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Thursday, 2 February 2017

February 2nd, 1977 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

I can find no evidence at all that anything remotely interesting happened anywhere in the world in the first week of February, 1977. I shall therefore plunge straight into the Time Stream and see if our favourite comic company was giving us enough thrills to compensate for such real-life eventlessness.

Super Spider-Man and the Titans #208, Sandman

I believe the Avengers story in this issue is the one in which I first encountered the Space Phantom.

Sadly, I got somewhat confused when reading it as a youth and mixed him up with the Space Parasite from the pages of The Incredible Hulk. I therefore was completely baffled by the dramatic change in his appearance, backstory and powers.

Is this Spider-Man tale one of those stories where the Sandman talks like he's just swallowed a thesaurus or is it one of those where he sounds like he wouldn't even know what a thesaurus was if you hit him over the cranial orbis with it?

Were the strange fluctuations in the size of his intellect and vocabulary ever explained?

Mighty World of Marvel #227, Hulk vs Abomination

"Captain Marvel -- More powerful than ever before!"

Does that mean this is the issue in which he gains his Cosmic Awareness?

I still, to this day, don't have a clue what Cosmic Awareness is but I suspect it's something you could only get in the 1970s.

Marvel UK, Planet of the Apes #120

Marvel's adaptation of Battle enters its eighty-nine millionth consecutive week. At this rate, this one battle is going to outlast the Hundred Years' War.

They'd better get a move on. There are only three issues to go before the comic's cancelled.

Marvel UK, Captain Britain #17, Captain America

I am saying absolutely nothing....

8 comments:

  1. Anonymous3 February 2017 at 03:00

    We live on a planet orbiting a star which is one of at least 100 billion stars in a spiral galaxy called the Milky Way. The nearest galaxy to us is 2.3 million light years away in the constellation of Andromeda. The Andromeda galaxy is twice as big as the Milky Way and both galaxies are part of the "local group". There may be 400 billion galaxies in the observable universe. That is Cosmic Awareness :D This week's Captain Britain is apparently the issue where all the colour pages were printed in the wrong order - I knew it was one of the weeks from early 1977 but recently my fellow commenter DW pinpointed the exact issue so thanks to him if he's reading this. Anyway, what a disaster that was - a classic Marvel UK cock-up ! And I see Marvel was taking liberties with the mutants in an ape film again as I don't recall the mutants in "Battle" having half-metal faces. But I'd stopped reading POTA by this point anyway.

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  2. Anonymous3 February 2017 at 04:26

    Cosmic awareness was basically Captain Marvel going blonde, easily missed in the transition to black and white, Steve.
    Btw, Capt. Marvel 29 was reprinted in POTA - later parts of Starlin's storyline ended up in MWOM.

    -sean

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  3. Steve W.3 February 2017 at 08:43

    Sean and Colin, thanks for the Cosmic Awareness information. I now feel confident that I can attain it as well.

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  4. Anonymous3 February 2017 at 09:33

    Whatever cosmic awareness is, the Sandman didn't seem to have any here.
    That lunk-head managed to knock Spider-man unconscious, and instead of just killing him, he straps him to a laboratory table and fires a freeze-ray at him, cackling like a mad man the whole while.
    Apparently he never saw Goldfinger. Spider-Man gets loose, of course, and turns the ray back on him, turning the Sandman into a moron popsicle.

    M.P.

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  5. pete doree3 February 2017 at 20:49

    Don't think they ever explained Sandman's fluctuating speech patterns, but there was definitely an issue of DD where Electro kept jumping backwards and forwards between 'It will avail you naught' criminal mastermind verboseness and 'ya lousy crumb' Hawkeye style street talk.
    DD only won 'cos Electro ended the battle by going into a full-blown schizo nervous breakdown. so they did tackle that once. It was when DD was in Frisco.

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  6. Steve W.3 February 2017 at 21:44

    Thanks for the Sandman info, Pete.

    M.P, it always used to drive me up the wall when a villain would knock out a super-hero and would then always declare, "I could kill him now but that would be too easy." They just never ever learned.

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  7. pete doree3 February 2017 at 22:17

    Ultron's the classic. Somebody ( again, prob'ly Hawkeye ) should've said to him: 'Are you called Ultron 7 'cos we've kicked your arse SEVEN TIMES?!!! '

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  8. Anonymous3 February 2017 at 23:12

    That was a Top Tip in Viz once - "Villains of Gotham City, next time you're facing Batman just shoot him in the head".
    Bit obvious really, isn't it? You'd think someone like, say, Ra's al Ghul would have figured that out, what with being the leader of the league of assassins and all.

    But, you know, if you're going to question something as basic as that, you really have to ask yourself how come those geezers are running around in masks and underwear in the first place anyway, and how come they never get sectioned.

    -sean

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