BACK IN 1981 I SOLD ALL MY MARVELS. It was for a good reason, though I won't go into that here. But I cannily felt that surely the worth of all this fading newsprint couldn't possibly go any higher and I divested my holdings. My entire comics collection - I had just about every Marvel from 1959, apart from Fantastic Four 1 - was put under the figurative hammer for whatever I could get for it. For my Amazing Fantasy 15 I got £75. It's an interesting story how I acquired that comic. This is all I have left of my original Marvel Comics collection - a few blurry pictures taken while I was trying to figure out how to use a new camera I had. The Hulk 1 was especially tatty, as I'd picked it up in a second hand shop about twelve years earlier. Back in 1971, I'd been fortunate enough to go on a school trip to the United States. While on a homestay in Connecticut, I chanced across a small store with a single comics spinner rack. All they had was about ten copies of Conan...
BY THE BEGINNING OF 1968 , I was a confirmed Marvelite. I devoured every word Stan Lee wrote and had only contempt for the offerings of DC Comics, especially given the bad taste the Batman TV show had left. But as I approached my fourteenth birthday, some NEW comics appeared in the newsagents that caught my attention. And incredibly, they were DCs. As noted in an earlier blog entry, I had been a big fan of Steve Ditko's version of Spider-Man and had been hugely disappointed when he left the title and Marvel. At the time, I wasn't aware of his work at Charlton Comics on Captain Atom , though I do remember seeing reprints of some of those stories in Alan Class' British black and white reprint comics. So when I came across a copy of Showcase 73 (Apr 1968) in a local newsagent, with the instantly recognisable Ditko cover, I plonked down my shilling without a moment's hesitation. The first appearance of The Creeper in Showcase 73 (Apr 1968) marked the return of Steve Dit...