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 -...
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...