TO SAY I WAS DEVASTATED when Steve Ditko left Amazing Spider-Man (and Marvel) back in mid-1966 wouldn't be overstating it by very much. But then I had just turned twelve, and that sort of thing was a pretty big event in my life at that time. Other stuff, like schoolwork and washing the back of my neck, not so much. I suppose the reason I engaged with the life of Peter Parker as depicted in Amazing Spider-Man comics was because there were more than a few similarities between us. I too was growing up in a single-"parent" household. I had family responsibilities in that I was expected to care for my younger brother and sister when my mum wasn't there. And though I can't say I was an unpopular kid at school, there was still a contingent of my classmates who were giving me a hard time because I was quite bookish and didn't play football at breaktime. When Steve Ditko left the strip he'd helped create, his departure was so sudden that he didn't even draw ...
BACK IN LATE 1965 , while my reading interests were firmly focussed on Stan Lee's burgeoning Marvel Comics line, there were other distractions for a typical eleven-year-old like myself. The prevailing cultural phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic was the spy craze, kickstarted primarily by the movie adaptations of Ian Fleming's James Bond books, which began in 1963 with Dr No . The first Bond movie I saw was Goldfinger , released in September 1964 in the UK. This movie introduced several concepts that would go on to be genre staples - the cool sports car with in-built ordnance, the laser death-ray and the exotic murder techniques, like death by hat and execution by paint. The iconic poster for Goldfinger . Inset: Bond discovers the body of Jill Masterson, while Oddjob prepares for some millinery mayhem. It really didn't matter that these plot devices were absurd, because when you're 11, you don't care about stuff like that. It turns out that covering someone in...