THE EARLY YEARS OF THOR , like the earliest Hulk stories, were a succession of false starts and reinventions. After the first run of Kirby issues, Stan tried to bring in more mythic elements with the help of his brother Larry Lieber on scripting and veteran Atlas penciller Joe Sinnott on art chores. But he wasn't happy with the way Journey into Mystery - and for that matter Strange Tales, Astonish and Suspense - were going and took the drastic step of taking over the writing of these titles himself, and then giving each a meaningful facelift. That this all happened in the same month means it wasn't a coincidence, but a plan. The July 1963 on-sale issues of the four anthology titles were the last written by Stan's hired gun scripters. Starting with the following month's issues, Stan transformed almost the entire Marvel line... This was what Marvel's assault on the newsstands looked like during the summer vacation period of 1963. Four major revamps, more Spider-Ma...
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...