I Wanted was a Pepsi..."

Marvel Essentials We'll Probably Never See No.7

It's sometimes difficult to get your head around just how fundamentally different US and UK comics were in the 1970's and 1980's.

 

The main reason was (and probably still is) that UK comics had a frenetic weekly publication schedule that spewed out a huge amount of material in a short space of time.

 

And when a UK comic relied on a US parent company to provide the raw material to be published, you can appreciate how UK titles like the fondly-remembered Spider-Man Comics Weekly were destined to be padded with brilliant back-up strips that opened you eyes to other stuff your little prepubescent mind had never even heard of.

 

Of course, Marvel UK titles were also prone to the British malaise of continual mergers and changes in title.

Disappointingly, the "Super Spider-Man TV Comic" which came into being with issue 450 [October 21, 1981] only paid minor lip-service to the sensational live-action "The Amazing Spider-Man" TV series, and made virtually no mention at all of the 1978-79 Japanese live-action "Spider-Man" series.

 

Funny, that...

The World According to Comics No.8

Here's a frame that gets trotted out every time someone writes a blog piece about feminist claptrap and Silver Age comics. ('Claptrap' is fast becoming a favourite part of the vocabulary of my middle-age, as I think I have reached the point where I can use it with the correct amount of gravitas and disdain).

 

Myself, I would file it under a sub-thread entitled "Reed Richards Needs A Slap" or something like that. And if I can remember to do it by the time I reach the bottom of the page, I may just do that.

 

Now, I'm not sure how much Lee and Kirby deliberately made Reed Richards to be such a smug, condescending, self-absorbed prick, but that is how his Silver Age persona often appears in these unfortunately modern times.

 

 

(Fantastic Four #12, cover date March 1963).

 

Personally, I think it was all deliberate.

 

Ironically, in the previous issue, Reed and Ben Grimm went to all the trouble of breaking the fourth wall to berate readers for sending in letters that said that the Invisible Girl's contribution to the team was a bit shite...

 

 

Anyway, it all ends well. Give a woman a slice of cake and a reminder that she talks far too much for her own good, and everybody's happy...

 

The World According to Comics No.7

I often wonder what drives people to collect stuff, as I often get mistaken for someone who collects.

Although I can fully appreciate and adopt the mind-frame necessary for collecting things, I ultimately just can't seem to fully commit.

So, I tend to accumulate unrelated stuff seemingly at random, until I slowly run out of enthusiasm and space, or get distracted by something else that looks like a good thing to totally immerse myself in for a few months.

I guess it's tough being such a polymath, and it's an aspect of my character that I struggle with in the same way that some people struggle with addictive personality disorders.

(My latest urge is to collect Silver and Bronze Age romance comics, which I am fascinated by on many levels. And I may still do it, until I get distracted, of course).

Anyway, speaking of collecting comics, here's an advertisement from a November 1975 DC comic...

Despite the debut issue of Fantastic Four not being published until 1961, this "Captain Collector" certainly makes a compelling case for hanging on to your beloved (yet previously ephemeral) comic books.

It' s just a shame that in 1975 he couldn't forsee the comics industry collapsing in the mid-1990's as years of ill-advised panderings to fanboy speculators reached critical mass, to the surprise of absolutely nobody.

I suppose it serves us right for denying the validity of the core 18-comic base unit as imposed by Captain Collector on our collections...

Publicity Shots from Hell No.51 - Ian Levine Special

Damn, and I thought comics were a safe haven, untouched by the taint of Ian Levine...

 

The World According to Comics No.6

You couldn't ever accuse Marvel comics of shying away from the Cold War, and it is also in no way surprising that contemporary advertising targeted children's interest in the latest military hardware.

 

So, the advert below that ran in certain July 1970 Marvels should come as no surprise, right?

 

 

What is downright exciting however, is that on perusing the small-print, there is only one teeeeny oblique reference that this just may be only a toy.

 

Forget that $0.75 postage charge, $6.98 for a goddamn Polaris nuclear submarine sounds like a good deal to me.

 

Hunt sunken treasures in pirate waters and fire rockets with controls that work??

 

And me with a birthday (hint! hint!) in July...

The World According to Comics No.5

On the eve of a certain TV programme's 50th birthday celebrations tomorrow, I thought it fitting to commemorate the tragedy that foreshadowed its birth.

 

I was going to liven things up with my usual tiresome comments, but for once I choose to maintain a respectful silence and let the story speak for itself.

 

So, here's the full story of how Krypton's finest helped President Kennedy prevent the youth of America from going "soft" in Superman No.170 [July 1964 cover date].

Click on the pages below to enlarge...

 

The World According to Comics No.4

With all the recent technical problems now hopefully solved, it's time now to drift back into some semblance of normality. (Long stretches of apathy punctured by brief bursts of sarcasm, some would say).

And in the enforced absence, ideas for new columns have been sluggishly churning in my head, some more feasible than others. For instance, a column titled "What Women Really Want" might possibly imply that I knew the answer, rather than it being the genuine exploration of a topic that is a continuous mystery to me.

 

So, it's back to the comics again.

 

Issue 13 of Amazing Detective Cases [July 1952] provides this rare and succinct insight into the workings of the female mind.

 

And believe me, this is just scratching the surface of what really goes on in there...

The World According to Comics No.3

For me, a  large part of the attraction of Marvel's Silver Age output is the emphasis on the human frailties of the lead characters. Spider-Man was a teenager with social and money worries, Iron Man had a weak heart, the Fantastic Four spent as much time fighting each other as they did fighting super-villains, and even Thor had a gammy leg in his civilian identity.

 

Unrequited love was also a well-used theme that Stan Lee liked to dust off at regular intervals, with Peter Parker having a love life sometimes bordering on farcical.

 

However, Matt Murdock, better known to the world as Daredevil, the Man Without Fear, is always an interesting case study when ticking off Lee and Kirby tropes.

 

Blinded in childhood by an accident (check) involving a radioactive substance (check), the young Murdock soon finds his remaining senses heightened to superhuman degree. When his father is murdered for refusing to throw a boxing match (check), Matt confronts the killers as the costumed Daredevil, and avenges his death (check). Eventually graduating with a degree in law, Murdock sets up in partnership and falls in love with his secretary (check).

Then, Murdock is offered the chance to have surgery that will restore his sight, but which may result in him losing his powers and his ability to fight crime. And here's where Lee really decides to twist the knife...

So, what do we learn from this June 1965 issue?

That according to Marvel, blindness was a shameful disability with such a stigma attached that sufferers had no right to expect to find love or happiness. Ever.

And if that weren't punishment enough, even when exercising in total privacy, you still have to wear your dark glasses.

Shame, shame on you, Stan Lee!

The World According to Comics No.2

As we saw in the last installment, before Smilin' Stan Lee jumped on the superhero renaissance bandwagon that would be known as the Silver Age of Comics, his attention was focussed on the proliferation of SF anthologies which kept him and his cohorts in work.

 

All of these anthology titles would later be used as a safe place to try out new post-FF superhero ideas, especially since there was a contractual limit to how many different titles Atlas (or Timely or Marvel or whatever they were called that month) could publish at the time.

 

Amazing Adventures [June 1961 cover date] was the fifth such anthology title the nascent Marvel produced, and from the start it was noteworthy in its early attempts to formulate a regularly published superhero strip five months before the first issue of Fantastic Four hit the racks. 

 

 

Yes, it's the fantastic Dr Droom!

 

Pretty much a prototype for Doctor Strange (created by Lee and Steve Ditko some years later), Droom appeared in five of the six published issues of Amazing Adventures before sinking into obscurity.

 

But that was not the last we saw of Droom, as he would later achieve notoriety when he was retconned into the Marvel Universe under the rather underwhelming name of Doctor Druid, becoming one of the more bizarre members on the Avengers' roster.

 

So what have we to learn from this fantastic Dr Droom?

 

 

That in the 1960s, having slanted eyes and a moustache were the essential assets needed to become the nemesis of all occult powers that are sinister and corrupt!

The World According to Comics No.1

Another occasional series which will initially promise much, but will no doubt languish in obscurity in favour of seemingly endless photographs of Matthew Waterhouse...

 

While Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were just starting out on the Silver Age superhero titles that would make their fame (if not fortune, in the case Jolly Jack), the duo were still churning out the giant-monster-awakens-and-causes-havoc-for-the-puny-humans type stories that I have such a fondness for.

 

Journey Into Mystery #75 [Dec 1961] featured one such tale, entitled "Lo-Karr, Bringer of Doom!", in which what appears to be a giant alien puts the wind up humanity to such an extent that the United Nations put aside their differences, and all races and creeds make peace in order to present a united front against forthcoming alien invasion.

(There is a twist to this tale, but I won't give it away).

 

 

Yes Ivan, that's exactly what happened when the Cold War ended...

[Dedicated to Iain Banks, who will be greatly missed].

Marvel Essentials We'll Probably Never See No.3

Once upon a time in the mid-1970's, when I was merely a whiskerless young Monoid, there was just one newsagent in town that sold proper US-style Marvel comics. Rather sporadically, but that didn't seem to matter too much in the days before pocket money, when your comic addiction was controlled by what you could manage to wheedle out of a parent.

In other words, a luridly-coloured US Marvel comic, stuffed with all the adverts for exotic things like Twinkies that a small child in an English rural market town could never, ever have was a very special treat.

Not that we were starved of Marvel output. Far from it, as Marvel's UK branch churned out vast swathes of monochrome reprints, often on a weekly basis.

However, one of my earliest semi-regular purchases was a monthly black and white magazine title called "Marvel Superheroes". I can only recall ever having three issues, and if you can see the cover scan below, the main feature was the Avengers, and I can well remember trying to learn all the characters' names and being absolutely gobsmacked by it all.

  

Team titles generally represented good value for money to the owners of the purse-strings, by the way. I do actually remember my mother attempting to explain the concept of six heroes being better than one, and not quite understanding it. Dad was more forgiving on that score, and was also happier to pay for bigger than usual special issues, which explains how Thor #300 ended up in my possession on a Saturday morning in 1980 and started a lifelong interest in Norse mythology...

Anyway, in addition to the Avengers and the X-Men, "Marvel Superheroes" boasted another super-team that time has not been so kind to...

ESSENTIAL CHAMPIONS Vol.1

With the success of the Defenders and the concept of the "non-team", Marvel seem to have thought that was a great excuse to chuck together any old characters at a loose end and try and make them work together. (And on the West Coast too, for when super-villains tire of Manhattan and fancy some sunshine).

So what we got was the Champions.

No, not them. Here's the roll-call...

Hercules, son of Zeus (yes, that Hercules, and probably the role that Brian Blessed was put on this Earth to play), the Black Widow (a reformed Russian secret agent), Angel and Iceman (two of the original X-Men who'd been dropped from that team in Chris Claremont's big revamp of the title), and Ghost Rider. (Imagine Evel Knievel with his head on fire, and his soul bonded to that of a minor demon).

Oh, and later on there was another Soviet agent on the mend called Darkstar, but nobody seems to remember much about her.

Sadly, the Champions never really caught on, and after 17 issues plagued by erratic publication scheduling, the title folded. (In fact, Hercules and his merry men were already a dim memory in their homeland when the Marvel UK reprints were doing the rounds).

I do recall being rather fond of them when they got into their stride (the first issue is a bit rubbish, if you care to peruse the download below), but I did spend my youth scoffing at Captain America for his lack of "super-powers", so what the hell do I know?

Anyway, the Avengers eventually established a West Coast branch (which probably made being Iron Man rather an uncomfortable proposition), and Angel and Iceman reinforced their status as Marvel pariahs and later joined the Defenders just before that title was cancelled as well.

Download here: The Champions # 1