They were Woodstock and the second Isle of Wight Festival. Needless to say, both have gone down in the annals of legend.
And they're not the only musical things from that month to have done so, because the Abbey Road zebra crossing began its journey to greatness right then as well, thanks to the Beatles having their photograph taken on it, with the camera of Iain Macmillan.
Things, however, were were not so rosy for the the coin known as the halfpenny, which ceased to be legal tender that month, as the nation hurtled towards decimalisation.
It was madness. At this rate, even the mighty shilling would be scrapped. And, without the shilling, how were we ever going to pay for our comics?
Barry Smith bows out as Avengers artist - for now - as Ultron gives the team a good hiding then formulates his plot to kill the scientist who created the Adamantium from which he's currently constructed.
I believe this is officially Sal Buscema's first ever Avengers cover, although I suspect he may have had some involvement in brother John's cover for the previous issue.
Unless I miss my guess, Captain America and the Red Skull have swapped bodies, leading Cap to call on the Avengers for help.
Needless to say, they take one look at him, in the Red Skull's body and decide to beat the living daylights out of him.
For some reason, it didn't occur to him to take off his Red Skull mask before knocking on the front door.
I didn't only have a copy of this tale in The Mighty World of Marvel. I also had an Alan Class comic that reprinted it.
I do believe Mr Fear is back and causing our hero all kinds of problems.
I also think the phobic fiend has a flying disc similar in style to those used by the Trapster and Wizard. I'm not sure where he got that from.
Speaking of problems, the FF's new house causes nothing but trouble, as it turns out it's not a house at all. It's a machine for turning everyone in the world blind, so the Mole Man can invade it.
Even robbed of their sight, the FF prove too much for the subterranean schemer.
It's that tale which showed up in Origins of Marvel Comics. Lady Dorma rescues Bruce Banner from drowning and it all leads to a misunderstanding that can only be resolved by Subby and the Hulk bashing each other in the face.
Iron Man and the Unicorn team up to give the Red Ghost the punch in the gob, he so deserves.
I do believe the Ghost has a brand new army of super-apes who turn out to be too good for him. That does pose the question of whatever happened to the originals.
Maybe they were too good for him, as well.
The saga of the mysterious tablet finally comes to an end with the death of Silvermane.
And, of course, it all leads to the return of the Lizard.
I'm really not too sure what happens in this one.
Is it the story in which Don Blake needs to perform surgery on Sif but then has to run off to fight Loki, halfway through the operation, causing the other surgeons to think him a little irresponsible?
Then again, the last I heard, Don Blake was just a bog-standard GP. How on Earth is he allowed to do major surgery?
The X-Men are up against the Sentinels again.
I do believe this is the one in which the robots end up flying into the sun.
Posts
30 comments:
Don't worry Steve - once the Brits are free of the tyrants of Brussels surely the repeal of decimalisation will be next (I read recently that the new Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg has already made a start on reversing metrication).
Mind you, I can't see the price of imported US comics going back to a shilling. But with an extra 140p in every pound we'll have more money to spend on them!
Don't know about most of these covers - compared to the rest of '69 so far it seems like a bit of an off month.
-sean
I either had a few of these issues, or read them later in reprint books. What an incredible batch of villains, many of my personal favorites! No "Masked Marauder" in that group.
If I remember correctly, Mr. Fear (in any interaction) wasn't exactly a complete "comics-science" genius. Maybe we could blame his anti-grav discs on the Tinkerer, or the Wizard was in need of some extra dough.
Any Hulk vs Namor issue is a good issue, but that one was amazing. Sub's had his wholesale anger-management issue on overdrive in that one.
When Silvermane got younger, then turned into a baby and became non-existent, I actually felt a little nausea. That, and the Lizard returning, made for over-the-top fun.
By the way, thanks for the B-Day wishes, oh my brothers. Made my day. You guys rule on celestial levels.
For me, Caesar "Big C" Cicero is this month's big star.
There's a great panel on page 5 of ASM #75 where he shouts "No! It cannot be! It is madness!"
And then on page 15 there's a panel where he shouts "No! No! It cannot be! It is impossible! It is madness!"
Unfortunately for those of us that like comical attorneys with great catchphrases, he doesn't appear again until 1995.
1969. A incredible time, and I still remember it well. Even though I was born in 1962, my memory through the 60's are relatively sharp.
When I was working at a music warehouse, the young "hipsters" would ask me if I was at Woodstock or Vietnam.
Hipster, toe-to-nose tattooed, 20 pounds of metal on his face, with really nasty dreadlocks, asks, "Hey man, were you at Woodstock?"
I looked over and said, " I was only 6 or 7 when that happened."
Hipster said, "Well, I thought maybe your parents were hippies and took you over there".
I told the hipster, " Not everybody was a hippy in the 60's. My parents were hillbillies, and my dad was a cop".
When my nephew was little, he asked me if I was in Vietnam.
I said "Yeah, I was in the Diaper Brigade."
He's now six-feet five, covered in tattoos and looks like the Kurgan from the movie Highlander, so his days of taking any crap off me (or anybody, probably) are effectively over.
On another note, I think if we've learned anything from today's post here at SDC, it's that if you buy a house, make sure the seller isn't the Mole Man. He's not an accredited real estate dealer. Reed Richards is pretty smart but he does do some stupid $#!t sometimes.
A portal to the Negative Zone in your own home? C'mon, man.
Oh hey, if you guys want a good larf, check out the website Funny or Die. Somebody there has envisioned a production of Cats where all the parts are played by Nick Offerman.
The mind reels.
M.P.
I've certainly read most of these though not in the alphabetical order they are posted above. (Thanks for doing that Steve!)
Ahh... the good ole days when when the heroes stilled seemed to have their original "weaker" powers e.g., the FF fighting the Mole Man! What's not to love about this time frame?
Steve - thanks for posting!
Sean, Charlie is grateful you took the time to regard the Tete a Claq. One of Mr. and Mrs.s Charlie's favs is "The Body Toner." The link is below.
Charlie doesn't have the familiarity with UK mass-marketing culture to know if you would find this funny, but the Canucks just nail the US marketing culture in these masterful productions.
Charlie thinks they are targeting their marketing culture, under the assumption it is fairly similar to the US's since 90% of Canadians live along the US border and take their spring breaks in the southern USA. Further, with their Quebecois accent it's just a hoot!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdKjpvnrhkU&t=163s
It was a strong crop of comics this month fifty years ago.
I know some of these from reprints (thank goodness for all the reprints Marvel used to pump out. They were cheap!)
I like Barry Smith's early stuff. It was rough and goofy, and clearly he hadn't found his own style yet and was aping Kirby, but it had this wacky charm.
And John Romita Sr. is my favorite Spider-Man artist. Just a pleasure to look at his stuff. Smooth and clean.
M.P.
Dudes - Charlie is struggling tonight! Charlie decided to watch a little soccer on the tele, but it was pretty lackluster so Charlie started channel surfing. Charlie is now obsessively switching between COMET which is showing Thunderbirds 6 and BBC America showing Goldfinger.
Son of a gun... both are equally compelling! And I am both British creations?
Charlie noticed the same name of "Odd Job" between Goldfinger's Asian assistant who throws a top hat that cuts through concrete and Don Rickle's name in Kelly's Heroes.
So many coincidences tonight. Must be a full moon.
Charlie, Don Rickle's character in Kelly's Heroes was called "Crapgame."
You're thinking of Donald Sutherland's character, "Oddball."
When I was in the army, my nickname was "Tweety," because I was kinda scrawny and I had this yellow T-shirt I used to wear around the barracks.
My platoon sargeant's nickname for me was "dumb @#!%*#$%@&?!#!" which I took as his peculiar way of expressing affection towards me.
Charlie, you gotta cut out this business of referring to yourself in the third person. People are gonna notice.
You're gonna end up in a puzzle factory if you keep that up.
M.P.
Sean, I'm already measuring everything out in bushels and paying for things with groats, ready for when Rees-Mogg becomes Prime Minister.
Charlie, both Thunderbirds and James Bond are indeed British creations - although the Bond movies have American producers. Speaking of coincidences, the special effects on Thunderbirds were done by Derek Meddings who also did the effects for a bunch of James Bond movies.
MP, I do like Barry Smith's early work. The draughtsmanship can be a bit dodgy but, right from the start, you can see the design and story-telling skills.
Dangermash, I'm glad to hear that Caesar Cicero was still going strong into the 1990s.
KD, you're welcome.
Steve, the decimal halfpenny continued until 1984 - perhaps you mean the Imperial halfpenny was abolished in 1969? I've got an Imperial halfpenny from 1967.
So much to discuss here!
Read most of these comics as back issues years after the fact. Only one I bought on the stands was Spider-Man. Like KD, I found Silvermane's "EC" style fate rather unsettling. Maybe hit too close to home, as I was only about 8 at the time (and a scrawny 8, at that). Oh, and Dangermash- really? Cesar Cicero made a reappearance in the 90's? Who'da thunk it...
To all you fine UK folk- afraid I've always found your monetary system incomprehensible. As a child, someone gave to me a bag of 'foriegn coins', which included one of those half pennies. With only our US dollar and it's related cent to work from, the whole shilling- halfpenny-pound thing was a mystery. Would a halfpenny buy you much? Half a cent here wouldn't even be worth the metal needed to coin it.
And as MP spoke of nicknames, mine as a child was "the professor". Not meant flatteringly, by the way...
Even though it seemed Mole Man fought out of his element, he did have danger-potential and I usually found stories featuring him entertaining. The guy was a handy fighter, possessed advanced scientific weaponry, hordes of creatures, and a limitless army of subterraneans. If he decided to use that gargantuan green monster of his more often he would be quite the force.
I'd bet that huge beast could kick Godzilla's butt.
Redartz, whats incomprehensible? A halfpenny was worth half a penny - thats self-explanatory, right? It would buy you twice what a quarter of a penny - a farthing - would (mind you, they stopped being legal tender in 1961 so none of us remember them).
The amusing thing about old money was that pounds, shillings and pennies abbreviated to lsd (except in Ireland, because we had enough sense to use p instead of d for pennies).
John Romita might have been right for Spidey - I'm not about to disagree with my old pal dumb@#!%*#$@£?!#! - but that Thor cover is pretty iffy.
-sean
Don Blake always seemed more than a general practitioner to me, Steve. In Thor's early adventures he was either involved with complicated operations or introducing some kind of miraculous medical equipment.
As far as his finesse in the operating room, I always believed he was at least equal to pre-accident Dr. Strange.
Come to think of it, KD, I think I remember Don Blake building a fully-working android in one of the early stories. Just where did he study medicine?
Red, Britain's monetary system before the 1970s was total madness. How anyone ever managed to buy anything is beyond me. I'm not sure if anything could be bought with half a penny but, when inflation demanded it, it meant goods could be increased in price by half a penny, rather than a full penny. You wouldn't want your Penny Chews going up by a full penny. That would be 100% inflation.
Colin, it was indeed the old half penny that was scrapped in 1969.
Steve, I often wondered what Marvel scientist-types studied, not just Don Blake.
Like, Reed Richards invented a rocket to go to the moon but he also looked for a cure for the Thing. What would a rocket engineer/space scientist know about bodily mutation? Wouldn't Ben have been better off with an exo-biologist?
Hank Pym invented Ultron and a helmet that communicated with ants. Ok, you could say both came out of his expertise in cybernetics - if you didn't actually know anything about cybernetics! - but what about the size changing pills?
How could he also be a molecular biologist, let alone enough of one to make a major breakthrough in the field?
-sean
Steve-
I too remember that android story, as well as some other devices that Blake invented. I wondered how he did it also, but there you are. Comic book science.
In the early days it seemed he had to turn into Blake to utilize his medical knowledge. Roughly around up to the Avengers story with the human bombs that took out the Vision, where he and Stark acknowledged knowing each other's identities.
I do seem to recall Thor did some first-aid or CPR in later stories.
In "The Death of Captain Marvel", if I correctly recall, Thor was in a scene with Richards, Pym, Strange, and Hank McCoy trying to cure Mar-Vell's cancer.
The Hulk was there. I still don't know why Strange didn't turn him into Banner. The leading authority in radiation might have came in handy.
Ok... the Brits had their funky money system and we have our stupidly-funky measuring systems. That's obviously how we got to where we are today with Bo Jo and Bonespur running the Anglo-Saxon world... we took our mind off the prize 'cause we were too busy trying to count.
M.P. - with all the talk of medicine and doctors Charlie is really (seriously) curious what it felt like being electrocuted? Was the pain intense? What do doctors do for electrocution?
KD - Charlie is glad you are still typing away! At least the saw blade didn't muck up your literary skills! We are grateful for that!
Sean - Charlie thinks you are over-thinking the whole knowledge-transfer thing in comics.
Speaking of the Cosmic Cube, Charlie just saw a photo where The Cat drops the cube during a fight scene, Charlie thinks while high up in the air between sky scrapers, and says, "Oh well, no use crying over spilled milk." While Charlie appreciated the whole cat-milk connection, how could she not realize the implications of someone like the Red Skull possibly finding the thing???
I reckon you're overthinking the Cosmic Cube Charlie. Not to mention overusing the third person in place of the first...
-sean
It hurt bad, Charlie, but it was brief. Maybe a couple seconds.
I'm just grateful I didn't befoul my trousers.
If it occurs again, however, I make no promises in this regard.
Then, you're kinda loopy for a while. You gotta walk it off.
Thank God I suffered no lasting effects, and remain a paragon of mental stability.
...And if that last assertion doesn't provoke a bewildered retort from my friend Sean, I don't know what will.
M.P.
M.P. - Charlie has always thought of you as a very stable genius, to say the least. In fact, Charlie suspects that if you had the Cosmic Cube in your mitts you'd make short order of all your enemies including electricity.
Steve and Sean- thanks for the lessons in British economics! And Charlie makes an apt point about our measuring system. Why our currency is decimal and not the yardstick, I'll never know. At any rate, MP's electricity would be measured here in nice decimal Milliamps...
Well, that's some consolation, I guess.
M.P.
Sean - Charlie speaks in the first person at Back in the Bronze Age on Tuesdays! Here, since you guys are from the UK and have royalty and can use the royal we, Charlie figured to use the royal Charlie.
Always thought that Captain America #116 had an amazing cover. It was non-distributed or scarce in the UK and Ireland and this added to its mystique, at least to me.This was part of a sequence of issues that featured an incredible array of artists that I do not think was topped at any point in the Silver Age of comics:Cap #112 Kirby, #113 Steranko, #114 Romita, #115 John Buscema and #116 Colan! Can anyone think of 5 consecutive issues of any title that had such an 'A 'list line-up!
That certainly is a sequence of outstanding artists, Fantastic Four Follower. I can't think of anything comparable from any other book.
Charlie concurs with FFfollower... An absolute -blow-your-mind artistic lineup on Cap in that brief period.
One has to wonder why the A+ team was focused on Cap covers, particularly Steranko? Was Marvel trying to rescue Cap? Did Marvel see it as their flaghsip title since it originated in WW 2?
I... I... I... Charlie just can't do it!
Post a Comment