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 l...
BY THE BEGINNING OF 1968 , I was a confirmed Marvelite. I devoured every word Stan Lee wrote and had only contempt for the offerings of DC Comics, especially given the bad taste the Batman TV show had left. But as I approached my fourteenth birthday, some NEW comics appeared in the newsagents that caught my attention. And incredibly, they were DCs. As noted in an earlier blog entry, I had been a big fan of Steve Ditko's version of Spider-Man and had been hugely disappointed when he left the title and Marvel. At the time, I wasn't aware of his work at Charlton Comics on Captain Atom , though I do remember seeing reprints of some of those stories in Alan Class' British black and white reprint comics. So when I came across a copy of Showcase 73 (Apr 1968) in a local newsagent, with the instantly recognisable Ditko cover, I plonked down my shilling without a moment's hesitation. The first appearance of The Creeper in Showcase 73 (Apr 1968) marked the return of Steve Dit...