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...
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...