BACK WHEN I first started reading Marvel Comics, in the mid-1960s, I was aware of The Hulk as a co-star in the Tales to Astonish series. To be honest, I liked the Giant-Man stories a bit better, but as I became more familiar with the Marvel titles, I began to pick up hints that The Hulk had enjoyed a life before Tales to Astonish . I found tantalising references to the nature of these earlier Hulk adventures when the stories started showing up in the reprint books Marvel were putting out in the mid-1960s. The Marvel Tales Annual for 1965 had a reprint of the Ringmaster segment from The Incredible Hulk 3 (Sep 1962). I knew that because Stan had thoughtfully added a caption at the foot of the first page that told me so. The cancelled Incredible Hulk series was reprinted in Marvel Collectors' Item Classics during the 1960s ... this was the first time I became aware of these comics. I can't now recall when I did finally manage to find an issue from the original run of The Incr...
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...