"Go Badge Mad, With Marvel!"

Bob Dylan once said, "Ma, take this badge off of me. I can't wear it anymore."

Clearly it couldn't have been a Marvel badge because a man would never feel such a way about such a thing. Why, he would go to his grave, clutching it to his chest, with rigor mortised fingers, sooner than have it removed from him.

I've mentioned in the past that, in my childhood, I had two Marvel badges, one with the Sub-Mariner on it and one with the Thing on it.

For some reason, Subby was bright red. Perhaps he was merely embarrassed to be depicted fighting seaweed. Or perhaps the people who were to blame for always miscolouring Dinky Toys' copies of Gerry Anderson vehicles had got hold of him.

The Thing, fortunately, was the correct colour and was accompanied by some fabulously 1970s lettering.

Thanks to my supreme detective skills (ie, getting some comics out of a wardrobe), I've tracked down the adverts for those very badges and discovered they were for sale in December 1974, which at least lets me know what I was doing in that month of that year.

I have nothing profound to say about the badges in this ad other than that, when I got mine, I was impressed by their larger-than-average size and that I think I got the best two, although I do also like the Silver Surfer and Conan ones. The Spider-Man one is also interesting for its unconventional camera angle and sense of design.

As with all offers from ancient comics, I'm sorely tempted to send off for them and see if I receive them. I like to think that somewhere, forty one years later, there's a warehouse in Tunbridge Wells with piles of these badges still in it, just waiting to be mailed out to the eager children of Britain, whatever their current ages.

Comics. Did you ever send off for anything?

One of the endless fascinations of reading comics as a child was encountering the advertising that showed all the comics-related merchandising the devoted fan could acquire should he or she be brave enough to cut coupons out of their favourite comics and thus ruin them.

It was a tempting thing. After all, there were posters, web shooters, medallions, dartboards, stickers, model kits, action figures and a whole lot more.

But, if you lived in Britain, there was a problem when it came to such items when advertised in American mags.

And that was that they had to be paid for with strange things called dollars that no one had ever seen and that no one knew how to get their hands on; meaning that, no matter how tempting they may have been, such items would be doomed to remain out of reach for those not familiar with the arcane art of international payment.

For items for sale through Marvel UK, there were of course no such obstacles. You could pay in pounds which were readily available even after that pesky decimalisation which so confused the elderly and led to them still chuntering on about, "New Money," forty years after it was introduced.

Even so, despite the ease of purchase, I only ever sent off for two things from any comics. Those things were a pair of quite sizeable Marvel badges.

Sadly, despite my best efforts, I've been able to find no signs of any pictures of those badges online, but one featured the uppermost image pictured here, while the other featured the Thing in a pose that was either the same as the one here or something very similar.

For some reason, in the Sub-Mariner badge, our hero had been recoloured red. It seemed an odd thing to have happened but I suppose that, if Dinky Toys could recolour Space 1999 Eagles, Thunderbird 2 and UFO Interceptors green, then Marvel could recolour the Sub-Mariner crimson. Then again, maybe he just wanted to silence rumours that he was semi-literate, by proving he was well red.

Anyway, that's enough of my heart-warming recollections. Did you ever send off for anything from a comic, what was it and were you pleased with it when it arrived?