IRON MAN'S GOLDEN ARMOURED RUN ENDED with the November 1963 issue of Tales of Suspense . Stan Lee had realised that his grand superhero adventure of the early Silver Age was in danger of foundering. He'd started drafting in some old Atlas alumni to (re)build to same sort of operation he'd presided over during the Atlas years. But the stories, by former Atlas and Charlton staff writer Ernie Hart and Atlas and DC scripter Robert Bernstein, seemed flat and lifeless compared to Stan's own writing efforts and they had to go. Tales of Suspense 47 was the final outing for Iron Man's golden armour, a design pretty clunky even by 1963's standards. Even while Don Heck was trying to make the armour lighter and more manoeuvrable in the interior art, Kirby continued to draw the same clumsy tank-like armour on all the covers. Small wonder Lee brought in Ditko for the makeover (and mentioned it on the cover). In taking over the writing of the Marvel b-titles, Stan also broug...
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...