From Regular Reader to Committed Collector

GROWING UP ON A SOUTH-EAST LONDON council estate might seem like a bit of an urban nightmare to some readers of this blog. But it really wasn't. The Milne Estate in Woolwich was quite genteel in comparison to the kind of sink-hole estates depicted in today's television shows and movies. For example, vandalism just didn't happen. We kids were all all too afraid that our families might be evicted if we committed such a senseless and selfish act. Besides, if any of us had been spotted daubing graffiti and our parents (or parent) got to hear of it, we'd be battered to within an inch of our lives.

Growing up on a council estate, we had no sense of hardship - quite the 
opposite. It was a community. We lived in the top left flat, 30b.

The up side was that we all had loads of mates to play with. The area itself was a wonderland for any child because Woolwich had suffered major damage during the war as the Nazis tried to bomb the Arsenal to rubble and, of course, there was a lot of collateral damage. Entire streets of houses were reduced to ruins or worse and less than twenty years after the end of the conflict, hardly any clearance or rebuilding work had started. But we had all these highly dangerous - and hugely adventurous - playgrounds.

The local kids would turn bombed-out house into dens,
where we'd hang out with our mates and read and swap comics.
(Hue and Cry, © 1947,  Ealing Studios)

Against this background, some kids collected Monkees bubblegum cards, some kids built go-karts out of old prams, some kids climbed trees and hung rope swings. And some did all of that. Me, I loved comics. In particular Marvel Comics. Back then, in 1965, the readiest supply of Marvel Comics was the corner newsagent, and I used to range far and wide throughout the SE18 postcode, looking for new sources for my favourite comics. My nearest supplier was in Kingsland Parade, the newsagent right next to Woolwich Church Street.

I had already decided that Captain America was my favourite character and set about tracking down as many books starring my hero as I could. The next item I was able to find was the second part of the story I began reading in my first Avengers comic, with good old CA right there, almost as large as life, on the cover.

Avengers 16 (May 1965) would have been on sale in the UK during the summer of 1965, just as I was turning 11 years old. I wasn't sure why there were so many supervillains on the cover, but I'd find out soon enough ...

This issue was an experience of highs and lows for me. At the end of the story, after the comprehensive defeat of the Masters of Evil, some of the Avengers decided they needed a rest. Iron Man and Giant-Man elected to take leaves of absence and, with Thor exiting (off-camera) to take part in The Trial of the Gods (Journey into Mystery 116, Jul 1965, covered in my last post) the hunt was on for replacement members. By happy coincidence, former Iron Man foe Hawkeye was looking for a new gig after his love Black Widow was wounded in battle and taken into custody by the Soviets. No sooner did he turn up at Avengers Mansion than he was sworn in. Then in far-off Europe, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, who had previously battled the X-Men under the dark influence of Magneto (more on that next post), read of the Avengers membership drive in a local Swiss newspaper and decided to write an application letter. No email in those days, you see.

So Captain America returned from his fateful battle with his arch-enemy, Zemo, to find that not only were there three new Avengers on the team, but also that he was in charge of them. And it doesn't take him long to discover that he doesn't especially enjoy his new management position. Then Iron Man and Giant-Man (prodded by The Wasp) take off and leave Cap to it. Thanks, guys ...

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver remark on how different
the atmosphere here is compared to their last team gig.

I'm pretty sure the real reason Stan Lee wanted to do this was because, although he was sole writer on the books by this time, even he was having trouble keeping track of where his characters were in any given month. The letters pages were peppered with comments from readers like, "If Thor is battling The Executioner in New York in Avengers, how come he's also doing the Trial of the Gods in Asgard?" So Lee moved his big stars out of the team and confined them to their own strips. The only flaw in this theory is that just two months later, Giant-Man and Wasp lost their spot in Tales to Astonish, so there wouldn't have been these types of conflicts if Hank and Janet had carried on as Avengers.

With Captain America, it was less complicated. The Tales of Suspense stories had Cap in a WWII setting while he led the Avengers in the present. I still wasn't sure how Cap could be in his twenties in 1944 and the same age in 1964 - but that conundrum would be answered in due course. Issue 65 of Suspense came out the same month as Avengers 16. And there was Captain America taking the lead slot on the cover battling The Red Skull and his nasty Nazi henchpersons. And it's a great story - what's not to love about The Red Skull?

The split-cover design of these former mystery tales 
anthologies must have been murder for the artists.

But it was the Iron Man tale that grabbed my attention in this instance. The new red-and-yellow Iron Man battles his clunky old Golden Avenger persona. How can this be? It's not that mysterious. Just three-time loser Weasel Wills finding Tony Stark's attache case containing his Iron Man armour during a burglary and stealing it. Stark has to use his original armour to take on the impostor. But it was quite a thrill to see the two Iron Men slug it out in a knock-down, drag-out brawl. Aside from that, I liked the fact that Stark had his own life, marred though it was by his heart issues. Worried that he might not live very long, he avoided getting romantically involved with his secretary Pepper Potts and stepped aside to see if she might make a go of it with Happy Hogan, the Stark chauffeur. In the following issues, all sorts of complications ensued and I'd find myself skipping over the fight scenes to see how Stark was going to resolve his latest emotional crisis.

A classic split-cover drawn by Jack Kirby
and inked by Frank Giacoia.

In Tales of Suspense 66 (Jun 1965), Stark has to risk Happy quitting when he assigns Iron Man to test a prototype miniature sub, to avoid risking Happy's life. This leads to all kinds of problems, the least of which is a pitch-battle with the Sub-Mariner's enemy, Attuma. After defeating the blue-skinned megalomaniac, Iron Man returns to the surface, only to find that Happy has left and that the Senator in charge of the sub's government appropriations committee is pretty ticked off with Stark. It's pure Stan Lee storytelling and mirrors the sort of private life complications that Peter Parker was having to deal with over in Amazing Spider-Man.

The Captain America story reveals to us the origin of the Red Skull. It's the story of how a nobody - we never see his real face - is chosen at random by Der Fuehrer to be the living symbol of Naziism, an Axis counterpart to our red-white-and-blue hero. The tale ends with the evil Skull brainwashing Cap to be ... a Nazi. Too horrible to contemplate. 

As Ben Grimm would say, Wotta revolting development
this is. Cap under the control of The Red Skull.

The letters page in this issue mentions that Tales of Suspense 63 featured the origin of Captain America, so I made a mental note to track that one down as soon as possible. But I also noticed a strange anomaly in this issue. The Marvel house ads that I looked forward to so much for the miniature cover repros were not in colour.

Now what was this all about? Did Stan think that
leaving the colour out might save a few bucks?
More likely, it was a deadline issue ...

The May cover-dated Avengers 16 also had house ads without colour, albeit with a slightly different arrangement of covers, so it could well have been down to some kind of time restraint in the production department. Needless to say, I didn't enjoy the mono ads half as much as I loved the colour ones. Later on, as I came to understand how this kind of four colour printing worked, I did wonder if those house ads were individually coloured using the hand separation method or whether there was some photographic way of reducing the original full size separations down to the smaller size.

With the next issue of Avengers (17, Jun 1965) the team were off on their first proper mission. Locate the Hulk and get him to rejoin. Captain America is putting the newcomers through a training exercise when an over-sized robot walks through the wall of Avengers Mansion to deliver a message about The Hulk. Without waiting to hear the whole message, they quickly disable the automaton, possibly a bit prematurely. Nonetheless, the robot's message tape is still functional and the team learn that The Hulk can be found in the desert. And far away, beneath the desert, The Mole Man gloats about the trap he's leading The Avengers into.

The first real mission for the new Avengers lineup was to track 
down the Hulk and persuade him to return to the team ...

Over the course of the next few pages, The Avengers engage in a battle with one of Mole Man's legion of monsters, The Minotaur, defeat the Mole Man and are shot up to the surface when old Moley doesn't like the way the fight is going - all without realising that The Hulk was just a few hundred yards away fighting his own battle against the Leader - as seen in Tales to Astonish 69 (Jul 1965), Stan's footnote tells us. It's not the best Avengers tale. It certainly looks like Don Heck was just beginning to find his way with the Marvel Method of storytelling. He starts with an uncharacteristic splash page that shows a scene from the main story, something that Kirby would never do and that you'd be more likely to find in a DC comic. Some of the pacing seems rushed, and some of the Hulk scenes look like they were swiped from Kirby art. But the book, and Heck's storytelling, would get better.

By this time, I was becoming more and more curious about earlier issues of Marvel Comics. References to The Hulk being an Avenger were making me wonder what I had already missed, so I set off on a quest to track down older issues, while keeping up to date with the current output by haunting the local newsagents. I knew of some kids in the area who had what I termed "classic" Marvels. Issues with numbers in the single digits. So I determined I would discover what they wanted and make some kind of trade. A friend told me he knew someone with Avengers 3 (Jan 1963), so I knocked on this kid's door and asked him if he was willing to do a swap. I can't remember what he wanted, but I'm pretty sure it was about three or four comics. I don't think I would have parted with Marvels, so it's likely he got a few Supermans or Adventures in the trade.

The first "classic" Marvel Comic I ever owned,
traded from a local kid for several DC comics.

And I had my first real "classic" Marvel. Rushing home to read the comic, I noticed that The Hulk was right there in the cover corner box, as well as featured large on the cover, so he must have been in the team. 

So it was true ... The Hulk was an Avenger.

Inside the book, there was just one tantalising reference, on page 2, to the fact that The Hulk quit The Avengers last issue. Darn. Now I was going to have to find Avengers 2. As with the mission in issue 17, this earlier team also set out the find The Hulk, to prevent him doing too much damage while at large. So Iron Man contacts the FF, Spider-Man and even The X-Men in an effort to get a lead on The Hulk's whereabouts, without success. But it's Rick Jones who is the key to The Hulk's whereabouts.

At this point, The Hulk was still an ill-defined character. There was still no clear logic behind his transformations or his personality as The Hulk. Though I wasn't aware of them at the time, the original run of six issues of The Incredible Hulk offered a different change method and Hulk persona with each issue. Sometimes the Hulk was mute, sometimes he talked like The Thing. Sometimes he changed at nightfall, sometimes Banner bombarded himself with rays from a gamma machine. It was all a bit ... badly thought-out. And if, as Kirby claims, he was responsible for these characters, then he plainly failed with The Hulk, the first of the early Marvels to be cancelled.

The Hulk in Avengers 3, drawn by Kirby, was definitely the Kirby Hulk. He has the same speech patterns as The Thing. He changes both spontaneously and using the Gamma Machine. But is also susceptible to being controlled by Rick Jones. He thinks, he reasons and he's a bit crafty.

Though he speaks about himself in the third person, something later 
versions would also do, this Hulk seems more like Fantastic Four's Thing ...

Finally, he spontaneously changes back to "Bob" Banner, deserts his "partner" Sub-Mariner and dives off the Rock of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea to escape. 

Stan took some stick for mis-naming Bruce Banner "Bob"
in two panels this issue. He explained it away later by claiming
that Banner's name was really Robert Bruce, but he was fooling no one.

The issue was one of the longest Marvel stories of the period - at 25 pages three pages longer than Avengers 2 and two pages longer than Avengers 4. With no ads and no letters page, Lee and Kirby had 25 pages to work with and the result was early "widescreen" Marvel. The story seems more epic than any of the other Marvel tales of the same time period - the extra space allows for more exposition of both Sub-Mariner and the Hulk, as well as scenes with the Teen Brigade and with the main heroes. And the pacing seems more leisurely ...

By the end of the story, the Avengers are down a member, have a new enemy in Prince Namor and a savage Hulk is still at large. A great day's work for your average Marvel super-team. Within a few issues the page-length would drop, until by Avengers 10, the team had the standard 20 pages to work with, and while these stories were fun too, they didn't have the big budget feel of Avengers 3.

Not long after this, I managed to scare up a couple of really early issues of Fantastic Four, but I'll leave that story until next time ...

Next: Two "classic" Fantastic Four Comics and exploring second-hand shops

More of a Marvelite, but now a Merry Marching one

BACK IN MID-1965, I was still in Primary school, approaching my 11th birthday and actively exploring the joys of Stan Lee's fledgling Marvel Comics line. I had started off my lifelong love-affair with comic stories at the age of about three, when my mum had bought me Micky Mouse Weekly. Somewhere among the family photos there's a picture of me in the street, in a romper suit, holding a copy of the Disney comic. It would have been around 1957 ... By the time I was seven, I was a regular reader of the DC Thompson titles - Beano, Dandy, Beezer, Topper. A couple of years later and I was an avid reader of DC Comics - Flash, Green Lantern and the Superman family titles. Then in 1964, I had found Marvel Comics and everything changed.

I had already discovered and immediately loved Captain America and the Avengers. It didn't take me long to find other Marvel product which was just as brilliant in my ten year old eyes - Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and Daredevil. But I still had a couple of Marvel characters to try out ...

OF GODS AND MONSTERS

I'd come across Marvel's take on Thor earlier. I'm pretty sure it was in an Alan Class reprint of Journey Into Mystery 84 ... but by the time I had caught up with the American originals, Thor had become a very different kind of strip.

I have no idea what else was in this black and
white reprint of JiM84, but the peril of the cover
image stayed with me for a long time.

More than anything else, it was the title of that Thor story - "Trial of the Gods" - that had an effect on me. Even though I was familiar with the stories from Norse mythology, the idea that there could be more than one god - and then that they could be on trial - was quite unsettling to a child of ten. As it turned out, it was more of a medieval tournament type of trial rather than a courtroom trial, but then neither the cover art or the story title of Journey into Mystery 116 (May 1965) made that clear.

Unusually for a Marvel cover of the period, this
one is not action-oriented. The suspense comes
from Thor meekly submitting to his fate ...

The story opens with Odin banishing the brothers Thor and Loki to the dread land beyond Asgard - Skornheim - where, unarmed, they will battle their way home against menace after menace. Odin warns that even an immortal may die there, takes Thor's hammer from him and zaps the pair to a mountaintop many leagues from home.

Immediately, the God of Mischief reveals that not only does he have a forbidden weapon - a pouch full of mystic Norn Stones - but also that he's sent his brutal allies, The Enchantress and the Executioner, after Thor's one true love, the mortal Jane Foster. And with that, Loki is off, using his enchanted stones to escape from the mountain, leaving Thor to rely on just his strength and his courage. Fortunately, Thor's friend and ally Balder gets wind of what's going on back on Earth and is dispatched by Odin to prevent The Enchantress and The Executioner from harming Jane Foster. Balder also scares the Frightful Four away from the Baxter Building when they mistake his fiery arrival for the Human Torch (and Stan adds a footnote mentioning FF38). And the story continued Next Issue, so I had to track down a copy of Journey into Mystery 117 to find out if Thor managed some last-minute miracle to prevent his cheating brother winning the Trial of the Gods. Dang, that never happened with DC Comics ...

The Tales of Asgard back-up story featured more Loki villainy, this time tricking his brother into a battle with an important political ally of Asgard, the blow-hard braggart King Hymir. The story begins with an editorial reference to issue 63 of Thor, which puzzled me no end because I was holding Journey into Mystery 116 in my hands. I didn't know Thor had his own title, let alone it reaching its 63rd issue. But the Shakespearian drama of the story soon banished my confusion and I never did try to locate a copy of Thor 63 ...

That same issue also carried an ad for something called The Merry Marvel Marching Society. I had no idea what that was. But I did know I didn't have a "buck" to send Marvel for my membership kit. So that, too, would remain a mystery to me ...

What exactly was the Merry Marvel Marching
Society? I thought it might be like a brass band,
but I never did find out ...

Another very early Marvel was Tales to Astonish 66 (Apr 1965). This was Ant-Man again, though I barely recognised him as such. But at least this Giant-Man uniform was familiar to me - it was the same one that I'd seen much earlier in Avengers 15. The art on the lead story was different, a bit more like a DC comic, with none of the manic edge of Kirby or Ditko. Bob Powell had been one of the mainstays on the old, pre-Marvel Atlas books, but had also worked for Quality, ME and Harvey. Once nice touch Powell brought to the story, was a two-panel sequence where Giant-Man shrinks down to six-foot size to greet Madame Macabre. I hadn't seen Ditko or Kirby do an effect like that, and it pre-figured Steranko, who did a lot of this "animated frame" stuff, by two or three years ...

Powell brings some animation to Giant-Man's shrinking
sequence with this clever effect.

But I could not - for the life of me - figure out what was going on with Giant-Man on the cover. You have to read the story to make any sense of the image and even then it's not very clear. I won't spoil the story for anyone who's not read it by explaining what's happening, but you sure as heck can't figure it out from Powell's cover image. Also, the difference of colour on either side of The Wasp's motion trail didn't make any sense. And why the additional typeset box covering Madam Macabre's bottom? 

So, what's happening to Giant Man here?
Falling down a well? Trapped in a lift?

The Hulk story was a different animal altogether. Drawn by Steve Ditko, in retrospect it seems like all of the artist's frustrated rage that he couldn't pour into his Spider-Man stories, he parked here. It's a pretty furious take on the Hulk, with Banner's green alter-ego taking on most of the Soviet army and doing a pretty convincing job of winning. For me, especially in my tender years, this version of the Hulk was pretty much the defining one. It also managed to form the classic Hulk personality. Much more cohesive than the five different versions of the character Lee and Kirby came up with in issues 1-5 of The Hulk's own, earlier magazine. And of course, it established the character's persona up to and including the recent blockbuster movie.

Ditko's take on the Hulk was just very, very angry ...
a characterisation that has lasted till the modern day.

For some reason, when I was growing up, X-Men 10 (Mar 1965) seemed like an especially common comic. I've owned many copies over the years. Back in 1965, it was the first issue of X-Men I came across. A few years later, when I was building a Marvel collection, it was one of the first early X-Men books I found in a second-hand shop. And when I started rebuilding my long-lost collection just ten years ago it was, again, one of the first early X-Men books I was able to get hold of. Coincidently - or maybe not - I've also never seen a UK variant price of this issue of X-Men. They've all been cents copies with the hideous, heavy ink Thorpe and Porter import stamp. If anyone has a pence copy of X-Men 10, I'd very much like to hear about it. But I have a theory ...

Every copy of this comic I've ever seen has had
an especially heavy ink pence stamp on it.

CENTS vs PENCE

At the end of 1964, Marvel comics had a hiccup in distribution. Up until September, Marvel Comics were freely available in UK newsagents. The company even changed the black plate at the end of the print run to substitute the US 12c price for a UK 9d price. They also removed the Month from the cover box because the Marvel books came over by surface as ballast in ships and thus were on sale here later. Then, some October issues failed to show up here. Some were scarcer than others. Spider-Man 18 and 19 were impossible to find and remained very scarce in the UK. FF 32 and 33 were also thin on the ground. Other difficult to find Marvels included Avengers 9 (though 8 and 10 were less common), Daredevil 4, Journey into Mystery 110 and 111, Sgt Fury 11, Strange Tales 127, Tales of Suspense 59 and 60, Tales to Astonish 62, and X-Men 8. 

The last 1964 pence copy of a Marvel Comic I have is Tales to Astonish 61 - which is odd, because traditionally, this has always been considered one of the "non-distributed" Marvels of 1964.

So here's what I think happened: sometime around June 1964, someone - perhaps Marty Goodman at Marvel, or perhaps a manager at Thorpe and Porter - decided that selling Marvels in the UK wasn't making enough money. They needed to raise the selling price. Maybe there was a difference of opinion over how much the price should be raised by. But whatever caused it, there was a delay in deciding, because for the most part, the November and December Marvels didn't reach the UK by official channels. Tales to Astonish 61 would have been the earliest November Marvel on sale, so would have somehow scraped though with a 9d price. For the next two months, no Marvels were distributed at all. Goodman resumed exporting copies of his books to the UK with the January 1965 cover dates, but left it to T&P to ink-stamp the copies. It wasn't until the September 1965 cover date that some Marvels started showing up with a 10d price replacing the 12c, and only the Marvels that replaced the "Marvel Comics Group" with "Marvel Pop Art Productions" in the corner box.

The corner boxes from Avengers 18 and 19.

I'll have more to say about the Marvel cover corner boxes in a future post, but for the moment, let's return to your regularly scheduled programming ...

WHERE WERE WE?

X-Men 10 was inked over Kirby pencils by Chic Stone. Over the years I've seen a lot of criticism of Stone's inks, especially on Kirby pencils, and I've never agreed with it. Stone began inking for Marvel around Journey into Mystery 102 (Apr 1964). I remember seeing his work on the first Fantastic Four I can remember owning, issue 36, and really liking his clean, organic line. Later on, I decided I preferred his inking on the earlier Thor stories in Journey into Mystery to the later ones that had the scratchy inking style of Vince Colletta. 

I instantly liked X-Men because, like Spider-Man, they were only a couple of years older than me.

But the main attraction of X-Men 10 was that it introduced the bargain basement Tarzan, Ka-Zar (boy, Stan loved his hyphens, didn't he?) to the Marvel Universe. Following a news report of an Antarctic expedition party attacked by a wild man, the X-Men discover a hidden pre-historic world beneath the South Pole. Great news for me, because like any other ten year old, I was fascinated with dinosaurs. Much battling ensues. In the end, Ka-Zar (pronounced Kay-zar, Stan's footnote helpfully explains) grudgingly accepts the X-Men's friendship, then chucks them out of his lost world and has his pet mastodons block the entrance with tons of boulders, presumably sealing it off from the upper world forever. Didn't work out that way, in the long run. Ka-Zar would be back to menace Daredevil next. But a great story. With dinosaurs.

The X-Men's encounter with a tyrannosaurus rex was a bit
of a low-key affair - surprised Kirby didn't make more of it.

By this time I had a good grip of how Marvel was different from boring old DC, and was a confirmed Marvelite. I still looked at the occasional DC title. Who could resist the brilliant Earth 2 cross-over with The Justice Society in Justice League 22 and 23 (Sep & Nov 1963)? But for the most part, I would now devote my energies to tracking down every Marvel Comic I could, starting with Tales of Suspense and The Avengers, both starring my favourite character, Captain America.

Next: Buy or barter Marvel Comics

Still paddling in the unfamiliar waters of early Marvel Comics

SO IT WAS MID-1965, I was just coming up to my eleventh birthday and I was leaving the kids-stuff comics of DC behind and discovering the wonderful new world of Marvel Comics, masterminded by a cheery bloke called Stan Lee. I had found a character called Captain America that I thought was really cool, with his lack of superpowers, his natty spinning shield and his eye-catching Stars-and-Stripes costume. But it didn't take me long to figure out that this Marvel outfit had other titles and pretty soon, I'd found Fantastic Four and Spider-Man comics as well, and they were just good as the Captain America and The Avengers stories I'd read.

Back in the 1960s, comics companies had no advertising budgets, and there were no comic stores or fanzines or internet to keep customers informed of what other books the company was publishing. If you picked up a Fantastic Four comic and you liked it, the chances were you might be interested in X-Men as well. So the publishers would heavily cross-advertise their various titles in every other comic they published.

There was no doubt that DC, as the incumbent sales champions and most polished of the comics operations, had the best-looking house ads. Mostly designed by Ira Schnapp, the master letterer of most of DC Comics' covers, the DC ads were an object lesson in grabbing the customer's attention.

Veteran DC editor Mort Weisinger was responsible for the copy, which was mostly pretty corny, but the text was elevated by Ira Schnapp's impeccable sense of comics design.

Marvel's house ads were quite a bit less polished than DC's, but they did give a pretty good idea of what else was out from Marvel at the same time. Where Weisinger went for a more specialised approach, writing punchy, hard-sell copy, Stan Lee just wanted to bring all Marvel Comics to the attention of all Marvel readers. Every issue.

And here's a confession to horrify everyone ... when I was ten, I was so impressed with the Marvel House ads that I clipped the miniature covers out of those ads with a pair of scissors and kept them as a kind of "Wants List". Yup, I totally vandalised my comics. Many years later, I bought some old Tales to Astonish at auction. The vendor hadn't checked the books carefully and had graded them as fine. But when I received them, you guessed it, some idiot had clipped the cover repros from the Marvel house ads. In the interests of karma, I'd like to think that idiot was my ten-year-old self. I certainly deserved it ...

Maybe Stan's scattershot approach worked, because Marvel's sales rose while DC's were falling - the above ad page is from Daredevil 5.

At the time, I couldn't know that Marvel Comics had been restricted to a handful of titles, distributed as they were by their own arch-rivals DC Comics. As I described in the last entry in this blog, in 1957 Marvel publisher Martin Goodman had been forced to enter a deal with arch-rivals DC Comics to get his books onto the newsstands. The catch was that DC would only take eight titles a month. Goodman extended his reach by putting out 16 bi-monthly titles, but as he'd been publishing 50-60 titles up to this point, it seriously cramped his style. The restriction eased a little during the early 1960s, but mostly it meant if Goodman wanted to launch a new title, he'd have to cancel an existing one.

However, there was an up side to this restriction. It meant, that Stan was able to advertise just about his whole line of super-hero comics in any one issue of his books, just using two house ads with four covers apiece. This, coupled with Stan's strategy of aggressive and regular guest-starring of a character in another hero's title, meant that the readers very quickly became accustomed to buying the entire Marvel output every month, something you just couldn't afford to do with DC comics.

Wow ... even Millie the Model and the cowboy comics made it into this house ad from Tales to Astonish 66 (Apr 1965).

It also meant that at least until the mid-Sixties, Stan Lee was able to write just about every Marvel title himself. Which, of course, meant the style and the tone of voice was consistent across the range of product, something that DC with their scores of titles weren't able to manage.

Anyway, it was the advertising policies of, initially, DC Comics and later Marvel Comics that kept me (and no doubt thousands of other kids) informed of what other titles might be in the spinner racks that month. But not always ...

STILL DISCOVERING MARVEL COMICS

In the case of Daredevil, I first stumbled across an issue in a motorway services area. It would have been sometime in the early part of 1965. My family would almost certainly have been on the way to visit relatives in Scotland by car. Back then, not many families had cars and the motorways weren't the giant parking lots they are today.

With this level of traffic, it was no surprise that motorway service areas were a treasure trove of "old" comics.

So you can imagine how pleased I was to discover a copy of Daredevil 5 (Dec 1964) in the newsagent at one of the few motorway pull-off areas between London and Glasgow. I must have read that issue a dozen times during the remainder of the journey. To my ten-year-old mind, it was a source of wonder that a blind man could be a superhero. And at that moment, Daredevil became one of my favourite Marvel characters - though this early in the game, Stan was still struggling a bit to know what to do with him.

Holidays in Spain were still two or three years away for me in 1965, but a criminal matador was an intriguing concept.

When I went back and had a look at Daredevil 5, I noticed some indications that perhaps artist Wally Wood was also partly responsible for DD's lack of a clear direction. After floundering for a couple of issues with a revolving door of artists (Bill Everett on issue 1, then a brief run of three with ex-EC artist Joe Orlando), Stan settled on Wally Wood, also an EC alumnus, as the permanent Daredevil artist. But even by this time, Stan had become accustomed to giving his artists the barest outline of the story and leaving the pacing them. That's fine if the artist is Jack Kirby. Even Dick Ayers and Don Heck had been working this way with Stan long enough to know what was required. But Wood was a newcomer to Marvel. He was likely unfamiliar with how Stan would spend as much time on his heroes' private lives as on their action antics. So Wood's pacing was a little off.

Daredevil 5 starts off with a three page action sequence to demonstrate to new readers how the character operates. Then there's a single page with Matt and Foggy in the law office to set up the rest of the plot. Ditko or Kirby would never have restricted this scene to a single page, as Stan needs a bit of room for character exposition. So page 4 looks like this:

Stan tries to squeeze two or three pages of exposition into a single page.

It's a bit of a car-crash, looking for all the world like one of those EC pages that Wood used to work on where Gaines and Feldstein would have all the dialogue lettered onto the comic page first and make the artists fill in the gaps with drawing. There's more lettering than art here. The rest of the book is a bit better but when Wood got tired of Stan criticising his storytelling, he left Marvel and went to Tower Comics. It wasn't a great loss to Marvel. Much as I love Wood's work - his EC stuff and his Spirit pages are beyond brilliant - he just wasn't cut out for superheroes. As his later work on the Tower books demonstrated.

Another comic I must have picked up in a swap, because it was dated May 1964, was Strange Tales 120. Probably what drew me to the book was the Fantastic Four's Human Torch on the cover, fighting side by side with a human snowman. At this point I hadn't read any X-Men comics, so I didn't really know who Iceman was ...

Fire meets Ice - Jack Kirby's dynamic cover is a cross-over between the Fantastic Four and the X-Men.

Nice though the Jack Kirby art was in the lead story, it was the back-up story that stayed in my memory. Drawn by Steve Ditko, the Doctor Strange story in this issue was a lot like the short mystery stories that had dominated the title before Stan's super-heroes came along. The plot involves the magician investigating a haunted house, which was very close to home for my ten year old self. In south-east London where I grew up, we were surrounded by bombed out and derelict houses that still hadn't been demolished in the post-war years. More than one of them had a history of haunting attached to them by the kids in the area.

Doctor Strange heroic battles the mystic forces of the haunted house only to discover its horrifying secret ...

So on that level, I had a real and emotional attachment to this story. The pay-off, which owed a lot to the formula Lee had developed earlier on the monster and ghost tales he did with Steve Ditko in Amazing (Adult) Fantasy, was at the time genuinely creepy. The shock ending is that the house isn't haunted at all. It's that the house itself is a sentient being.

... the house is alive and malevolent. And only Doctor Strange has the power to force it to release its human captives.

It probably seems pretty corny now, but in 1965, I can tell you, it scared the bejabbers out of me and my pals. We didn't go near a derelict house for weeks after that story.

Thinking back on this tale and relying on my memory, I was sure that this was the first or second Doctor Strange story, as it featured none of Strange's main foes or supporting cast. I remembered that there were a few Strange stories before Marvel revealed how he became a magician, and my faulty recall was telling me that the Nightmare and the Baron Mordo stories came later. So I looked for this story around issue 111 of Strange Tales. Funny how the memory can plays tricks on you ...

Doctor Strange was to become one of my favourite characters and would remain so until the present day. At his best illustrated by Steve Ditko's art, subsequent artists like Gene Colan and Frank Brunner did the character no disservice at all, and I still remember the later run written by Steve Englehart with reverence.

Another "vintage" item I stumbled across right at the beginning of my conversion to Marvel was Tales to Astonish 39 (Jan 1963). I'd already seen a later Astonish, featuring Giant Man battling the Human Top, the year before, but this one was a really old comic, in my eyes. The cover was very much part of Stan's plan to stay below the radar of DC's distributors by resembling one of early Marvel's standard monster books. The giant red insect dominates the scene with the "Astonishing" Ant-Man in the foreground, but very tiny - an occupational hazard for ant-men.

This doesn't look remotely like a superhero comic - which is probably what Stan intended.

The plot wasn't really much different from those pre-hero monster tales. The Beetle is zapped with radio-activity, and gets intelligence. The growing really huge bit is when the creature snatches Ant-Man's growth gas and uses it all to make himself man-sized. Ant-Man is then stuck at his tiny size until he can defeat the Scarlet Beetle. But here and there in the story are the first signs of Stan showing you that the world may not idolise and trust super-heroes just because they're super-heroes. Where Batman and Superman would have police officers saluting them and politicians asking them to sort out some problem, in Stan's Marvel universe, the heroes would have no automatic endorsement from either the authorities or the public. In this story, the police speculate that Ant-Man is too frightened to tackle the growing insect problem.

Taking Ant-Man's gas-cylinders, the Scarlet Beetle chucks our hero down a hole and sets off to cause mayhem among the humans ...

And when the menace is defeated, because they don't know of Ant-Man's involvement, the police wonder why there was no sign of Ant-Man. Of course the readers know that Ant-Man saved the day and the story also shows us that a True Hero doesn't wait around to take a bow ... already Stan's own moral values were coming out in his stories.

Restored to his normal size, Dr Henry Pym sets the little beetle free to live out the rest of his several-week lifespan, while the cops wonder why Ant-Man never showed up to do their job for them ...

Strangely, Ant-Man didn't really catch on. Stan's reasoning must have been, small boys love insects so here's a hero that works with the insects to battle commie spies and catch crooks. And that's quite sound reasoning. But it was right at the beginning of Lee's hero revolution and Ant-Man was an early experiment that didn't work. It even took me a while to connect the dots and realise that the Giant Man in issue 15 of The Avengers was the same character as the guy who fought the Scarlet Beetle. Eventually, Stan's search for the ideal comic book style would pay off, but that was still a way in the Tales to Astonish 39's future. In the meantime, I had more new Marvel characters to discover. Just round the corner were The X-Men and The Mighty Thor, both visualised by the equally mighty Jack Kirby.

Next: From Explorer to Fan to Collector

Why were Silver Age Marvels so much better than Silver Age DCs?

SO ... IN THE FIRST HALF OF 1965, I had discovered Marvel Comics and thought they made DC Comics look like kids' stuff by comparison. But then I was ten years old and didn't have a clue why Marvel Comics seemed quite a bit more grown up. It's possible that now, almost fifty years later, and having worked as an editor in comics for something like fifteen years, I may have a better insight into why that might have been. But for the moment, I want to continue to retrace my first steps through my transition from a casual DC reader to a fully-formed Marvelite …

Now, this wasn't some kind of magical, overnight transformation. Through 1965, as I started to look for more of those cool Marvel Comics, I was still reading a smattering of DCs. In 1964, when I first discovered Marvel, one of the DCs that still stands out in my memory was an issue of World's Finest, issue 139, "The Ghost of Batman". It had one of those typical early Sixties DC covers that make you want to find out how this incredible scenario came about.

While we were happy to accept the idea of costumed superheroes, the concept of ghosts was plainly preposterous.

My mum had given me a shilling to get something to eat. I can't remember the exact details, but for some reason she wasn't going to be at home when I got back from school, and I was supposed to buy myself a snack to tide myself over until she could get home and cook the supper. Of course, I spent ninepence of that money on this issue of World's Finest, because I really wanted to know how Batman could be a ghost ... my mum was not best pleased when she found out.

The other thing I was noticing in 1965 was ... girls. Although I was only ten, I was beginning to notice that some girls were prettier than others. This held true in the comic stories I was reading too. Probably the first woman in comics that struck me as attractive was Star Sapphire from the Green Lantern books.

"Star Sapphire" was the amnesiac alter-ego
of Hal Jordan's fiancee Carol Ferris, whose hatred
for Green Lantern was in direct conflict with her
love for test pilot Jordan.

Clad in a fetching purple leotard, Star Sapphire was a persona thrust upon hapless Carol Ferris, love interest of Green Lantern's alter ego Hal Jordan, by a bunch of slinky intergalactic feminists, the Zamarons. They wanted Carol to be their Empress, but first she had to defeat Green Lantern.

Maybe it was because Gil Kane drew her as an elegant, raven-haired beauty that caught my attention. Or more likely it was because she was a good girl forced to be bad. I may have only been ten, but I had quite sophisticated tastes.

Another example of good girls going bad was in the Legion of Superheroes story "Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires" in Adventure Comics 326. The premise was another of those Mort Weisinger covers that they'd evidently concocted before the story was written, then tried come up with an explanation for the ludicrous situation.

In the story inside, Superboy doesn't fly overhead, eavesdropping. If he had, maybe he would have thwarted the plot.

Legion stalwart John Forte wasn't the best artist in the DC stable, but that wasn't really the point. It was the depiction of the "good" girls of the legion using their - I'll say it - sexuality to trap the boy legionnaires that gave this story its frisson. And true to my form, it was the black-haired beauty Phantom Girl that I had eyes for. In the story, she takes Star Boy as her target and just when he thinks his luck's in ... it runs out.

So, the girls choose their targets and Phantom Girl goes after Star Boy ...

There's some shenanigans around an exploding poisonous plant which Phantom Girl avoids with her intangibility power, while Star Boy makes himself heavy and sinks into the ground.

Phantom Girl gets to gloat evilly, destroy Star Boy's statue with a handy bazooka (adding vandalism to her list of misdemeanours) then she and the rest of the girls have a party where they gyrate in a most salacious manner. Yep, I did enjoy a bad girl back then.

Meanwhile, back at Marvel Comics, they weren't really doing any stand-out female characters. At least, nothing I was aware of in early 1965. It's difficult for me to remember the exact timeline of which Marvels came next, and there's every likelihood I might get some of this stuff in the wrong order, but the next significant Marvel Comic I remember around this time was Fantastic Four 36, cover dated March 1965.

OK, Medusa was pretty bad, but no one could ever accuse Jack Kirby of drawing a sexy female character.

Again, where DC Comics were all primary colours, the Marvels of the same period used greys, purples and maroons. In later years I've often wondered about this. It doesn't make a great deal of sense for Stan to have had the covers - and in many cases, the interiors - of the comics he edited coloured in such a subdued palette. I'd have thought the idea would have been to make the comic books stand out on the racks, so that potential readers would notice the covers and pick up the book. This was the approach that DC Comics took. It wasn't until later, when I read about how Marvel Comics came to be distributed by Independent Distributors, owned by DC, that a possible explanation occurred to me.

A HISTORICAL ASIDE

During the 1950s, Marvel Comics was known as Atlas, named for the distribution company owned by Marvel publisher Marty Goodman (Stan Lee's uncle by marriage). At the time, Goodman was publishing an incredible 53 comic titles, covering every genre - war, western, horror, romance, humour, funny animal and jungle.

Strange Tales was one of the survivors of the great Atlas implosion of 1957 - not many other titles weathered that storm.

Goodman's Magazine Management was also publishing puzzle mags, "men's" magazines, movie and celebrity monthlies and humour publications. In 1956, for some undisclosed reason, Martin Goodman decided to close down Atlas News Company and get his publications to the customers through distribution giant American News Company.

Very soon afterwards ANC, which owned and operated newsstands as part of its distribution business, found itself on the wrong end of a Justice Department investigation. The Justice Department concluded the company was in violation of federal anti-trust laws and ordered it to divest itself of its retail outlets. The immediate effect was that the boss of industry giant Dell Publishing, George Delacorte, decided he would look elsewhere for distribution services. Faced with the loss of their biggest customer and the costs of maintaining massive real estate holdings in New Jersey, ANC liquidated the company. And Martin Goodman was in real trouble.

After shutting down Atlas and doing a deal with ANC, Magazine Management periodicals and Atlas comics would cost the wholesalers and retailers more. So when Goodman needed help, no one was in a hurry to step up. He had to go to his arch-rivals DC Comics and ask them if they would distribute his publications through their Independent News Distributors

DC and IND honcho Jack Liebowitz threw Goodman a lifeline and agreed to distribute his books for him, but only eight comics a month, for fear of diluting his own line of DC Comics. In the space of a few weeks, Atlas went from 53 titles to 16, all the staff except for Stan Lee were let go and Lee had to stop commissioning new material until further notice.

The fledgeling Marvel Comics limped along with its 16 titles, publishing war, romance and monster comics under this arrangement until 1961 when Stan Lee stuck a toe in the superhero pool and tried out Martin Goodman's answer to Jack Liebowitz's best-selling Justice League of America - The Fantastic Four. 

The DC comic covers were designed to be seen from a distance. Even at this size, you can pretty much see what's going on.

With Goodman's operation existing only by the grace of Liebowitz, the last thing he wanted to do was antagonise his distributor by horning in on DC's lucrative superhero comics line. So the earliest Fantastic Four comics featured lead characters who wore street clothes rather than costumes, while the comic itself appeared for all the world to be no different to Marvel's other monster books like Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales.

And Stan Lee's next superhero book The Incredible Hulk also looked very similar to Marvel's other monster titles. So it appears that Lee's plan was to keep his new projects under the radar of DC Comics, by deliberately staying away from the sleek, brightly coloured look of DC heroes like The Flash and Green Lantern.

Over the next 12 months, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko launched the foundation of the entire Marvel empire, building a solid following among readers and racking up sales. Before they knew what had happened Independent News had some major hits on their hands, so curbing Marvel Comics at that point would have made no business sense whatsoever.

AND BACK TO THE BLOG

So, for my introduction to The Fantastic Four I couldn't have picked a better issue than number 36. I had probably seen other issues of FF before this one, but this was the first that stood out in my memory. It was the start of a story that was to wind on for eight months until FF44. Other comics of the period, FF included up to this point, offered stories that lasted no more than a single issue. Many DC comics featured two or sometimes three stories in a single comic. For Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to run essentially the same storyline for 160 pages was unprecedented. Further than that, it sowed the seeds of the Inhumans saga that would kick off properly in FF44 and run on until FF47. This was heady stuff ...

FF36 introduced the mirror image of Reed Richards' family foursome - The Frightful Four. Their leader was The Wizard, a renegade scientist introduced in the earlier Human Torch solo story in Strange Tales 102. The second member of the evil FF was Paste Pot Pete, a comedy villain from Strange Tales 104. The third member was the Sandman. Originally a Spider-Man villain from Amazing Spider-Man 4, he turned up a couple of months later in Strange Tales 115, menacing ... The Human Torch. The fourth member was the mysterious and haughty Madame Medusa, a strange woman with weird living red hair. We'd find out more about her later.

The idea of villains being reverse versions of the heroes wasn't a new idea. DC Comics had been doing it for years. Flash had Professor Zoom, Green Lantern had Sinestro, Superman had Bizarro. But the Frightful Four were the opposite of the Fantastic Four in every way. The USP of the good FF was that they acted like real people. With the announcement of Reed and Sue's engagement that opens this issue, they were becoming a family. They had their differences and their arguments, but they still had each other's backs. The evil FF were just appalling characters. They clearly didn't like each other very much, they certainly didn't trust each other. They bickered and fought like Reed's team, but theirs was a mean-spirited bickering.

The Frightful Four are a pretty unpleasant people, boorish and aggressive ... Medusa ditched the dominatrix costume after issue 36 of Fantastic Four.

Lee and Kirby cleverly opened the story with scene of Reed's FF at home, starting with the engagement announcement. We see Ben and Johnny arguing good-naturedly, but when a package that may be a bomb is delivered, Ben uses his own body to shield the others from the explosion, though it turns out to be a practical joke by the Yancy Street Gang. Immediately, the scene switches to the evil FF meeting up. By contrast, Pete and the Sandman are at each other's throats straight away, before their fight is broken up by The Wizard. The stark difference between the two groups is jarring. We, the readers, know which group we'd rather be part of.

With the Fantastic Four, the team are supportive of each other and behave like a caring family ...

And the main plot hadn't even started ...

Around the same time, I picked a copy of Justice League of America 32 (Feb 1965) from a little newsagent on a street behind Woolwich Arsenal station. The Gardner Fox story in that comic, "Enemy from the Timeless World", was nothing like "Defeated by the Frightful Four". 

This Justice League adventure would have been one of the last I bought, so unfavourably did it compare to the Marvel Comics I'd started reading. Gardner Fox's script is squarely aimed at the non-discerning 10 year old ... and I considered myself very discerning by this age.

To begin with, there was none of the characterisation of the Marvel books in Fox's script. All the characters in JLA32 talked exactly alike. You could take any of the dialogue and put it any of the characters' mouths. Even in their own books, DC characters all talked alike. It was Stan Lee that pretty much created distinctive speech patterns for comics characters. And that was one of the magic ingredients that made Marvel's stories so different.

The other big difference between DC books like JLA32 and Lee's Marvel Comics was that the entirety of the Justice League story happened in a landscape that wasn't recognisable - a distorted version of the League Clubhouse, and there were no civilians to be seen. By contrast, all the Marvel books showed their characters constantly interacting with real people in a recognisable American cityscape, in the case of the FF ... New York.

THE VERY AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

For someone whose first exposure to US comics was the staid and starchy DC heroes, Lee and Ditko's Spider-Man was a revelation. It was completely unlike anything I'd seen before. I was familiar with Ditko's work and really liked it. His Marvel and Charlton stories were regularly reprinted in the British, black and white Alan Class comics. But Spider-Man was something altogether different.

The first issue I remember reading was Amazing Spider-Man 15. I must have swapped it with a friend, as it was quite a few months older than the other Marvel Comics I was picking up in the newsagents. The villain was unlike any other. For a start, he didn't actually commit any crimes. He just wanted to hunt the Most Dangerous Game - a man. Specifically a Spider-Man. Not realising he was being manipulated by dangerous spy, The Chameleon, one of Spider-Man's oldest enemies, he hunted and battled Spider-Man - more-or-less honourably - for the sheer sport of it.

Spider-Man's adversaries were a weird crowd and Kraven the Hunter was no different -
Ditko's design-sense here is exemplary.

But all that was a bit beside the point. The part of Spider-Man's stories that grabbed the readers - me included - was the way the super-hero Spider-Man managed to do really well, a sixteen year old kid defeating really menacing villains who would happily kill him, while his real-life persona Peter Parker messed up just about everything he did.

In this issue was the first mention of Mary-Jane Watson, as Aunt May tried fix her nephew up on a blind date with her friend's niece. But Peter is too busy trying to court Betty Brant, while fending off the sort-of-unwanted attentions of arch-rival Flash Thompson's girlfriend, Liz Allen. A tangled web, indeed.

Peter's Aunt May constantly worries about her nephew, because of how frail he is ...

Anyway, Betty's nose gets all out of joint when local airhead Liz Allen tries to make school bully Flash Thompson jealous by playing up to "Petey". She won't listen to his explanations and the issue ends with Pete unable to get a date with either girl. Even Mary-Jane begs off with a headache. Personally, I thought Betty was a bit high-maintenance ... which would turn out to be the case when I found out that in an earlier issue Betty blamed Spider-Man for the death of her criminal brother Bennett and berated Peter for being a thrill-seeker just like Spider-Man.

The issue closes with Peter's luck running true to form, all bad, as he fails to get a date with Betty, Liz or even the as-yet-unnamed Mary-Jane Watson.

In the next couple of months, I would read and save many more Fantastic Four and Spider-Man comics. But I hadn't forgotten the character that drew me to Marvel in the first place ... 

Before I turned my attentions seriously to collecting any Marvel Comics with Captain America in them, I had still to enjoy my first tastes of some of Marvel second-string characters. In my immediate future were my introductions to Daredevil, The X-Men and Dr Strange ...

Next: Exactly how many comics does Marvel publish anyway?