AS I NOTED in last month's blog entry, at the age of 12 I hadn't been much enamoured of John Romita's version of Spider-Man. I had been a die-hard Steve Ditko fan and, when he unceremoniously ditched the creation that had made him famous, in 1966, I struggled to warm to the new, sleek, decidedly un-nerdy version of Peter Parker. The whys and wherefores have been adequately covered in other blogs - mine and other people's. My reaction to this changing of the guard was to turn my attention firmly backwards and seek out the invaluable Marvel Tales reprints of the earlier Spider-Man stories. At first, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Stan Lee had just aped the classic DC Comics reprints of earlier stories. The cover formats of the DC 80-pagers and the early Marvel Tales were visually quite similar. Both took either panels from the stories they were reprinting or generic images of the characters and put them together in a kind of patchwork quilt of a cover -...
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...