THE VERY FIRST DAREDEVIL comic I ever saw - around Easter 1965 - was Daredevil 5 (Dec 1964), with its striking Wally Wood cover and interior art. It was also Wood's first work on the title, and for Marvel, taking over from his old EC colleague and occasional inker Joe Orlando. Daredevil 5 was Wally Wood's first work for Marvel since the four stories he'd done for Atlas around the middle of 1956, shortly after the tragic collapse of EC Comics, and uncredited pencil job under Colletta inks for Love Romances 96 (Nov 1961), coincidently the same month that Fantastic Four 1 came out. At the time I was mesmerised by the idea of a blind superhero and - not knowing Wally Wood from Adam - Stan's cover blurb trumpeting the arrival of "the brilliant artistic craftsmanship of famous illustrator Wally Wood" completely passed me by. This may not have been the first time Stan puffed up an artist on the cover of one of his mags, but he'd never done it with this much hy...
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...