BACK WHEN I was a kid, very few television or movie producers would have dreamed of looking to comic books for source material. Certainly, the old poverty row studios, poor in ideas and budgets, might have occasionally turned to comic book and comic strip characters, but that was about it. For obvious reasons, comic strip characters made it onto the screen first. Original comic book characters didn't really kick off in a big way until Superman showed just how viable heroes created specifically for comic books could be. The earliest live-action comic strip movie I have is Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). I know Tarzan wasn't originally a comic strip character, but I'd argue that the success of the Hal Foster daily comic strip running in hundreds of newspapers in the USA from January 1929 was almost certainly what caught the attention of the the great MGM Studios. Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) was a major movie from a Hollywood's biggest and most successful studio MGM. Olympic ...
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...