AROUND 1964 I discovered Marvel Comics and almost immediately abandoned the DC Superman , Green Lantern and Flash books I had been reading up till that point. In early 1965, I came across a copy of Tales of Suspense 64 (Apr 1965), which featured the wartime adventures of Captain America, a character who immediately became my all-time favourite superhero. Around the same time - probably the same month, given the cover dates - I found a copy of Avengers 15 (Apr 1965), which starred Captain America working with his fellow team members in a contemporary setting, looking not a day older. How was this possible? My ten-year-old brain was confused. Much later, when I'd back-filled my small collection of Marvel Comics a little, I was able to figure out what was going on. The revived and revised Human Torch appeared in the first issue of Fantastic Four . The Sub-Mariner made his Silver Age debut a few months later in FF4 . Martin Goodman also had Stan spin The Human Torch off into his o...
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...