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. ...
IT'S PROBABLY hard for younger fans to understand just how slim the pickings were for those of us who followed comic book superheroes back in the 1960s. As early as 1966, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman had licensed the rights to his Marvel characters to television. The Marvel Superheroes cartoon show was made in colour, though no one had colour televisions back in 1966. And, yes, we really did sit that close to the tv set back then. The screens were so small you couldn't see anything unless you were no more than three feet away. Pretty sure all those cathode rays fried my brain ... Even Goodman didn't realise what he had, and seemed content to let the producers of the Marvel Superheroes cartoon show do pretty much what they wanted in return for almost no money. The big return would come, reasoned Marty, when the cartoons propelled the sales of his comic books into the stratosphere, just the way the Batman tv show had done for DC's Batman and Detective Comics . But...