WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN THE 1960s , my pre-teen years were almost entirely consumed by comics. In the first half of that magical decade, while so much around me was changing, all I could see was the DC comics of Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz, along with the Beatles and certain favoured tv shows like My Favorite Martian , The Munsters and Space Patrol . As an eight year old, this was the sort of thing that held my rapt attention - DC comics and Ray Walston as My Favourite Martian. Life was much simpler then. In the second half of the Sixties, I'd discover Stan Lee's Marvel Comics, The Monkees and Steed and Mrs Peel in The Avengers . While it was a great time to be growing up, there were also plenty of disadvantages to being a kid. Chief among these was the prevailing attitude that comics were stupid. Once I got to about ten, I discovered Marvel Comics, the Monkees and, a little later, Emma Peel. For a lad at a tough South London primary school, it didn't pay to be d...
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...