Marvel Comics: Second-Hand Memories

BACK IN THE MID-1960s, when I first became interested in reading as many Marvel Comics as I could lay my hands on, there wasn't the perfect distribution network today's comic fans enjoy. I was reliant on the spotty delivery of American comics to the many independent newsagents in my local area and what I could salvage from the piles of second-hand comics in the various unlikely shops I'd stumble across. Once I realised that there were shops that would sell second-hand comics, I began to explore the area in earnest, ranging far and wide on my bicycle, stashing my new-found treasures in the saddlebag I'd acquired especially for that purpose.

In general, these second-hand shops charged 6d (that's 2.5p in today's money - though adjusting for inflation it's actually about 30p). My pocket money was 2/6, so I could afford to buy five comics for that. Or three if I was buying them new from a newsagent. Caution was often called for.

Of course, I didn't spend all my money on comics. Another favourite pastime for kids back in the 1960s was to go to Saturday Morning Pictures. My local cinema was the ABC on Wellington Street, Woolwich, and every Saturday morning we'd all troop off for three hours of entertainment - a feature film, cartoons, a serial chapter and even birthday celebrations. All for sixpence. 

Top left: An ABC Cinema of the period. Top right: The Woolwich ABC as it is today (sad).
Bottom left: An ABC Minors birthday invite. Bottom right: The classic glow-in-the-dark ABC Minors badge.

If you were feeling particularly flush, you could sit upstairs in The Circle for 9d. The advantage of this was that you wouldn't have kids above you flicking gobs of ice cream at you during the performance. But before we got to see any films, there was a bit of housekeeping. The MC would ask if there were any birthday boys or girls in the audience. Each celebrant would have to come up on the stage and get a free ice lolly. One time my friend Roger Phair pretended it was his birthday. I felt sure he'd be found out, but he returned to his seat, beaming and holding his ill-gotten prize - a Zoom lolly. Then we'd sing the ABC Minors song while the words appeared on the screen. Finally, we got to watch the movies ...

Back in the 1960s a tribal custom was to sing your tribal song at the top of your lungs.
When it got to the last line, all the kids hollered "A-B-C" as loudly as they could.

In 1965, I was excited to hear that Batman would be featured in the following week's matinee. Even though I was a confirmed Marvel fan by that time, it was still a big deal to think that a superhero would be featured on the big screen. The previous year, Batman had undergone a revamp. DC Comics had got rid of the corny old science-fiction tales and remade Batman in the same sleek style they'd used for their Silver Age versions of Green Lantern and The Flash. The character even had a costume redesign ... they put a yellow circle around the bat emblem on Batman's chest, an allusion, I figured, to the famous "Bat Signal".

Though I didn't know it at the time, Batman's early 1964 revamp was
down to Julius Schwartz and Carmine Infantino, who'd so successfully
revived The Flash and Green Lantern five years earlier.

All the way to the cinema, I kept asking my friend Steve Rainey if he thought the Batman on the screen would have the yellow circle around the bat emblem. I don't think he had the faintest idea what I was talking about. As it turned out, the Batman on screen was the 1943 serial version, starring Lewis Wilson in a wrinkly costume. Once I got over my initial disappointment, I quite enjoyed the serial. It was black and white, and obviously very old because of the suits the characters were wearing and the cars they drove. But it was one of the better serials, given a decent budget by genre standards and directed by Lambert Hillyer, who also did the eerie Dracula's Daughter (1936) and went on to have a long career directing westerns and tv segments.

The Batman chapterplay was pretty action-packed and though Batman's costume was a bit saggy, I enjoyed the serial immensely. There would be many more superhero serials in my future.

This was also my first sight of a superhero on screen. We never did get the George Reeves Superman tv show in London until much later (if at all - can anyone say for sure?). I'd have to wait a couple of years for Adam West to put on the famous cowl, which would be my next exposure to a live-action comic character. Boy, how I hated that tv show - but that's a story for a later post.

The other product that vied for the attention of the neighbourhood kids during 1965 was bubble gum cards. I somehow managed to miss out on the Mars Attacks series. And I didn't know anyone back then who had any. It may have been that they just didn't make it into our area. But we were very aware of the Civil War News series from AB&C. These were a set of pasteboard cards, about 80mm x 55mm, depicting often gory scenes from the American Civil War, rendered in glorious, full-colour painted artwork.

The Civil War News gum card set was much-loved by my generation of kids.
Extremely gory and painted, in part, by the Mars Attacks artist Norman Saunders,
these images were deemed quite unsuitable for children by an outraged popular press.

With each wrap of cards you also got an reproduction Confederate banknote and a wafer of bubblegum with the taste and consistency of cardboard. As it was a bit of lottery as to what cards you got in a packet, you'd end up spending way more than you expected to to acquire the full set, though it was possible to swap "doubles" with your friends. 

As noted on the wrapper, Civil War News cards cost 2d
and came with a free Confederate Dollar banknote.

But at just 2d a pack, I quickly collected a full set and  ended up with a roll of Confederate bills that could have choked a horse.

So successful was the first Beatles set of cards that card company
AB&C immediately released a second set.

Other card sets that were popular during 1965 were The Beatles and Man from UNCLE. If anything, the Man from UNCLE cards were even more popular than The Beatles set. And in the couple of years that followed, there would be other sets of gum cards that we'd all collect like crazy - Battle (a WW2 set along the same lines as Civil War News), several sets of Batman cards,(riding the wave of that tv show) and The Monkees.

The Man from UNCLE cards were in the same format
as The Beatles cards - black and white photos with a
signature overprinted in blue.

If you came up short for money back in the mid-1960s, you could scour the area for empty lemonade bottles. Back then, glass bottles like those for Tizer and R Whites lemonade would net you 3d each if you returned them to the shop. Even cider bottles and some beer bottles had a deposit. Some shop owners were a bit suspicious if you came in with an armload of sticky empty pop bottles. "Did you buy those here?" they'd sometimes enquire. But there were some shopkeepers who'd happily accept anything you could find, because they too received money for bottles they returned to the beverage companies.

Two bottles would net you a used comic. Three would get you a new one off the newsagent's spinner rack. Money was just lying around next to dustbins in those days ...

But back to the main story ... by this point I was on my way to building a pretty good run of Tales of Suspense featuring my hero Captain America, along with a good run of The Avengers, also with Cap.

Most of these I had sourced in my immediate neighbourhood, in and around Woolwich, in south-east London. It wasn't the best area for finding American comics. The nearest newsagent to my house was an old-fashioned shop at the top of Frances Street, all dark wood interior with elderly proprietors. They would have no truck with any new-fangled American nonsense, so I couldn't get my Marvel Comics there. There was the paper shop on Kingsman Parade near the south end of Frances Street that did have a single spinner rack, but carried mostly DC Comics. And there was the newsagent behind Woolwich Arsenal Station that I mentioned in an earlier post. All in all, pretty slim pickings. Luckily, I had a bike.

Casting my net wider, I travelled westwards along Woolwich Church Street, through lower Charlton which was a dead loss for likely newsagents, until I hit Greenwich and found a small print shop that had a pile of American comics in the window. Leafing through the pile, under the watchful and distrustful eye of the elderly proprietor, I pulled out a few issues of Tales of Suspense that I needed.

The little print shop was somewhere about here on
Trafalgar Road in Greenwich during the 1960s - now long gone.

Then I found something much cooler - Amazing Spider-Man 11 and 12. Excited by my discovery I put both books on my "to buy" pile. 

A two-part Spider-Man extravaganza from Stan Lee and Steve Ditko -
featuring the return of Doctor Octopus (I hadn't been aware he went away at this point).

Finally, near the end of the stack, there was a copy of Amazing Spider-Man Annual 3. Now to my ten-year old mind, this was way better. For a start, it cost 6d, so it was cheaper than the two regular Spider-Man comics. It reprinted the entire story from Spider-Man 11 and 12. And it threw in an all-new tale about Spider-Man joining the Avengers. Easiest decision in the world. I put the two Spider-Man books back and went with the Annual.

Spider-Man battles the hulk as part of the Avengers joining process.
And fights Doc Ock in the back end of the book. Brilliant!

Of course, by today's standards, that was the worst possible decision. The Overstreet Price Guide price for Spider-Man 11 and 12 is about £190 apiece in fine. The fine price for Spider-Man Annual 3 is £32 - as an investor, I clearly hadn't got the hang of it yet.

Another Marvel I uncovered on my travels around south-east London was a copy of Fantastic Four 30. This one featured an alchemist called Diablo, a villain criticised by some fans because his potions never really worked very well. Buried in a vault beneath his medieval castle somewhere in Transylvania, Diablo manages to take control of Ben Grimm and turn him against his team-mates. Even by issue 30 of "The World's Greatest Comics Magazine", the idea of Ben turning again the rest of the FF - having already been pretty testy for the first six issues then actually going rogue in issues 8 - was getting a bit overworked. Yet Stan (or Jack) would return to this one again and again, notably in Fantastic Four 41-43, 51, 68-69, 111 - and that's just the Silver Age stories ...

Another beautifully composed cover from Kirby, enhanced by Chick Stone's
classy, smooth inking style. The premise - The Thing looking more human - is
immediately engaging. We need to know what's happening.

Like some of the Captain America stories I was enjoying so much in Tales of Suspense, this FF also featured the inks of Chic Stone over Kirby pencils. I've mentioned before how much I liked Stone's inks both then and now, and I always wondered why other fans didn't seem to like his stuff.

Stone was active with Marvel for about a year during 1964-5, inking Kirby's work pretty much exclusively until mid 1965, when he suddenly disappeared from Marvel Comics. I've not been able to find an authoritative explanation for this and can only assume Stone was offered a better rate from another company. After Marvel he continued to ink for ACG and started producing artwork for Dell (The Flying Saucers), then did a long stint for Archie Comics through the 1970s, returning to Marvel as an inker around 1978 on the Thing team-up book Marvel Two in One.

But during that one year period, Stone turned in some exemplary work on just about all the pencil work Kirby did ... the key books he inked were:

• Avengers 9 (Oct 64) - 14 (Mar 65), 15 (cover)
• Fantastic Four 28 (Jul 64) - 38 (May 65), FF Annual 2 (Sep 64)
• Journey into Mystery 102 (Mar 64) - 114 (Mar 65), 115 (cover)
• Sgt Fury 18 (May 65)
• Tales of Suspense 59 (Nov 64) - 66 (Jun 65)
• Tales to Astonish 57 (Jul 64), 63 (Jan 65), 67 (May 65)
• X-Men 6 (Jul 64) - 11 (May 65)
• Patsy Walker 115 (Jun 64) - 116 (Aug 64)

I've read elsewhere that FF30 was completed in a bit of a rush, due to scheduling problems, but in the first half of the book, Stone's inks are as good as anything he ever did. Especially good are pages 2 and 3. The detail and the quality of the inks enhances Kirby's pencils beautifully, and unlike later inkers, all the faces Stone inked still look like Kirby faces. And also unlike later inkers, Stone took the time to ink the backgrounds fully, instead of just erasing stuff he didn't want to spend time inking.

Especially well done here is the inking on Johnny's and Reed's faces on page 2
and the Burgomeister's face on page 3. The backgrounds are beautifully filled in too.

Towards the end of the issue, you can see that there was some hurry to Stone's inking - or it may have been Kirby's pencils that were rushed. But it's still fine storytelling.

By this point in the story, you can see that Kirby and Stone's artwork isn't quite as detailed
as the earlier pages, but it's still very efficient storytelling, very slickly inked.

I'd love to know why Stone suddenly quit Marvel in mid-1965. I've not been able to find out, and I suspect the lack of information may be because Chic Stone was too much of an old-school gentleman to ever discuss the matter. But if you know anything about Stone's leaving Marvel at that time, please leave a comment ...

Next: How the Bullpen Bulletins made Marvel the Market Leader

You can buy these Marvel Comics second-hand, too?

IN THE EARLY1960s, I discovered Marvel Comics and dedicated myself to tracking down comics featuring my hero Captain America. At first I was content with scouring the local newsagents looking for ... the spinner rack. Then I looked for kids in the neighbourhood who had Marvel comics that I really wanted and offered them ridiculous trades - three DCs for one Marvel.

Okay ... this is a spinner rack in an American store, but we had
them in UK newsagents, too. Trouble is they wrecked the condition
of the comics - not that we cared much about that back then.

But there was another source of US comics beginning to turn up during the Silver Age - second hand shops. At first it was just random shops, often selling bric-a-brac like brass ornaments or other household nonsense, that would have a box of old LP records and comics outside, priced at 3d or 6d.

The records outside those second-hand shops would be tut ...
terrible stuff I'd never be interested in. No Beatles or Dave Clarke 5 here.

In America, if comics were unsold, the newsstand owner could cut or tear the logo from the front cover and return it to the wholesaler for a refund. You'll sometimes still find old comics on eBay missing the logo for that very reason. The comics were supposed to destroyed ... but many made it on to cut-price racks. Later, the publishers figured this out and made the news sellers return the whole comic, and the wholesaler would then ink the edges with blue ink. These comics also made it out into the world again.

In the UK, if distributors Thorpe & Porter accepted returns, it would have been the entire comic, which they would then likely pulp or possibly commit to landfill. But even during the Sixties, American comics had a perceived value and it was possible to find second-hand comics in the oddest of places.

Back then, like many kids in the neighbourhood, I had a bike. After exhausting the newsagents in the area, I began to range further afield to get my hands on yet more Marvel Comics. There were more newsagents  to be found westwards along Woolwich Church Street, at least two of them before it became Woolwich Road and crossed over the Blackwall Tunnel Approach. Then, as Charlton gave way to Greenwich, I found a print shop that had a stack of comics in the window. That shop would become a regular source of older Marvel Comics for me.

Finally, at the furthest limits of my range, was New Cross and the Popular Book Centre, a sleazy haven for paperback books, assorted girlie magazines and three or four stacks of American Comics, all with a heavy "Popular Book Centre" stamp on the cover and a handwritten biro price, initially 6d, but that would go up over the next couple of years.

Admittedly, this one's not too bad, but very often,
the Popular Book Centre stamps were heavy and inky,
and often smudged on the glossy comic cover stock.

Later on, I'd become a regular customer of Bonus Books in Woolwich, which was much closer to home for me. In fact, I was in there almost every day and got to know the proprietor quite well, to the point where he'd save comics for me. I think his name was Dave. He seemed a like a very nice guy, even though he did appear to sell some quite scary porn, to some even scarier customers, from under the counter.

The comics I bought from Bonus Books have long since gone,
(and what happened to them is a story for another blog entry)
but I still have the Doc Savage paperbacks all these years later.

MORE CLASSIC MARVELS

Sometime in the second half of 1965, I had managed to find two really early Fantastic Fours ... 4 and 8. I forget now where I'd got them from, but I know I would have paid 6d from one of those second-hand shops. Being second-hand, they weren't in perfect condition, probably about Very Good to Fine in today's standards, but back then, condition wasn't a deciding factor, more of a bonus if the comic was a nice copy.

My next Marvel "classic" was Fantastic Four 4.
I had no idea that Sub-Mariner had been a major
Golden Age character ... but it didn't spoil my
enjoyment of this issue one bit.

Fantastic Four 4 brought back The Sub-Mariner from the Golden Age of comics. Then, I knew nothing about "The Golden Age of Comics" - and to be fair, Stan didn't bill it that way. What I did notice was that this was not the same Fantastic Four team I'd been reading about just weeks earlier. The Thing looked completely different. More like a mudslide than the blocky angular rockpile he later became. And he seemed much more ... dangerous than his later self. 

The underlying (at best) insensitivity of Reed Richards
is present here when he calls Sue "Sue"
in the last panel and Ben "Thing".

The issue begins with a brief recap of FF3 - the Torch has run off because The Thing shouted at him and now both Mr Fantastic and Invisible Girl are fed up with The Thing. The leader of the FF keeps calling Ben "Thing" over and over again, while Reed and Sue call each other by their names. My first thought, looking back, was that Stan was trying to establish new characters the readers weren't familiar with. But that doesn't seem to be the case. It's as though Stan was deliberately de-humanising Ben Grimm, so the readers would think of him as a monster, rather than as an ordinary man who's tragically devolved into a monster. That approach would change quite quickly.

Meanwhile, The Torch is hiding out in the Bowery. Why he would hole up in a fleapit flop-house isn't explained, but it's a quick way for him to meet The Sub-Mariner, who has lost his memory years before and is now a down-and-out. Stan and Jack show us an old Sub-Mariner comic but that didn't mean a thing to me, as I had no awareness of any comics older than 1960.

Johnny Storm finds a vintage Sub-Mariner comic in
a Bowery flophouse (yeah, right!) not six feet away from
the actual Sub- Mariner ... what are the odds?

Johnny suspects the true identity of the hobo, after the apparently frail amnesiac bounces several burly thugs around the dormitory as though they were weightless. Oddly, The Sub-Mariner allows Johnny to burn off his beard without even a blink, and is revealed as ... yup, Prince Namor.

The first of several close shaves with The Sub-Mariner.

Finally, Johnny does the stupidest thing he's ever done. He drops the Sub-Mariner into the ocean to restore his memory. Why would you do that, Johnny? What good can ever come of restoring the the memory of one of the most dangerous creatures on Earth? No good at all, as it turns out. But amidst the battles we see the beginnings of Namor's infatuation with Sue Storm and though his plans are balked, The Sub-Mariner escapes to fight another day ... as he surely will.

At the time, this was the earliest Marvel comic I'd been exposed to. Heck, they weren't even called Marvel Comics at this time. And to be honest, I didn't think it was anything really special as a story. Mostly, I was thrilled to own it because it was such an early number of Fantastic Four. Even then, I was as much a collector as a reader. 

One irony that occurred to me much later about this comic was the way that Jack Kirby didn't seem to have any qualms about using The Sub-Mariner in one of his Fantastic Four stories (Kirby had claimed for years that he did all the writing as well as the art and was robbed of his creations by Marvel), even though the copyright situation was a bit fuzzy, and the rights to the character may well have been owned by The Sub-Mariner's creator Bill Everett. I've always respected the heck out of Kirby's abilities as a creator, but even he can't have it both ways ...

LIKE A PUPPET ON A STRING

Anyway, in the same transaction I also acquired a copy of Fantastic Four 8. This too was a key issue because it introduced not only one of the dumbest-looking villains the FF have ever fought, The Puppet Master, but also the baddie's step-daughter Alicia, who would become the love interest for Ben Grimm and the key factor in the humanising of The Thing. 

Why did the Puppet Master look like a ventriloquist's dummy?
And why did no one comment on his bizarre appearance?

No rationale is given for why the Puppet Master looks the way he does. Precious little motivation is given for why the character wants to do mean-spirited things. He just does it because he feels like it. At this point, I don't think Lee and Kirby knew what they had or where they were going with it, so the whole issue feels like it was just a throwaway "comic book story". The elements that separated Marvel from DC were all here, just a little unfocussed. So everyone is still calling Ben Grimm "Thing" and he's still pretty angry with the world. 

When Reed bars Ben from the Lab, Grimm gets all paranoid and stumps off in a huff. Of course, Reed is working on a cure and doesn't want Ben disappointed if it doesn't work. But his moodiness is the catalyst for Ben to meet The Puppet Master - and more importantly, Alicia. This is one of the few times I can remember that Alicia is said to resemble Sue Storm. And the Puppet Master disguises her as Sue with the mere addition of a blonde wig and sends her back to the FF with a now mind-controlled Ben.

This is one of the first times that Ben Grimm reverts to his human state,
this time because of a chemical potion Reed has been working on.

I wonder now whether Stan was going somewhere with this. In the earlier issues of FF, he'd given Ben a romantic interest in Sue which ended up being forgotten. Perhaps he was toying with the idea of Ben falling for Alicia because she looked like Sue. But this idea was quickly abandoned and Ben and Alicia's relationship became its own animal, and a core principle of the Fantastic Four family legend. 

Even though Alicia is unable to see, she can sense that Ben is
essentially the same person, no matter what his outward appearance.

The other features in FF8 were a Feature Page which explained how The Human Torch's powers worked and an early Fantastic Four Fan Page on which all the letters began "Dear Editor" ... a formality that would be soon jettisoned in favour of "Dear Stan and Jack" or "Dear Marvel Madmen". 

The early issues of Fantastic Four were filled with fun features like this -
this one explains in "scientific" terms how Johnny Storm's power works.

But the terrible misfortune for me was that when I went from junior school to grammar school in September 1965, I took these two comics in with me one day and foolishly left them in my desk. And when I came back later, someone had taken them. It took me years of scouring the second-hand shops before I was able to replace Fantastic Four 4 and 8 ... but I learnt a valuable lesson. Some people are real a*holes ...

THE X FACTOR

This bit of bad luck and poor character judgement didn't deter me, though. It wasn't long before I uncovered a copy of X-Men 4 - a real key issue. It was the first time I saw Magneto (I pronounced it Mag-netto) and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

A brilliant iconic cover to introduce the reverse X-Men.
Pretty much perfect apart from a couple of silly colouring errors.

These days you wouldn't get a cover like that. It seems that contemporary editors would look at an illustration like that and ask why Magneto and his Evil Wotsits have been drawn as giants. But even as an eleven year old, I knew that Magneto wasn't really fifty foot tall. I just thought it was really cool and that the baddies looked really menacing.

Inside the story was fairly routine, except that the characterisation again was way ahead of what any other publisher was doing at the time. At this point, Magneto was still a bit of a dictatorial control freak. He wouldn't get in touch with his nobler side until much later. But his followers were a mix of repulsive and pitiable.

Without comment, we're shown life with the X-Men and how things go down
as Castle "Evil Mutant" and left to decide where we'd rather be.

Lee and Kirby compared the good guys with the bad guys side-by-side and left it to the readers as to which group they would prefer to hang out with. They would use this device again, notably in Fantastic Four 36, which introduced the Frightful Four.

But the key milestone is this issue is the introduction of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch as reluctant allies of Magneto. 

We're offered an origin of sorts for both Wanda and Pietro.
These four panels would be expanded on later by other hands.

Leading by fear, he exploits the humans' hatred of mutants to keep these two basically decent people in his thrall. Of course, later Pietro and Wanda would break away from Magneto's influence and join The Avengers in issue 16, which I covered in more detail in an earlier post.

The other high point for me in this issue was one of the house ads. It showed the very issue of The Avengers, coincidently also issue 4, where Captain America is introduced in a modern setting.

For a Captain America fan like me, this house ad depicted
the Holy Grail of comics ... The Avengers 4.

It would be many years before I managed to track down a copy of this immensely important (to me, anyway) Marvel Comic ... but that's a story for another time.

Next: More Marvel, more second-hand shops

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