DURING THE 1950s , Marty Goodman's Marvel Comics were published under the Atlas trademark, though this was in reality the name of Goodman's own distribution company. During this time, he also put out a wide range of detective, movie and men's magazines, and considered the comics as no more than a mildly lucrative sideline, leaving most of the day-to-day decisions to his nephew-by-marriage and editor, Stan Lee. It's fairly well-documented that Goodman was never a creative thinker, and mostly ordered Stan Lee to follow whatever trend seemed to be the most popular at the time. With the waning of the wartime superhero craze, Goodman wound down publication of his costumed characters, and began to look for other subjects for his line of comic books. When his former employees Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had a massive success with Young Romance in 1947, Goodman instructed Stan Lee to come up with some romance books and was soon publishing My Romance . The first issue of Joe Simo...
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...