IT'S PROBABLY hard for younger fans to understand just how slim the pickings were for those of us who followed comic book superheroes back in the 1960s. As early as 1966, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman had licensed the rights to his Marvel characters to television. The Marvel Superheroes cartoon show was made in colour, though no one had colour televisions back in 1966. And, yes, we really did sit that close to the tv set back then. The screens were so small you couldn't see anything unless you were no more than three feet away. Pretty sure all those cathode rays fried my brain ... Even Goodman didn't realise what he had, and seemed content to let the producers of the Marvel Superheroes cartoon show do pretty much what they wanted in return for almost no money. The big return would come, reasoned Marty, when the cartoons propelled the sales of his comic books into the stratosphere, just the way the Batman tv show had done for DC's Batman and Detective Comics . But...
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...