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. ...
BACK IN THE LAST CENTURY I earned my living in the magazine business ... and the prevailing wisdom at the time was that you didn't ever - under any circumstances - mess with the magazine's logo. In fact, any kind of change to the magazine's masthead was frowned upon, and even re-branding exercises were viewed with much suspicion. In the last entry in this blog, I looked at the many times that Marvel Comics changed their magazine's logos during the 1960s ... it all seemed so much easier then. But even less acceptable was the idea that you could transform the comic's logo for just one issue for, oh I don't know ... Dramatic Effect. From a marketing perspective, that's an even bigger risk than changing the logo as part of the natural evolution of a magazine's masthead Strangely, though this blog focusses on Marvel Comics, and I've always maintained Stan Lee was far more willing to experiment with different approaches to comics and storytelling than his...