FOR ME AND THOUSANDS OF OTHER KIDS , Saturday morning pictures at the local ABC or Odeon was the highlight of the week. And the most anticipated items on the programme were the serial chapters. Every week, a few hundred of us would gather in the darkness to cheer the heroes and boo the villains as the decades-old adventures unspooled onscreen. A couple of years before the dreaded Batman tv show, I'd heard that there would be a Batman film shown at my local ABC Minors and rushed to be first in the queue. This being 1964 and me being a fairly undiscerning 10 year old, I thought the weekly screen adventures of Batman, starring Lewis Wilson, were just brilliant. A lineup of the top comic characters of the 1940s who successfully transitioned in the serials - Captain Marvel, Batman, Spy Smasher, Captain America and Superman. Click image to enlarge. At the time, I had no concept that movie serials were shown at every cinema during the 1930s and 1940s, far less that they regularly featur...
AS THE DAYS of Marty Goodman's Atlas Comics drew to a close in the late 1950s, the publisher was casting around for the Next Big Thing. Locked in to a draconian distribution contract with arch rivals DC Comics, Goodman was limited to a tight eight titles per month and if he needed to launch a new title, he was forced to cancel an existing one. So, feeling that mystery and science fiction was the coming trend Goodman decided to launch three new comics to complement the existing Journey into Mystery, World of Fantasy and Strange Tales titles. The new books were Strange Worlds , beginning in December 1958 and replacing the cancelled Navy Combat , and Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish , both debuting in January 1959, replacing the cancelled Homer the Happy Ghost and Miss America . Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales had been around since the twilight of the Golden Age and changed in content according to Martin Goodman's take on his customers' tastes. So they bega...