Chuyển đến nội dung chính

Bài đăng

Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn Man from UNCLE

Bullpen Bulletins and the Merry Marvel Marching Society

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...
Đăng nhận xét
Đọc thêm

Marvel Comics: Second-Hand Memories

BACK IN THE MID-1960s , when I first became interested in reading as many Marvel Comics as I could lay my hands on, there wasn't the perfect distribution network today's comic fans enjoy. I was reliant on the spotty delivery of American comics to the many independent newsagents in my local area and what I could salvage from the piles of second-hand comics in the various unlikely shops I'd stumble across. Once I realised that there were shops that would sell second-hand comics, I began to explore the area in earnest, ranging far and wide on my bicycle, stashing my new-found treasures in the saddlebag I'd acquired especially for that purpose. In general, these second-hand shops charged 6d (that's 2.5p in today's money - though adjusting for inflation it's actually about 30p). My pocket money was 2/6, so I could afford to buy five comics for that. Or three if I was buying them new from a newsagent. Caution was often called for. Of course, I didn't spend all...
Đăng nhận xét
Đọc thêm





Bài đăng phổ biến từ blog này

Marvel's First Mystical Hero - Dr Droom

THIS TIME, I've asked my old friend and former 2000AD colleague Kid Robson to contribute a guest entry for this blog. We both share a love of early Marvels, especially those written by Stan Lee, and as The Kid had mentioned Droom in one of his earlier comments on this blog, it seemed natural to ask him to offer a few words about Dr Droom and his spiritual successor Dr Strange. Thank you, Kid ... "Twas Steve's idea..." said Stan Lee about Dr. Strange in a letter to Jerry Bails in 1963. However, it's interesting to ponder just what gave Steve the idea to do a strip about a 'Master of Black Magic' (later changed to 'Mystic Arts') in the first place. The origin of Dr Strange wasn't revealed until the character's fourth appearance, in Strange Tales 115 (Jul 1963) - he hadn't appeared in Strange Tales 112 and 113 . It has been speculated that this episode was drawn much later in the series run - perhaps the ninth story, as it's markedly...
Đăng nhận xét
Đọc thêm

Captain America: Live Action Star of the Small Screen

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...
Đăng nhận xét
Đọc thêm

Astonish: The Rise of Giant-Man

I HAVE A SPECIAL affection of the Marvel character Giant-Man, not least because he was the first ever Marvel character I came across in the winter of 1963/4. I was still in primary school and we'd been dragged off one cold morning to play football in Charlton Park, some distance from my school. I was never a fan of football, so I was more interested in a colourful American comic one of the kids had. The front cover showed a guy in a red costume trying to catch another green spinning guy, appropriately called the Human Top. The first Marvel Comic I ever saw back in the 1960s. Kirby's bird's-eye view of the action meant it wasn't immediately apparent to me that the guy in the red costume was a giant, but I figured it out once I opened the book. I leafed through the comic, noted that the red guy was called Giant-Man and could grow in size to about ten-foot tall, then handed the comic back. I pretty much immediately went back to my then-preferred DC comics - Flash , Green L...
Đăng nhận xét
Đọc thêm