WAY BACK IN THE EARLY 1960s , my first exposure to actors dressed up as comic characters was in the movie serials I saw at Saturday Morning Pictures. I've mentioned here already that for a 10-year-old comics fan in the Sixties, there wasn't a great deal of choice when it came to superhero movies or tv shows . But we were able to see b-movie actors playing a couple of our favourite comic characters in serials like Captain Marvel (1940) and Batman (1943), and fake comic characters like Copperhead in The Mysterious Dr Satan (1941) and Rocket Man in King of the Rocket Men (1949). King of the Rocket Men is a perennial favourite and the flying suit turned up in further Republic serials during the tail end of the serial cycle - Radar Men from the Moon (1952), Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952) and Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe (1953). Movie serials were mostly made by the b-movie divisions of the smaller, cheaper film studios, like Universal, Columbia and Republic...
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...