MY ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE MARVEL CHARACTER back in the mid-1960s was Captain America. I've already written several posts about Cap , so I probably don't need to go into that any further here ... but when he took over as leader of the team at the end of Avengers 16 (May 1965), you could say it was one of my best moments in comics. Stan set quite a challenge for himself. How to take Marvel's best-selling team book, and replace the A-list heroes Thor, Iron Man and Giant-Man with three B-list villains . It worked out much better than anyone expected ... It all kicks off while Cap is polishing off Baron Zemo in South America, his fellow Avengers are reflecting on what they'll do now that Zemo's minions are in custody. The Wasp suggests that now's as good a time as any to take a vacation ... right at that very moment, Iron Man's old foe, Hawkeye, invades the Avengers Mansion looking to apply for membership to the super-team. The timing is opportune (and not a little...
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...