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...
BACK IN THE LAST CENTURY I earned my living in the magazine business ... and the prevailing wisdom at the time was that you didn't ever - under any circumstances - mess with the magazine's logo. In fact, any kind of change to the magazine's masthead was frowned upon, and even re-branding exercises were viewed with much suspicion. In the last entry in this blog, I looked at the many times that Marvel Comics changed their magazine's logos during the 1960s ... it all seemed so much easier then. But even less acceptable was the idea that you could transform the comic's logo for just one issue for, oh I don't know ... Dramatic Effect. From a marketing perspective, that's an even bigger risk than changing the logo as part of the natural evolution of a magazine's masthead Strangely, though this blog focusses on Marvel Comics, and I've always maintained Stan Lee was far more willing to experiment with different approaches to comics and storytelling than his...