Hostess Twinkies.

Everyone knows that I only shop in the classiest of establishments. Why, if Holly Golightly wouldn't be seen dead in a place, neither will I.

And so it is that it's repeatedly come to my attention that my local Poundland now sells Hershey Bars.

Being  a man who likes to experience the produce of exotic alien cultures, I must confess that I've been tempted to buy one.

But paying £1 for a chocolate bar seems a trifle excessive to me, especially as I keep seeing Americans say bad things about them on the internet. There's talk of waxiness, additives and aftertastes, all of which make me wonder if I really want to eat them.

But, of course, I can't see the words, "Hershey Bar," without thinking of two things; Judge Hershey and Hostess Twinkies.

Unlike Hershey Bars, I've never seen a Twinkie. But I do know that every American comic I bought in my youth seemed to include a super-hero trying to convince me to buy them, that I might more easily thwart the schemes of super-villains.

I remember Spider-Man fighting the Human Fly, Captain America fighting the Red Skull, and the Hulk getting knocked out by a partnership of the Wendigo and the Abomination.

But, of all the ads, the ones that always stuck in my mind were Batman's encounter with a mummy, and Captain Marvel's battle with Nitro.

I suspect the Batman one was memorable because it involved a dread creature of the supernatural and because of its stylish art, which may or may not have had the involvement of Dick Giordano.

The Captain Marvel one was probably so memorable to me because I've always been taken by Nitro's habit of blowing himself up when anyone gets in his way, which surely has to be one of the least likely and most drastic super-powers of all time.

Of course, I'm not sure the Captain Marvel one makes much sense. Where did the hole in the mountain suddenly appear from?

And how come Robin's anti-mummy gun doesn't work in the other ad? According to Batman it's because you can't kill someone who's already dead. Well, leaving aside the fact that I find it hard to believe Robin would so readily shoot to kill, it's supposed to be an anti-mummy gun. Surely, as it's an anti-mummy gun, it should be designed to work on dead people. If it isn't, in what way is it an anti-mummy gun?

For that matter, how come he has an anti-mummy gun on him anyway? Just how much usage is that likely to get in the course of a typical evening?

Do Hostess Twinkies still exist?

I don't know.

Are they nice?

I don't know.

Do you have to pay £1 for one?

I don't know.

But I do know that they seem to be the greatest weapon ever invented in the fight against both logic and crime. And, surely, that alone justifies their existence.

Web shooters! Get your genuine web shooters here!

As I've complained before, on Twitter, it's not easy to be Spider-Man when you live in Sheffield.

Not only are radioactive spiders a bit thin on the ground but any ambition to swing from skyscrapers is somewhat muted by the fact that it doesn't have that many tall buildings to swing from in the first place.

To make it worse, the ones it does have are all at least a mile apart, meaning one needs a very good aim to be able to hit one building with webbing whilst clinging to another.

Having achieved that, you would then smash stylishly into the pavement, roughly fifteen seconds after beginning your swing.

Of course, the other reason for my lack of Spider-Man style activities is that I don't have any web shooters.

Unbelievably it's true. Despite the fact that a penniless teenager managed to whip a pair up in his bedroom, in about twenty minutes, I, a genius beyond measure, with the resources of Croesus at his disposal, have somehow failed to make a pair for myself.

I did once make a Daredevil style billy club from Lego, a piece of string, and a metal hook from a Meccano set but, sadly, Lego isn't the strongest building material known to man and I suspect my contraption wouldn't have stood the test of supporting me as I swung majestically from the towering heights of Park Hill Flats.

But wait? What's this? All along, in the 1970s, there was a solution to my problems?

For just $2.19, I could've bought a genuine Spider-Man web shooter simply by cutting out a coupon?

Armed with this knowledge, I do find it amazing that, when  I watched American movies and TV shows, as a youngster, there were never any children in sight swinging around in the background, from their web shooters. Clearly they must have all been skillfully edited out, so as not to divert attention from Kojak or McCloud as they went about their crime-smashing business.

Now that I have that problem solved, all I need to do is find out from which issue of which Marvel comic I can find a High Evolutionary style Genetic Accelerator and I will at last have all the comics-related hardware I have ever desired.

Evel Knievel - As Seen In; Conan the Barbarian #46

Sometimes in life, you set yourself challenges you suspect are doomed to failure by their very nature.

Earlier this week, I decided that for my next post I'd grab a random comic from my domestic pile and write about whatever I found within it that wasn't actual story.

Clearly this was a recipe for disaster, as I couldn't guarantee there'd be anything inside, other than story, that was worth writing about.

This in mind, I randomly grabbed Conan the Barbarian #46 and plunged right in.

And blow me down if I didn't find enough potential material in there to keep me in blog posts for a lifetime.

The biggest of those things is on the back cover.

It's an advert.

It's not just any advert.

It's an advert for the Evel Knievel action figure and his assorted stunt vehicles.

In the grim days of the 1970s, if you were British, your knowledge of America came entirely from reading American comics, watching American cop shows in which it was always sunny, and watching short features about American sporting events on ITV's World of Sport. Thus it was that we were introduced to the wonders of competitive tree felling, log rolling, drag racing, beaver wrestling and something Dishy Dickie Davies always called Grid Iron.

It was also through World of Sport that we got virtually our only exposure to a man called Evel Knievel.

Sadly, every exposure we got to Evel Knievel through that means seemed to involve him trying to jump over things we'd never heard of and hurting himself upon impact.

Evel Knievel, it seemed, never had landings.

He only had impacts.

If he ever succeeded in actually jumping over anything, World of Sport resolutely refused to show it, as, every time they featured him, he seemed to end up in traction, having only got halfway across whatever it was he was trying to jump over. You couldn't deny his courage but whether he was actually in the right profession was not at all clear.

But of course, our other exposure to him came from the ads on the back of Marvel comics. How triumphant he seemed in those ads - and how at odds with the image we got of him through television.

I must admit I never wanted an Evel Knievel stunt figure. It may have been because I associated him with nearly killing himself every time he left the house. It may be because he seemed to have the same tailor as Elvis Presley. Or maybe, somehow, he felt like Hostess Twinkies and Cup Cakes in being things that somehow seemed too resolutely American for anyone British to genuinely get.

Still, I can at least say that, thanks to Evel Knievel, I know of the existence of Snake River Canyon - even if I still, to this day, have no idea where it is - and that must surely be something to thank him for.

Marvel coins.

Coins. What marvellous things they are. Without them, I wouldn't be able to buy the things that give my life meaning and prevent me plunging into an abyssal maelstrom of endless despair beyond anything even Norrin Radd could imagine - things like bubblegum and Curly Wurlies.

But there were other coins in my life when I was a child.

Coins that had my favourite heroes on them.

And those coins could only be acquired from the pages of 1970s Marvel comics. Forget your Decimalisation. That was a minor trifle in comparison. This was the real revolution in currency.

To be honest, I never had any of them and, despite my love of Marvel comics, I never really felt any urge to have any of them. Even now, vexed most sore as I am by a nostalgia that fair threatens to tear my mind asunder, I'm still strangely undriven by any desire to own them.

But, still, if their portrayal in the ads is anything to go by, they seemed a fine thing indeed and a cut above the items you normally saw advertised in comics, such as that genuine nuclear submarine on offer for $1.

So, in the end, I'd still rather have a Curly Wurly in my hand but it is strangely heartening to at least know that such things as Marvel coins existed and no doubt still exist, tucked away in some collectors' drawers, as shiny now as they were on the day they were first foist upon the world.

Steve Does Comics - A Man Of Letters: Part II.

Gasp, primitive humans, for I am now going to try and write an interesting post about sheets of paper.

I could claim that I'm doing this as a personal challenge designed to explore the very depths of my literary talent.

But the truth is I can't think of anything better to write about.

Admittedly, this isn't strictly speaking true.

Excitedly inspired by recent talk of Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Liverpool and Manchester agglomerating into one huge mega-city of ten million people, I was going to declare that the only thing wrong with the plan is that Mr Bumbleton, my local Community Support Officer, has now been replaced by Judge Dredd and that the bottom of my street is now populated entirely by hostile mutants. I was then going to use this as an excuse to write a review of a Judge Dredd tale from the 1978 2000AD Annual.

Sadly, this scheme hit the buffers when I actually read the tale and decided it wasn't a substantial enough story to  review, and then remembered that scanning hardback books is difficult. I must confess that, while I might live in a mega-city, I somehow fail to have mega levels of commitment.

So instead I fall upon my back-up plan, much as a failed samurai falls upon his sword, and bring you my thoughts on writing paper.

It's not just any old writing paper, of course.

That's because it's Marvel writing paper, as advertised on the back of early 1970s Marvel UK mags.

It's at this point that I must confess that my mind has long been tortured by thoughts of chocolate bunnies.

The reason for this is that fifty percent of the reason you buy them is that they look like bunny rabbits. But, the moment you start to eat one, you begin to wreck its innate bunniness and therefore diminish its spiritual appeal to you. Therefore, you don't want to eat it.

But the other fifty percent of the reason you bought it is that it's made of chocolate and can be eaten. Therefore, if you don't eat it, it fails to serve its purpose as chocolate and is therefore a waste of money.

That very same dilemma smacks you in the face when it comes to the subject of writing paper letterheaded with your favourite super-heroes. If you use it for its intended purpose and send it, in the form of letters, to other people, you won't have it anymore, depriving you of the item you coveted enough to hand over money for.

On the other hand, if you don't use it, then it has no purpose and you've wasted your money.

What is the solution to this emotional trial?

I have no idea.

That aside, the one thing that does always strike me whenever I see an offer on the back of an old comic is what happens if I cut out the coupon and - over forty years later - send it off?

Will I still get my goodies? Will I get a reply from a totally unrelated body telling me that Marvel UK no longer live there anymore? Will the coupon and the postal order simply disappear, never to be seen again? Perhaps all such orphaned coupons are placed in bottles by a government agency and then flung into the sea to float forever, gaining, in the process, a romance that one could hardly ever imagine would be bestowed upon a forty five pence postal order.

And there was me thinking that sheets of paper were less interesting than mega-cities. What a fool I was. Judge Dredd and his big stroppy Chopper bike might be one thing but I see now that, within that very subject of writing paper, lies the route to a madness from which no human mind could ever hope to escape.

Steve Does Adverts. The magic and mystery of See-Action Football

To be honest, it's not been a happy week for those of us who're fans of all things loveably juvenile. Within days of each other, we've seen the deaths of Rik Mayall, Shaggy and Captain Scarlet. Not to mention the demise of Captain Thingy from Allo Allo.

Still, there's one juvenile thing we can all rely on to never go away.

And that's football.

Yes it's true; even as I type this deathless prose, I'm busy watching Belgium vs Algeria in the World Cup of Footsoccerball.

How I love the World Cup. Frankly, nothing outside of the Eurovision Song Contest and the return of Dr Who manages to get me quite this excited in life.

Needless to say, England have shown a versatility many thought beyond them by finally managing to find a way to lose that doesn't involve the use of penalties.

Of course, if the government had listened to me and adopted Kate Bush's Oh England, My Lionheart as the National Anthem, I like to feel we would have swept to triumph. There's nothing like singing about a man dying in a plane crash to get the adrenaline going.

But we should remember that there's another kind of football on this planet.

A kind of football no one can understand.

It's American Football. It seems to involve neither feet nor balls, and one of my strongest memories of reading American comics as a child is seeing the advert above and not having a clue what was going on in it.

I must confess that, looking at it again as an adult, I still don't have a clue what's going. Just how does a field goal differ from any other kind of goal? What is a 5 yards off tackle? And what, in the name of Johan Cruyff, is a 4-3 bump and run?

Whatever it all means, I do feel that, in the interests of money-saving, this is how future World Cups should be played, with the managers televised as they stick various slides in a projector and spout gibberish at each other.

The scary thing is I could see BBC2 actually doing it, with Craig Charles introducing.

Sadly, I fear the BBC's perma-bewildered ubercommentator Jonathan Pearce would have no more comprehension of what was going on in it than he does in real-life matches.

Like one of those bricks they made you rescue in swimming lessons, Steve Does Comics heads straight to the bottom. Unlike those bricks, it stays there - because it likes it there.

We all know the biggest crime ever committed against humanity was when Marvel Comics stopped putting those one-line ads at the bottom of their pages - the ones that used to tell you what was going on in their other releases of that month.

"But even so," I hear you cry, "what kind of fool would be so sad as to have a favourite set of those ads?"

This fool would.

In Steve Does Comics' tireless endeavour to sink ever further into the quagmire of futility, I bring you my favourite set of Marvel's one-line ads. They come from Marvel Spotlight #12, featuring the debut of the Son of Satan.

Why they're my favourites, I don't know. I suspect a quick check would tell me they're neither better nor worse than the ones that could be found in any randomly selected comic. It strikes me that, rhythmically, these particular ones're mostly ungainly - and the last quote in particular seems especially clumsy in its execution.

In the end I think it's down to mere association, the fact that they appear in conjunction with the Son of Satan, the man I've modelled myself so closely on for all these years.

So, to compound my madness further, here they are:

"Who'd ever believe the Miracle Man could destroy the world? Not the Fantastic Four- till they face the truth in ish #139!"


"Dracula Lives - in three terror fraught tales, no less!"


"How can Conan stand against - the Shadow in the Tomb?"


"Special battle issue! Ka-Zar vs the Super-Soldier --- all waiting for you, in Astonishing Tales #20, right now!"


"Who is Memorax? Learn his startling secret - in Warlock #8!"


"Crazy magazine! First explosive issue - now on sale!"


"Kraven the Hunter's back in town! But this time, the town is Frisco --- and the victim is Daredevil! Don't miss the wall-to-wall action!"

This is where I now ask you which Marvel comic featured your favourite one-line ads.

This is where I suspect I'm not going to get any answers.

Another Adventure with the Ready Rangers.

Hooray! I've had a request - and just for once it's not the usual one.

In response to my post about the Steve Scout advert, R.W. Watkins has asked me to dig out and post the legendary Ready Rangers advert, which in this case comes from the back cover of the 100 page Witching Hour #38.

What a marvellous thing a Ready Rangers Mobile Field Pack was. To those of us unused to the ways of Ray Mears it might seem like a flimsy plastic box with flimsy plastic toys inside it but to the dedicated survivalist it's all you need to launch an all-out war-of-will on the Great American Wilderness. "Bow before my flimsy plastic box!" you'd shout, as nothing nature could throw at you could stop you.

Why, with its periscope and signal light, I wouldn't be surprised if you could stage an assault on the North Pole itself and be back home in time for tea.

Personally, with its ponchos and Distance Computer, I wouldn't trust it to keep me alive in my back garden, let alone the American wilderness, but it all takes me back to the days of Clarks' Wayfinders, the legendary shoes that had a compass in the heel, so you'd always know where you were as long as you went everywhere stood on one leg. I seem to recall they also had animal tracks reproduced on their soles so that if you saw strange animal footprints, by taking your shoes off and staring at the soles you could tell what animal had left the tracks. While you were doing this, the animal in question would no doubt take advantage of the fact you were stood in bear country, distracted by staring at your shoes, and kill you.

Ray Mears, eat your heart out.

Fun with Steve and Bob. The Phantom Stranger #35. Part Two.

As long-standing readers of this blog know, I've always had a soft spot for the classic, "You too can be a ninja," ad that turned me into the human killing machine I am today - not to mention the legendary ad for Duke the wonder dog that's worthy of a blog in its own right. And don't even get me started on Charles Atlas.

But Phantom Stranger #35, the comic that never stops giving, provides us with another classic example of the art of comic book advertising.

As any fool knows, if there's anything more exciting than being a ninja, it's being a boy scout, and here's where comics prove it. This time they give us Steve Scout, the boy scout action-figure. Why, just imagine the fun you can have with a boy scout action-figure, doing things like... ...erm.... ...er...

But don't just accept my word for it. Take a look at all the exciting stuff the ad credits him with doing: "He kneels to chop wood", "He stands to signal," and my favourite of them all, "He sits by the campfire."

Not only does he sit by the campfire but  his canoe actually floats and he has a battery powered flasher, a thing I think we can all do nothing but envy.

The ad bravely tells us he was America's only ever boy scout action-figure, which must've been a surprise to Bob Scout, his action-figure boy scout friend. Seemingly the manufacturers didn't feel Bob Scout was worthy of being counted in the official boy scout action-figure stats. I'm sure I can't imagine why that might be.

So there you have it. America's only ever boy scout action-figure (and his friend). I don't like to be a cynic but I can't help feeling that, clean-living though he no doubt was, there was a good reason no one else ever produced boy scout action figures. You know, like the fact they weren't ninjas.

Dynamic Tension injures ninjas in beach front barneys? Alas Charles Atlas, I knew him not? "You too could have a body like mine?" I already do - but then you have been dead for forty years

As we all know, there's nothing impresses a woman more than random acts of violence on a public beach. Thank God, therefore, for Charles Atlas, a man who can teach the meekest of us to turn into a rampant thug at the drop of a hat and thus gain vengeance on any not-worth-it bully who's ever kicked sand in our face.

"That's all well and good," people have asked over the years, "but what if the bully's a ninja? Then what would Charles Atlas do?"

What Charles Atlas would do is simple. He'd get stuck in an endless battle with said ninja - a battle that, like Dr Who's war with the Daleks, can never be won and can never be lost.

That's right. The results of our latest poll are in and, despite the fact that none of you voted for a draw, you the public have decided that a fight between Charles Atlas and a ninja would indeed be just that, with five of you voting for Atlas and five of you voting for the ninja.

Of course, if this were a Marvel comic, after their draw, Atlas and the ninja would realise they had an enemy in common and beat him up instead.

As always with my polls of vital importance, thanks to all who voted, and for answering at last this age-old conundrum that's kept me awake for more nights than I could ever dream of counting.

How to kill everyone you meet, for just $5. That's what I call a bargain.

As I roam the streets of Sheffield, people often say to me, "Steve, how come you're a man who can either fight or disappear?"

And I say to them, "It's simple. My entire body's an invincible killing machine."

"But how can I become an invincible killing machine?" they retort.

"It doesn't come easy," I tell 'em. "It takes years of study and dedication - reading issue after issue of Iron Fist."

"I: Ron Fist?" They say. "Who's Ron Fist?"

"You've never heard of Ron Fist?" I demand. "The greatest exponent of the martial arts there's ever been? Did Misty Knight lose her arm for nothing?"

But what a fool I was. If only I'd spotted this advert earlier, I could've become an invincible killing machine with just a fraction of the effort.

Yes. It's true. The 1970s really were so great that it was possible to become a lethal ninja simply by handing over $5.

I hereby nominate this as the best comic book advert ever - even better than the legendary one for Duke the adventure dog whose exploits I touched on here.

Reader, Please tell me you sent off for this very booklet. Please tell me it enabled you to become a man/woman who can defend him/herself even whilst asleep. Most of all, please tell me you've used its secrets to gain mastery of the deadly Retrievable Stone.


(Addendum: Don't forget to vote in the matter-of-life-or-death poll to discover who'd win a fight between a ninja and Charles Atlas.)

Steve Does Comics comes to a sticky end.

As I said in yesterday's post about the Marvel stickers I so desired as a youth, I have to admit that although I was more of a Marvelite than a DC fan, I was always more impressed by the DC stickers than the Marvel ones. Somehow the DC ones always seemed slicker and more stylish, although I have to say the Marvel stickers now seem brighter, more dynamic and more varied, to my adult eyeballs.

This particular ad comes from Action Comics #440 and I was especially taken with the Batman sticker - which I believe was taken from a Neal Adams' Batman/Joker story - as well as the Green Arrow and Gil Kane's Green Lantern.

The other thing that strikes me now, looking at that ad, is you only got 14 stickers for $2.50, whereas you got 18 Marvel stickers for the same money.

I don't know, somehow in the 1970s, Marvel always managed to steal a march on DC, even - it seems - when it came to sticky-back plastic.

Stuck up? Moi? Chance'd be a fine thing.

First of all a big thank you to Terence Stewart of the Mighty World of Bronze Age Marvel for giving this site a plug and for posting a picture of Six-Armed Spider-Man. As we all know, Six-Armed Spider-Man was the best idea ever in the history of comics and I'll fight to the death anyone who says otherwise.

People who I won't be fighting to the death are the people on the left, who I'm sure you're aware have super-powers, while I don't.

I am of course referring to the super-heroes, not the kid who's touching Thor in a place I don't think Thor would like to be touched.

But, as for those super-heroes, why would I want to fight them when I can instead spend all my time sticking them to everything in sight?

I'll admit it, when I was a youth, there were certain things I couldn't see advertised in a comic without wanting, and super-hero stickers were top of that list.

At the time, both Marvel and DC ran ads for their stickers and, treacherous though it was of me - me being far more of a Marvelite than a DC fan - it was the DC stickers I wanted most. I'll be blathering on about the those DC stickers in my next post - providing I can find some pictures of the ones in question - but here's the Marvel ones I always wanted; in this case taken from the pages of Strange Tales #181.

It does always strike me that there are some items that are conceptually self-defeating.

A cake is one of them.

A cake's only any use if you eat it but once you've eaten it, it's not a cake any more and its ability to give you pleasure's gone.

Erasers in the form of cute animals are another. You can't use them without destroying them but if you don't use them, they're not erasers.

Stickers too fall into this category. They're only stickers if you stick them to something but, once you've stuck them to something, you can never use them again, meaning that by using them you've ruined them.

Still, even though I knew this, it never put me off. And, as I roamed the streets of Sheffield, I always kept my eye out just in case a pack of Marvel stickers should hove into view.

Sadly, it wasn't meant to be. They simply weren't available in this country and, in order to send off for them, you had to pay with some weird thing called dollars. The only people in the UK who used dollars were the policemen in Z-Cars. Why the policemen in Z-Cars were always going on about paying for things in dollars, when they lived in Liverpool, I'll never understand. Then again I'll never understand why they never seemed to have Scouse accents or why they never noticed that one of them was Brian Blessed.

But, ultimately, none of that mattered. With them being fictional, I doubt they'd've supplied me with the dollars I needed anyway.

Weird War Tales #32. The madness and the mystery. "Cheeze it, luv!"

Cursed are those who live in interesting times, and few times are more "interesting" than wartime. That realisation gives us all the excuse we need to plunge once more into the mystery and the madness of Weird War Tales, the comic that set out to give wholesale slaughter a bad name.

Because we're luckier than most of the characters in this month's issue, we get, not the normal three stories, but four. In the first, Bill Finger and Gerry Talaoc tell of a sceptical soldier whose friend keeps telling him his destiny's controlled by the stars. And, wouldn't you know it, as he lies injured, hit by a German tank attack, the constellations come to life to scatter his persecutors like chaff.

Why the stars take it upon themselves to save him, given that he's never had a good word to say for them, is never explained. Like Stan Ridgway in the song Camouflage, we and he have to just put it down to the strangeness that can happen in warfare.

The next tale is a Day After Doomsday job that definitely makes no sense. A couple who live on a farm in what we're told is "rural Great Britain" drink from their well and almost immediately shrink down to the size of mice, to be eaten by their own chickens. From the talk during the tale of how the days are so hot lately - and of radiation having seeped into the well - we're clearly led to assume there's been a nuclear war but one they've somehow failed to notice or hear anything about. I don't know; rural Great Britain, eh?

Giant chickens aside, the tale's main claim to greatness is that it features the line, "Cheeze it, luv!" a phrase that, in over forty years of living in Britain, I've never heard once.

From a Great Britain that's unrecognisable to natives of that land, we move on to a story whose metaphorical landscape's instantly familiar to Weird War Tales readers, as a crusader makes a deal with what seems to be the devil. According to the terms of their pact, the crusader will live forever unless he asks to die, and inevitably then starts to suffer a string of mishaps that make him realise that, in striking the bargain, he wasn't as clever as he thought he was.

The fourth story sadly seems to have no purpose other than to fill two pages, as a bunch of soldiers land on an island guarded by robot soldiers and get them to wipe each other out. "Still no match for the human brain," remarks one soldier. "Not now," warns his colleague, "...but what about future wars?" It's a message I think we can all take to bed with us tonight and ponder deeply upon.

The story of the soldier saved by the stars is probably the best of the bunch but, for me, the real highlight of the issue isn't a story at all.

It's an ad.

I love the ads in old American comics - the stupider the better - and in this one we get a plug for Duke, the super action dog. In the space of just four panels, we get to see the plastic pooch slide down a rope, use a periscope and run around with a flashing light, not to mention using a winch that'll no doubt save some poor soul from doom.

I may be over-rating Duke but I get the feeling that none of the misfortunes that afflict our protagonists in this month's issue would've befallen them if they'd only had half the brains of that dog.