WITH STAN LEE taking a much more active hand in Marvel's anthology titles during 1964, following his first revamp of Strange Tales , Journey into Mystery , Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense in the last couple months of 1963, it became apparent as 1964 wore on that Stan wasn't quite happy with the B-team titles quite yet. Starting with Strange Tales , he would further evolve those mags with more radical changes, the first of which was introducing the "split-cover" idea . Doctor Strange had been appearing in Strange Tales beginning with a couple of appearances in issues 110 & 111, then returning as a permanent back-up in 114 (Nov 1963), the first to see Stan scripting the main Human Torch feature. But the magician was nowhere to be seen on the following Strange Tales covers - aside from a cameo on issue 118 - until June 1964's Strange Tales 121 . Strange Tales 121 sported Marvel's first regular "split cover" format - the idea wouldn...
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...