THE EARLY 1960S WAS A WEIRD TIME for kids. The effects of the Second World War were all around us. Rationing had only ended a few years earlier, and life wasn't easy growing up in a single-parent family on a south-east London council estate. That said, Woolwich was a great playground, and I had plenty of other kids to play with. Our games were inspired by what we saw on television and at our beloved Saturday Morning Pictures. Chief among our pastimes were playing war, and cowboys and indians (we didn't call them "native Americans" back then). Marvel Comics got into Westerns as the post-war superhero crash began to take hold. Stan Lee's characters, Two-Gun Kid, Kid Colt and the later Rawhide Kid would go on to be the longest running comic book cowboys of all. That said, I was never much of a fan of the screen cowboys. A uniquely American institution (I can't think of a single British-made cowboy tv show or movie - Carry on Cowboy doesn't count!) the weste...
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...