From "Dear Editor" to "Face front, fearless ones"

BACK IN THE MID-1960s, when I first started reading comics, like other kids I was mostly interested in the stories. I'd always had a fascination with Science Fiction since my Mum had taken me to the cinema to see a re-release of Forbidden Planet (1956) when I was about six or so. The movie kept me up all night for weeks afterwards with nightmares about glowing disembodied eyes that roved the landscape at night destroying esoteric buildings like lighthouses. I'm sure Freudians could have a field day with that one ... but then I was only six years old.

To my six year old way of thinking, the Monster from the ID was the ultimate
in horror, though to most people today, I suppose it just looks like a
large Disney cartoon dog, which is pretty much what it is.

The other reason that same movie also caught my attention was because of Anne Francis as Altaira. I guess we don't need any Freudians to explain why that might have been ...

Anne Francis was certainly a lot prettier than the Monster from the ID ...
but at just six years old, I didn't do that much dreaming about her back then.

So it's no surprise that the first American comic that caught my eye featured a science fiction monster on the cover (see the first post in this blog).

But like any other kid of my age, patience wasn't a virtue I valued. When I got my hands on a new comic, I'd tear through the story at breakneck pace, giving scant attention to the other features and fillers in the magazine. I knew that I liked Marvel Comics better than the DC mags of the same era, but I hadn't really thought about why. Yet, the Spider-Man and Fantastic Four stories were better than the Batman and Superman tales. The Marvel characters talked more like real people and seemed to inhabit a world that looked quite like the world I lived in. But that was what started me reading the Marvel product. But it didn't explain what kept me reading Marvels well into my teenage years and up to the present day. I didn't figure that out until much later.

DCs were the first comics I was reading in the 1960s. The format of these books hadn't changed much since the 1940s - only the page count had dropped in an effort to maintain that 10c cover price. The typical Superman comic would feature as many as three Superman tales, often a single-page of little-known facts to demonstrate that comics were really quite educational, and a half (or full) page humorous strip by Henry Boltinoff, featuring Casey the Cop or Super-Turtle.

Henry Boltinoff (brother of DC editor Murray) contributed fillers like this 
Super-Turtle half-pager to DC comics through the 1960s and into the 1970s.

Not all DC comics had letters pages - for example, I have a copy of Blackhawk 170 which has no letters, but does have a one-page historical text piece about remarkable survival stories of World War Two. The letters pages there were, mostly in the Mort Weissinger-edited Superman Family books, pretty stodgy. They read like they'd been written by your English teacher, all a bit stiff and formal. There wasn't much real communication going on, no connection with the readers. 

This letters page features the results of the Great DC Contest (readers had
to count how many times the letters D and C appeared in issue 169 of
Superman) and four letters, apparently selected for their collective dullness.

The Editor's replies to readers were even duller than the letters selected for print. Small wonder, then, that I skipped over these tiresome text pages.

An aside - there's a great story in the second volume of Steranko's History of Comics. It tells how, sometime in 1943, Fawcett Comics editor Will Lieberson went into a barber shop and noticed a kid in the chair next to him reading a comic. A Fawcett comic. Lieberson smiled and listened as the kid read the comic out loud to himself, across the top two panels, skipping the lower two-thirds of each page. Lieberson leaned over to the kid and explained kindly that to get the best from the story, he should read all the way down the page before moving to the next. The kid stopped, looked Lieberson straight in the eye and said, "I know, but this way it's faster."

Back to the main subject - It was a tradition, in the comics published by Marty Goodman, that the magazines would always carry at least two pages of text material. As I understand it now, this was so the publications qualified for Second-Class postage rates, which meant Marty could mail at the subscriptions copies at a cheaper price, saving himself a cent or two per subscription copy. For that very reason, Stan Lee would be obliged to run a two-page text story in every book he edited from the 1940s right through to 1962, so that the comics qualified as magazines under the law. And it didn't have to be new material, so the text tales were recycled on a regular basis. Some Marvel books as late as Suspense 58 and Astonish 57 were still reprinting those text stories in 1964. I ignored those too.

Around 1962, though, Lee hit on an idea. His new superhero team book Fantastic Four was generating mail from readers. Stan is quoted in Ronin Ro's Tales to Astonish as saying, "We had never gotten fan mail, maybe one letter a year about some stupid subject. But all of a sudden we got fan mail from readers saying 'We love this [Fantastic Four] book', 'We can't wait for the next issue'. I knew we were onto something."

So Stan decided to use this sudden outpouring of reader sentiment to his advantage and introduced the Fantastic Four Fan Page in FF3 - as far as I can tell, the first lettercol in a Silver Age Marvel. The earliest FF lettercol I have in my meagre collection of comics is from FF5 ...

This Fantastic Four Fan Page, in issue 5 of FF, features a letter from a young
Roy Thomas. It also signs off with Stan's first use of the phrase, "Face Front!"

Not surprisingly, this early collection of fan letters wasn't really any different to what was going on in the DC books of the period. Each letter begins "Dear Editor" and Stan Lee isn't identified anywhere as being the author of the replies. Though there are faint glimmers of Stan Lee's personality in the replies to the letters - "Aw, Bill, don't be mad" and "Well, mebbe some day" - the letters themselves are quite unremarkable.

There was no letters page in Fantastic Four 6, but it was back in issue 7, and Stan managed to squeeze in a plug for Strange Tales 101 which featured the first solo outing for Johnny (Human Torch) Storm, and the word "Echh" makes its first appearance.

Although it's still early days, the readers' letters continue to focus on silly mistakes
made by the production team rather than any discussion of the content of the comics.

Issue 8's Fan Page contained an interesting letter that suggests the rest of the team stop addressing Ben Grimm as "Thing", a point I also picked up on in an earlier blog-post. Even as a kid, it struck me as bit callous that Reed, Sue and Johnny called each other by name yet insist on addressing Ben as "Thing". Given that the character was supposed to be sensitive about his monstrous appearance, the team couldn't be any more cruel if they tried. Stan explains that this is for the benefit of new readers who might not know why the others are calling a monster by the name Ben. But it wouldn't be long before the penny dropped for Stan and he began having the others refer to Ben as "Ben" ...

Fantastic Four 10's Fan Page was the first big step change to the Marvel voice. Stan kicks off the page by announcing that they've enough of that "'Dear Editor' jazz from now on" and that as he and Jack read every letter, they're changing the salutation of every letter on the page to "Dear Stan and Jack" to demonstrate how much friendlier this sounds. And of course, Stan was right ... it reads way better. Also, Stan here began to pepper the page with announcements about this and that - including Stan telling fans that the letters page would be a two-pager starting next issue, that Marvel didn't have any issues of FF1-9 to hand, so couldn't supply back issues, and that Amazing Fantasy 15 was a big success so there would be more Spider-Man tales coming in December 1962, which sounds about right for the on-sale date of Amazing Spider-Man 1 (cover-dated March 1963).

The Fantastic Four Fan Page from issue 10 was the first to include news items
about what was happening in the Bullpen and with other Marvel titles.

By the time issue 13 of Fantastic Four (Apr 63), came out, Stan was gathering his announcements and placing them in a block at the end of the Fan Page - a kind of embryonic Bullpen Bulletins. FF14 carried some notable announcements that must've had budding Marvel fans in a lather. The most visible of these was the inauguration of the iconic Marvel corner trademark emblem. I'll be devoting a future post entirely to the origins and history of this unique identifier.

This collection of announcements from Fantastic Four 14 revealed that a 
Fantastic Four Annual was in the works and that a new war comic, Sgt Fury
and his Howling Commandos, was due at the newsstands soon ...

But here Stan also mentioned that he reads every letter from fans and because of that, he's not able to have lettercols in the other Marvel titles, but encouraged readers to send their letters about Thor and Iron man to the FF Fan Page. Spider-Man, of course had his own letters page.

The Fan Page continued pretty much in this vein, with Stan releasing snippets of information about upcoming Marvel magazines, like the imminent Fantastic Four Annual 1 and Strange Tales Annual 2. Issue 16 mentioned the many letters they received congratulating them on the new trading name Marvel Comics Group, and the launch of Dr Strange in Strange Tales, and in FF17 Stan promised to bring back the Hulk somehow. The letters page for FF18 plugged the Annuals again, and announced the release of the first issues of The Avengers and The X-Men. One reader asked why Stan didn't print more flattering letters, he replied that he'd rather print controversial letters readers could argue about, the strongest signal yet that he considered the readers partners in this grand enterprise. When another reader asked who devised the idea for the cover corner emblem, Stan revealed that it was Steve Ditko who came up with it. And this column also featured the first use of the phrase, "The Marvel Age Comics", signifying the beginnings of Lee's tongue-in-cheek brand-aggrandisement.

This house ad from Fantastic Four 18 also mentions the "Marvel Age of Comics"
and plugs the newest team to appear in the ever-expanding Marvel Universe.

It's significant that the types of new book Lee and Kirby were putting out that this time were variations on the Fantastic Four formula. It's possible that Lee was serving Marty Goodman's agenda to put out the sort of comics he thought could compete with DC's uber-successful Justice League of America. But rather than just spit out clone books, Stan was careful to give each of these team books its own Unique Selling Point. 

Where Fantastic Four was a dysfunctional family (with Ben Grimm as the grumpy uncle), Sgt Fury was a kind of United Colours of Benetton, decades before anyone else thought of the idea. In this war book, Lee was able to give voice to his liberal world-view where people weren't judged on the colour of their skin or their racial origins. He was careful to include a black man, a jew and an Italian in the original line-up, but quite rightly didn't make a big deal of it. 

Certainly The Avengers were much more of a direct response to The Justice League. In this book, Stan just gathered all the available heroes (barring Spider-Man who had already been established as not being much of a joiner) and put them all in a single comic. But the X-Men was something different. By making his X-heroes mutants - essentially a science fiction version of a separate human racial type - he was able to bring his liberal beliefs into his comic stories. Something I've never had an issue with.

On the Fan Page in FF19, Stan shared a Bullpen in-joke. He explained that whenever Jack Kirby drew crowd scenes, the same faces would crop up again and again. The Marvel staff called them "Kirby's Kast of Kharacters". By bringing the readers in on the joke, he was engaging in classic team-building. He would go even further down that route in a few months but even here we can see that none of this was an accident. Stan knew exactly what he was doing, and he was doing it very well. 

"Kirby's Kast of Kharacters" from Fantastic Four 20. By comparison, here's a crowd scene from the 1936 Fritz Lang movie, Fury, a film Kirby would almost certainly have been familiar with, though this type of character imagery was common in pre-war Hollywood movies.

FF20 included a letter from "George R. Martin" (he only had one R at this point), who would later go on to write the acclaimed Games of Thrones series of novels. Martin praised Marvel for fitting "so much action into so few pages" - a quality all too sadly lacking in today's comics with their notoriously decompressed storylines.

By the time we get to FF21, the Special Announcements section is taking up a quarter of the Fan Page, mostly plugging the dozen other Marvel mags Stan is putting out.

This issue of Fantastic Four started a run of guest star spots that would run up to
issue 29, featuring The Avengers, Dr Strange, X-Men and The Watcher.

These Special Announcements would continue right up until FF37, with issue 32's section mentioning the MMMS for the first time. Issue 34 had the plugs for the other Marvels separated out into its own box and a letter from "George R. R. Martin" (there's that second R) complaining that the Special Announcements section had become just a plug-fest for all the other Marvel mags. Issue 37's lettercol had a note from letter-hack Guy H. Lillian III complaining about Stan shortening letter-writers' names in his replies: "For instance," writes Guy, "'Jackie boy' for Jack, 'Stevie' twice and 'Jer' for Jerry." In FF38, the Special Announcements are gone from the Fan Page, leaving only the Mighty Marvel Checklist. Issue 39 had Stan's first use of the catchphrase "Make Mine Marvel", and by issue 42, the Announcements are sneaking back in as separate items in yellow boxes dotted through the two-page lettercol. But this was only temporary ... in issue 45 of Fantastic Four, Stan included the first of what would become a Marvel institution for the next twenty years or so - The Bullpen Bulletin page.

Fantastic Four 45 was the culmination of Stan's mission. He'd made comics cool, cemented his reputation as a leader the youth looked up to and had a lot of fun in the process. 

The transformation was complete. In just three years, Stan Lee had taken Marvel Comics from an also-ran comic company grinding out formulaic stories and art to a pop culture phenomenon. Though some have tried to undermine Stan's claim to being the architect of Marvel, they're simply wrong. Yes, Kirby and Ditko helped Marvel's rise to market dominance with their imaginative plotting, but it was Stan who created the affable personalities for the Marvel characters and more importantly, wove the whole thing into a complete and fully realised package. It wasn't just the Marvel stories we were buying into here. It was a lifestyle and an aspirational brand. And it was this mature approach to branding and packaging that kept me reading Marvels way beyond 1965 and my eleventh birthday.

But of course, Stan wasn't done yet. For Marvel some of their greatest achievements were still ahead. Stan's liberal world-view wasn't yet fully communicated to his readers, and it was the next three years that would have a profound effect on me and shape my life, both in my own world-view and my professional ambitions. But that's a subject for another time.

Next: More Marvel Bullpen Bulletins ...

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