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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...
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From "Dear Editor" to "Face front, fearless ones"

BACK IN THE MID-1960s , when I first started reading comics, like other kids I was mostly interested in the stories. I'd always had a fascination with Science Fiction since my Mum had taken me to the cinema to see a re-release of Forbidden Planet (1956) when I was about six or so. The movie kept me up all night for weeks afterwards with  nightmares about glowing disembodied eyes that roved the landscape at night destroying esoteric buildings like lighthouses. I'm sure Freudians could have a field day with that one ... but then I was only six years old. To my six year old way of thinking, the Monster from the ID was the ultimate in horror, though to most people today, I suppose it just looks like a large Disney cartoon dog, which is pretty much what it is. The other reason that same movie also caught my attention was because of Anne Francis as Altaira. I guess we don't need any Freudians to explain why that might have been ... Anne Francis was certainly a lot prettier than ...
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I said, Don't Mess with the logo!

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...
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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...
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Messing with the Logo - A 2000AD Interlude

A COUPLE OF HUNDRED YEARS AGO, I was paid to interfere with the work of others, as member of the editorial team on 2000AD, a British weekly comic that featured mainly science-fiction oriented action stories. Later, I was briefly the Editor, a post I never sought but was rather thrust upon me - though that's a story for another time. The Galaxy's Greatest Comic has had a long tradition of both evolving and messing with the logo, much of it on my watch, but also stretching back to the dawn of time when 2000AD first began. The original dummy for the comic had the logo rendered as "AD2000", although there's no evidence to suggest that this was intended to be its final title. Dummies were produced as a matter of course for any new magazine back then as a way of demonstrating to interested parties - management, marketers, distributors - what the  final product might look like. In the US comics industry, they called them "ashcans". The final render of the log...
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