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Tuesday, 7 July 2020

The Marvel Lucky Bag - July 1970.

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.
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The very definition of the word, "frustration," is having been a member of the band Free in July 1970.

That's because their track All Right Now spent the entire month stuck at Number Two on the UK singles chart; behind Mungo Jerry's In the Summertime and then Elvis Presley's The Wonder of You. It does seem strange to see Elvis at Number One in 1970 but I suppose it's a reminder of his enduring appeal.

But he's not the only one with that trait because, just a couple of weeks ago, in 2020, Bob Dylan was top of the UK album chart and, wouldn't you know it, exactly 50 years ago, he managed the self-same feat, thanks to his LP Self-Portrait.

However, he was soon robbed of that pinnacle by Simon and Garfunkel whose Bridge Over Troubled Water quickly reclaimed the Number One slot he'd so rudely taken from them.


Speaking of rude, the evil Commander Kraken captures Lady Dorma and Diane Arliss and tries to use them as leverage to force Subby to join his band of not-so-merry pirates.

You do have to feel sorry for Diane Arliss. She seems to blunder from one watery crisis to another, which is quite an achievement for a land-living gal.

A spy has a great idea.

He decides to use shrinking pills, so he can spy on people more easily.

With a grim inevitability, he loses those pills and ends up permanently stuck at that size. I think I can guess which film Stan was watching before he wrote that one.

We also get a story called The Ghost Beast. Of it, I know little but do know it was written and pencilled by Wally Wood.

There's also a Tom Sutton helmed tale whose details I'm mostly ignorant of.

And we finish with a venture called The Scream From Beyond which has the privilege of being introduced to us by an, "Onscreen," Gene Colan.


As if Marvel wasn't giving us enough horror this month, we get the launch of yet another monster anthology.

In it, we get I Am The Brute That Walks. A weakling scientist develops a growth serum, so his girlfriend will like him better.

With another grim inevitability, the serum turns him into a giant monster.

I've no news on whether his girlfriend now likes him better.

Meanwhile, Kragoo shows us an alien, with the power to possess the bodies of others, visit Earth, on a mission of conquest.

Unfortunately, the space dolt takes possession of a statue and discovers he now can't move.

Finally, Fear in the Night tells of a human and a robot who crash-land on an alien world inhabited by a monster. Now, one of them must make the ultimate sacrifice.

Not having read the tale, I'm going to guess the tale's robot is the one who chooses to make the ultimate sacrifice, proving that he is the most human of us all.


We may be getting the debut issue of Where Creatures Roam, this month, but its near-namesake hits its fourth issue.

In Behind My Doors Waits... Medusa! A store owner has a statue he claims is a burglar, turned to stone by the dreaded Gorgon.

Is he telling the truth?

And just what lies behind that locked door of his?

In I Met the Thing on Midnight Island, a sailor finds a note written by a castaway but, when he gets there, finds only a monster. 

Finally, at the tale's conclusion, he discovers the monster was, in fact, the castaway.

In I Was Trapped in Nightmare Valley, evil trees plan to conquer the world but are destroyed by an erupting volcano.

And, in The Monster in My Cellar, a fiction writer inadvertently wills a deadly fiend into existence.

I'm pretty sure this one was reprinted in Star Wars Weekly, at some point.


I haven't read it but I'm convinced we're in for another 20 pages of sobbing, and learning valuable lessons, as love once more preys upon the sanity of attractive young women.


We don't get just a new monster mag, this month. We also get a new humorous one.

Admittedly, I'm assuming it's humorous, based purely on the cover. For all I know, it could contain a descent into madness from which Lovecraft himself would recoil.

Regardless, I must confess I've never heard of this comic before. I can say, however, that the stories within are reprinted from a book originally published in 1949.

10 comments:

  1. Caught By The Kraken sounds so painful.

    Oh and that Avengers cover on Sunday was the business. I don't care that it was the Man-Ape and that he was way out of his league. Everything is perfect about it.

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  2. Ahh nice memory blast there as Sub Mariner 27 was one of my very first US Marvels I still recall picking it up and thinking that Subby was such a strange character to have his own comic, then again that was what made Marvel so cool.

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  3. I have actually read "My Song And My Sorrow" from My Love #6 Steve, in one of the mid-70s reprint issues (don't ask why). Its from the sub-genre of vaguely counter-cultural romance stories Marvel did around this time, which are generally quite amusing (as Stan Lee's idea of 60s liberation seemed more Hugh Hefner than the Yippies).

    The cover is a bit misleading (imagine that!), but basically our attractive young heroine splits with her boyfriend because she wants to make it as a singer, and goes to New York to hit the scene. Because "that chicks got it" she becomes a success, but wonders if she made the right decision as she misses being in love.
    So she cops off (in a manner acceptable to the comics code) with some muso-type from her band. The end.
    Which was not quite the ending I expected, so well done Stan. Nice John Buscema artwork too. I've no idea about the rest of that issue though.

    -sean

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  4. Don't know about you chaps, but ole Charlie usually picked up 3 - 4 "monster" titles every year, even though they were reprints from 10 - 20 years earlier. Charlie found them to be a fun read and, not having read anything like that genre before, always got a "wow" out of them.

    Charlie never grooved to the contemporaneous stuff like Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummy or that Werewolf by Night.

    FWIW - The $1 "Marvel True Believer" series of reprints has the first appearance of Man-Wolf in Space! Kind of reminds me of Killraven in that action pose on the cover. (Killraven - not Killdumpster, lol.)

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  5. Charlie, I used to love those old monster reprint books too.

    Sean, thanks for the My Love info.

    McScotty, I was a huge Sub-Mariner fan when I was a kid. I never turned down a chance to read his adventures.

    Dangermash, it's certainly a striking cover. I'm not sure the selection of covers in this post are quite up to the same standard. I'd say the Subby one comes closest. It certainly has a magnificent speech balloon on it.

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  6. Dear MacScotty:Curiously that issue of Submariner was also one of my earliest purchases and I loved it. Always thought Submariner was an atypical Marvel comic, that sounds stupid but it seemed different to other Marvels. Once again the cover(plus the smell of the ink!!!) takes me back to summers past. Thanks for jogging my memory. Great post.

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  7. FFF, MacScotty -

    Put me down as a Subby fan too. I've been re-reading the Bill Everett issues the past month from the early 70s (not the 40s LOL).

    For my $ he set the bar for Subby with his unique style of art and story telling.

    That said, as I read through them, including the preceding dozen issues (death of his wife, death of his dad, Doc Doom) he does seem an awkward character to develop. His temper, rashness, and green swimsuit do not signal intelligence. Everett seemed to elevate him and write the few stories where it seemed to work, though.

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  8. The Ghost Beast is a Wally Wood story. An early sword-and-sorcery, pre-Marvel Conan adventure of Beowulf. Reprinted in one of the 1980 issues of the Valour weekly, IIRC.

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  9. Steve, if you thought it strange that Elvis could reach No.1 in 1970 you must have been utterly flabbergasted when he reached No.1 in 2002 and 2005.

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  10. Colin, I must confess that my gast was well and truly flabbered.

    Thanks, Dougie.

    Thanks to you too, FFF. :)

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