WHEN I WAS TEN , back in 1965, girls were just pests. They didn't like playing football or war. They didn't climb trees, or draw on walls or commit other acts of senseless vandalism. They were, well ... kind of annoying. Certainly that's what the DC comics editors seemed to think as well. Just about every DC female supporting character was simply a thorn in the side of their respective superhero. Queen of the bunch was Lois Lane - though Lana Lang gave her some competition. I think what I liked least about Lois Lane that she was often depicted as, at best, selfish and, at worst, downright spiteful. Really ... this isn't the kind of behaviour I'd expect from a grown woman. Lois clearly doesn't care about anyone - not Superman, not Lana - except herself. What a completely ghastly human being. No wonder us ten-year-olds didn't like girls much. In other parts of the DC universe, other supporting females seemed every bit as snoopy and as suspicious as Lois. Even...
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...