This week, I have mostly been reading...

As you no doubt know, this blog ploughs through millions of comics every day in order to bring you opinions so powerful they could rock the world. Why, grown men themselves have been known to hide in cupboards to avoid the power of my fulminations.

But the truth is that even I don't always have strong enough feelings about a comic to bother reviewing it in full. Therefore, this is a selection of what I've been looking at lately that I can't bring myself to give a full write-up to.

The Avengers have their second outing and find themselves up against the Space Phantom who, for years, I always got mixed up with the Space Parasite.

Needless to say, in this tale, everyone gets everyone mixed up with the Space Phantom and by the end of it all, the Hulk's quit and the newly formed group are already a man down.

Just to make things worse for our heroes, not only are they a man short but the very next issue, they have to fight both him and the Sub-Mariner.

Bah! Who needs that pesky Hulk anyway? Thanks to the maturity levels that only Namor can supply, the Avengers return to full strength with the return of Captain America.

Batman has  his greatest failure!

Or perhaps he doesn't, as he encounters murder on a film set.

This is actually one of my favourite Batman tales from the era but I don't have anything to say about it that I haven't said about other Batman tales in other posts, therefore I shall not review it but merely express my liking for it.

Captain Marvel goes all cosmic and has his head redrawn by John Romita.

To be honest I've never been totally sure what Cosmic Awareness is but it's all good mythic stuff as Jim Starlin's Cosmic Cube saga rumbles on and we get some back-story for the solar system.

Jim Starlin's long-gone but Mar-Vell's Cosmic Awareness comes in handy as he uses it to beat the Super-Adaptoid and bring Rick Jones permanently back to our world.

Tragically, this means we shall have to endure more of Rick's singing career which mostly seems to consist of him declaring himself not to be John Denver.

I can confirm that I too am not John Denver.

Ka-Zar finds himself in a Savage Land re-enactment of Moby Dick as he helps a vengeance-seeking wally try to kill a giant river monster.

The story's concept might be pretty clichéd but it's beautifully drawn by Alfredo Alcala.

It's the Mighty World of Marvel but it might as well be called Daredevil Annual 1979, as our red clad hero finds himself in two tales.

The first is a very long but uninvolving team-up with the Black Panther. The second is shorter and stronger as the man without fear finds himself on a train, up against the Beetle and the Gladiator.

Jim Starlin's All-Time Top Ten Mighty World of Marvel Covers.

As we all know, in the 1970s, there was no one quite like Jim Starlin when it came to Cosmic-ing up comic books. It seemed like, given half-a-chance, he could even have turned the adventures of Roy Race into an intergalactic epic.

But the man they call Judo Jim had a more important part to play in comic book history than even that.

That's because, for several months, he was the main cover artist on Marvel UK's flagship title Mighty World of Marvel. This was before his cosmic heyday but, even in the early 1970s, the seeds of his future greatness were there for everyone to see.

Therefore, Steve Does Comics gives its not in the slightest bit definitive list of Jim Starlin's ten greatest Mighty World of Marvel covers.

Remember, this list is compiled without the aid of insight, taste or expert knowledge and makes no claims to being at all right in its opinions.

10.

Spidey comes up against a surprisingly stylishly dressed Lizard, while the floating heads of the Fantastic Four and the Hulk look suitably startled.

9.

That bounder Dr Doom's up to no good - both of him.

Daredevil's so sickened by it all that he can't resist throwing away his stick.

He'll regret that later. You never known when you might need a stick.

8.

It's Doom vs Spidey.

Do my razor-sharp senses spot a helping hand from Jazzy John Romita on the figure of Spider-Man?

7.

The Hulk gets zapped.

6.

It's brain vs brawn, as the Leader causes his usual mischief.

5.

How can the FF possibly hope to defeat both the Sub-Mariner and Dr Doom?

I reckon they'll be fine as long as no one tries to launch the Baxter Building into outer space.

4.

This was the first issue of Mighty World of Marvel I ever read - and what a way to start, as Spidey battles the FF.

3.

The FF vs the Hulk.

Daredevil's throwing his stick away again.

Will he never learn?

2.

If the sight of the Hulk smashing through a wall doesn't make you want to buy a comic, then what would?

1.

Spidey might have quit the comic but a new hero's introduced to readers, as Daredevil makes his entrance.

All scans from the Grand Comics Database. 

Incredible Hulk #109 - Ka-Zar!

Those of an observant nature will know that Christmas was an exciting time for me.

When I say, "Observant," I mean, "Fixated," and, "Prone to stalking," as only such people would know  I spent the Festive Season braving the wilds of Devon.

American visitors to this blog will of course not know the dread reputation Devon has amongst the God-fearing folk of England. What savage terrors I encountered there as I was forced to battle manfully with various wild animals for supremacy.

Needless to say, I was triumphant, managed to get the blanket off the cats on more than one occasion, avoided tripping over a dog and lived to tell the tale.

But who else could have managed such a feat?

Only one man could.

And that man is Ka-Zar: king of the Savage Land.

And so it was that, as I roamed, bare-chested, the fields of Devon, people would often say to me, "Steve, having someone of your fame in our little county's quite an honour but when did you first encounter the loin-clothed loiterer on whom you've clearly based your survival skills?"

And the truth is it was in Mighty World of Marvel #61.

This is a good thing. Mighty World of Marvel #61 holds a special place in my heart. Not only was it one of the earliest comics I collected but its reprint of Incredible Hulk #109 features one of my fave Hulk tales, as the green skinned stirrer lands in the Savage Land and proceeds to make a nuisance of himself before saving the world from a machine that can make it rain a lot.

First of all, of course, he has to fight Ka-Zar.

Frankly, against such opposition, Ka-Zar's totally outclassed.

When I first read the tale, knowing nothing of the character, it didn't strike me just how outclassed he really is but he and Zabu are soon dispatched by the Hulk and left to the tender mercies of the Swamp Men who're in the mood to set light to them.

Frankly that's the least of their worries because it seems some naughty aliens have planted a doomsday machine in the Savage Land and it's in full swing.

What can even the Hulk do to stop such carnage?

It turns out he can't do anything but Bruce Banner can and Bruce battles to sort things out, as a giant robot stomps the land.

It's not hard to see just what the appeal of the tale is. The mixture of the Hulk, prehistoric creatures, jungles, aliens, Tarzan clones and giant robots is a heady and evocative mix. Not only did the tale introduce me to Ka-Zar and Zabu but it introduced me to the Savage Land itself - and Umbu the giant four-armed alien statue with a killer tuning fork.

Herb Trimpe had been drawing the strip for a few issues when this tale started but, for me, this was the tale where he really arrived, his partnership with John Severin hitting its stride to take the title to heights it had rarely even aspired to before but rarely fell from from that moment on.

Within mere weeks, the Hulk would be in outer space battling a giant mouth in space, Betty Ross would be made of glass, the Leader would be back and the strip would exert a grip on me that, even all this time later, those tales still hold. It's not often you can view an individual issue as pivotal in a strip's history but I reckon The Incredible Hulk #109 is more than worthy of that description.

Happy Birthday, Mighty World of Marvel!

It's an exciting time in the Steve Does Comics household.

Why?

Because my boiler's been declared free of deadly carbon monoxide.

But freedom from the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning is nothing compared to the other grounds for excitement.

That's because, in but a few short days from now, we celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the most important event in the history of humanity.

That event was the launch of The Mighty World of Marvel - a magical moment when American and British comics traditions fused to create an experience guaranteed to blow the socks off any child.

Sadly, despite seeing it advertised on TV, I missed issue #1 but my dad did see sanity in time to come home three weeks later with issue #4. And, from that point on, no weekend was complete without it.

How I thrilled as the Hulk took on the terrible Toad Men. How I boggled as the Fantastic Four were grabbed by the Skrulls. How I did whatever it was I did as the Amazing Spider-Man battled the FF.

I've not read issue #4 since I was eleven but what I do remember of it was how dark the world of Marvel Comics seemed in it. While the heroes of DC inhabited a mostly cheery world in which they were revered by their fellow inhabitants, Mighty World of Marvel #4 gave us a Frankensteinian monster whose first instinct was to destroy humanity rather than save it, a Fantastic Four who had another monster amongst  their ranks and defeated aliens by brainwashing them into becoming cows, and a teenager with the powers of one of the most loathed creatures on Earth.

It's easy as an adult to read those early Marvel tales and see them as cheery, naive escapism but escapism wasn't the real secret of their allure. Like Dr Who, they brought a weekend dose of the unsettling and sinister into the world of a child and, for that, some of us were strangely grateful.

Underused villains.

There can't be many of us who've not at some stage in our lives wanted to smash a pink, radioactive Neanderthal in the face.

Sadly; for most of us, such an act can never be more than a pipe dream.

For the Hulk however it became dramatic reality in the pages of Mighty World of Marvel #53, a comic that shall always linger in my memory as the oldest issue of that mag I had in my collection.

From what I can recall of it, that issue featured two stories; the Hulk's first-ever encounter with the Missing Link, and the Fantastic Four's meeting with the Enfant Terrible.

In the Hulk tale, having seen off the Rhino, our hero returns to New York just as the Chinese unleash their own version of the Hulk on the city.

That version is the Missing Link, a caveman revived by nuclear tests, who quickly mutates into something else altogether.

I admit it, I loved the Missing Link. He managed to make even the Hulk sound articulate, and his tendency to explode at inconvenient moments could only be viewed as appealing.

Sadly, no doubt thanks to that tendency to randomly explode, it was several years after his first appearance before the Missing Link returned, by which point he was called Lincoln and working in a mine. After that, he was never seen again during the era when I was reading comics, and I have no idea if he's been seen since.

While it was disappointing, such an absence does raise the issue of villains you always felt didn't appear enough in comics.

Some of them were plain baffling.

For instance, there was the Lizard's long long absence from the pages of Spider-Man between his initial appearance and his eventual return in John Romita's tenure.

Even more markedly, the Scorpion - having been used twice in the Steve Ditko era - managed to go missing throughout the whole of the John Romita and Gil Kane epochs before finally reappearing well into the Ross Andru one.

Of course, those were the lucky ones. Although initially ignored, they did go on to become major foes.

But others weren't always so fortunate.

So, which villains did you always think were bafflingly underused?

And, for that matter, which were used too often?

Nostrils and monsters. Life's a beach on the island of terror.

Never explain and never apologise. Neil Gaiman once told me that.

When I say he, "told me," he told me nothing of the sort. I've never met him and he's never met me. That's probably for the best, as I have a much daintier nose than him and I'm told these writers can easily plunge into a jealous rage.

But the advice I began this post with, I read it in an article he once wrote, and The Incredible Hulk #170 (AKA, The Mighty World of Marvel #176) is a perfect example of its correctness, as, having seen off the Bi-Beast, the Hulk and Betty Ross find themselves on a mystery island. With no immediate way to leave, the Hulk takes on the role of protector and provider, while Betty Ross takes on the role of annoying woman who keeps running off and having to be rescued.

The island, you see, is home to a bunch of giant monsters. Where they come from and how they got there, we don't know. Not only that but the monsters themselves don't know. It seems they're from outer space but the hows, whys, whats and wherefores are so long forgotten they've degenerated into little more than animals. All we - and they  - know is they speak in cryptic symbols, without the aid of speech balloons, and they're very keen on killing Betty Ross. This means that, when she flees the Hulk one time too many, they take her off to be sacrificed, at which point the Hulk flings them to their deaths in a volcano, before a rescue helicopter arrives.

You can't get round it. With its almost total lack of clarity as to what's going on and the unlikelihood that such gigantic creatures could've remained undiscovered on a small island for what seems to have been thousands of years, it's tempting to write the whole episode off as a hallucination caused by the infected wound we know Betty has.The problem is I'm pretty sure the Hulk makes a reference to the monsters in a later tale, so it looks like if it was a hallucination it's one they were both sharing.

I've mentioned before that in 1975 The Mighty World of Marvel disappeared from my local newsagents, again without explanation and apology, but this was the first Hulk story I read upon its return. It seemed a strange tale then and it seems a strange tale now. And that strangeness lies at the heart of its appeal. However frustrating its lack of answers, it's that very lack of answers that makes it live long in the memory.

So, it looks like Neil Gaiman was right. There is a strength in not explaining things. Maybe I should write a post without any explanations. Maybe I should make a plaster cast of my nose and send it to him, leaving him none the wiser as to why. The power of mystery. The power of mystery.

Mighty World of Marvel Annual 1975.

Dads. Are they psychic - sometimes sensing their future blunders and taking action to make amends for them before they've even committed them?

A couple of years before he completely forgot to give me the Avengers 1977 annual for Christmas - meaning that, when he finally remembered, I got it in the Spring - my dad, for no reason I've ever been able to determine, gave me the 1975 Marvel Annual, weeks before Christmas. Clearly Christmas was a movable feast in his eyes.

Why he did it I shall never know but I know it was on a Thursday because Top of the Pops was on and David Essex was singing I'm Gonna Make You A Star, with a little help from The Goodies.

Well, David Essex was a big fat liar and never did make me a star but my future bitterness over his broken promises was the last thing on my mind right then because I suddenly had a Marvel annual to keep me warm through those long dark cold winter nights. This was the first Marvel annual I had after the 1972 Fleetway Marvel Annual that had so disappointed me at the time and this more than made up for it. Not only had I not read any of the stories before but blow me down if they weren't in full colour too.

So, what did we get for our 90p?

Well, we got lots of Hulk. First up we got a double-length helping of him and his encounter with Captain Omen's undersea kingdom that owed nothing to Captain Nemo. Clearly Steve Englehart had the same kind of mentality that I had when it came generating names.

When it came to the tale itself, I was most struck by Captain Omen's bright red metal tentacles the Hulk thought were giant worms, the wide-bodiedness of his crew, the salivary goodness of Aquon and most of all  the shocking denouement as the crew of Omen's ship exploded in the lower air pressure of the surface world. Never before had my youthful mind reeled before such titanic terror. There were other things that grabbed me  too; the fact that General Thunderbolt Ross had been captured by the Russians, and that one of Captain Omen's crew kept a leaf as a sacred relic of the surface world.

This was followed by the Hulk's first punch-up with Zzzax, the creature from the Dynamo. I like Zzzax. Zzzax always referred to himself in the third perzzon and was as stupid as they came. This is how a Hulk villain should be. Through the story I also got a bit of a lesson in electricity from Hawkeye, thanks to which I've never been tempted to use my electric toaster in the bath.

Finishing off the annual we had what for me was its highlight; the Hulk's first-ever encounter with the Silver Surfer. The Hulk's determined to force the Surfer to take him into outer space, where he can escape the puny humans who hound him. The trouble is the Surfer's not allowed to go into space, thanks to the orders of Galactus. Violence follows - the ironic ending being that, after discovering where the Hulk came from, the Surfer's about to cure him, with his cosmic powers but the Hulk thinks he's about to attack him. The Hulk hits the Surfer in preemptive "retaliation" and the Surfer takes his board home and leaves.

Sandwiched in between all this green goodness were a series of pin-ups, mostly the covers to the issues from which the annual's tales originated. There was also a very curious pin-up of the Hulk landing in what seems to be a courtyard, as a bunch of oddly-dressed men run away and a strange looking tank waits  in the background. I don't have a clue who did it. It's clearly not by what you'd call one of Marvel's top rank artists. The issue also features what for me's quite a special pin-up, a reproduction of Marie Severin's  cover to Tales To Astonish #99. Unless there's something wrong with the version on GCD, the one in the annual's clearly been re-embellished noticeably and it looks genuinely epic, which is why I'm reproducing it here.

So David Essex didn't make me a star and my dad never again displayed anything that resembled psychic powers but I had an underwater kingdom and a rider of the space ways to keep me happy and, in the often blighted days of the early 1970s, that was enough.

PS. Don't forget the breathless results of our Captain America vs Daredevil poll are in, fresh from the burning inferno of democracy -- and it's not good news for one of them.

Mighty World of Marvel annual 1978.

I suppose it’s a sign of how far Marvel UK’s flagship title Mighty World of Marvel had drifted away from its roots that the 1978 annual of that name doesn’t feature any of the characters you actually associate with it.

By then, in the weekly mags, Spider-Man was long gone and the Fantastic Four’d been shunted around all over the place, having been moved to The Titans then to Captain Britain then to their own comic before eventually heading back to The Mighty World of Marvel. On top of that, the likes of Conan, Dracula, Sgt Fury, the Avengers, X-Men and even Planet of the Apes had had their spells in the comic.

And so it is that, despite the cover showing long-standing Mighty World of Marvel favourites Daredevil and the Hulk, inside we get Captain Marvel and Luke Cage.

The 1978 annual gives us just two tales. In the first, Captain Marvel - having been trapped in the Negative Zone - gets to swap atoms with Rick Jones so they can take each other’s place in this world.

I’ve never really been sure why the decision was made to bring together Rick Jones and Captain Marvel. They don’t seem a natural fit and I’m not sure the strip really gained anything from it. It’s easy to see why Captain Marvel’s there but not why Rick Jones is. Maybe it was just Roy Thomas trying to find a new use for a character who’d tended to be a spare cog wherever he’d shown up or maybe it was him trying to emulate the Billy Batson/Original Captain Marvel set-up. Either way it meant Jones was now a spare cog actively built into the structure of a comic rather than just being tacked on which maybe gave him a greater sense of importance but also gave him a greater potential to be an irritant.

Still, it’s an atmospheric tale as stylishly drawn as ever by Gil Kane, though let down towards its climax by the appearance of a dull villain in the shape of the murderous Yon-Rogg. There’s also an exploding Carol Danvers, an idea the less said about which the better.

In the second tale, Luke Cage goes to Japan where he encounters a megalomaniac with a base in a volcano. I think we can guess which movie Chris Claremont’d been watching before he came up with this tale and it does indeed feel suspiciously like a James Bond flick as Moses Magnum tries to drill to the Earth’s core, paying no heed to the fact it’ll set off a series of earthquakes that’ll destroy large chunks of the globe.

Exactly why he wants to do this isn’t clear. Apparently he wants to get his hands on the magma so he’ll be rich. Maybe it’s me but I wasn’t aware of any major global trade in magma. I’m also not convinced the market for it’ll be all that great if half the world - and its economy - has just been destroyed.

In truth it’s a tale that doesn’t really make a lot of sense all round. It’s hard to see why Magnum’s doing what he’s doing at any point in the tale, nor where the character Sam Sheridan, who’s some sort of seismologist/geologist, fits into it all. One moment Magnum wants her alive, then he wants her dead. One moment he wants her advice on how safe what he’s doing is, the next he’s totally ignoring that advice.

In the end, none of it matters as Magnum’s killed when his drilling laser causes his volcano base to blow up, meaning Luke Cage never actually needed to have turned up in the first place. It’s quite a long tale but rarely an interesting one and I do have the problem that Cage is written in such a way that, whenever I read his dialogue, I hear him speaking with the voice of Hong Kong Phooey.

This was the last UK Marvel annual I ever had. After reading it I decided that if it didn’t have the big-hitters like the Hulk and the FF, and only had two stories, it just wasn’t worth bothering with anymore. It’s a shame because, like a lot of people my age, Mighty World of Marvel had been my main inculcation into the ways of Marvel. The weekly comic itself still had some life in it but, not much more than a year later, Dez Skinn’s editorship made that too a shadow of its former self. Maybe the 1978 Mighty World of Marvel annual at least did us that service of preparing us psychologically for the once-unthinkable time when Marvel UK’s greatest title was no longer worth buying.

Mighty World of Marvel Annual 1977.

1976 was a bad year for Britain. We had the worst drought in history, the Brotherhood of Man hit the charts, and the government had to go to the IMF.

Happily, none of that mattered because we had a whole bunch of Marvel annuals to see us through, much as Vera Lynn had done in the war.

Flagship of this wave of rescue was of course The Mighty World of Marvel annual and it kicks off with a story that makes me very happy, as the Incredible Hulk comes up against his Communist Bloc equivalent the Missing Link.

Few monsters could get away with being pink, but the Missing Link pulls it off with style. Along with the Glob, the Link is possibly my favourite Hulk monster of his era. A shame then that we didn't see more of him over the years. The last time we did, Linky was exploding. Happily, a mere trifle like blowing up isn't enough to stop a man of the Link's calibre and now, in this tale, he's back, having been adopted by a mining community in the middle of nowhere.

The only problem is he's giving off dangerous radiation that imperils the very people who've taken him in.

Needless to say it's not long before the ever-turbulent Bruce Banner's lost his rag, and the Hulk and the Link are smashing the town up. Happily, the Missing Link explodes again and quickly reconstitutes, free of radiation.

I can't deny it, I'm a total sucker for 1970s' Hulk comics. There's just something that Happy Herb Trimpe brought to the table. Maybe it's the way he draws monsters. Maybe it's the way he draws machinery. Maybe it's just the way he tells a story but I get into these tales in a way that's quite unique. My only complaint about the outing is that, to my eyes, Jack Abel's inks don't suit Trimpe's pencils a millionth as well as those of John Severin and Sal Trapani did. But it's a crime I can forgive. Far as I'm concerned, as long as there's two big stupid monsters hitting each other, all's well in Hulk land.

A few days ago I reviewed Daredevil #115, featuring the conclusion of Daredevil's first encounter with the Shadow-inspired Death-Stalker. And, wouldn't you know it, this annual contains the previous instalment of that very tale as, blundering around the Everglades, the man without fear encounters that villain plus the Gladiator and the Man-Thing. Sadly, as too often with established villains who meet the Man-Thing, Gladiator turns out to be a scaredy cat and burns at the swamp monster's touch. Marvel's heroes never burned at the Man-Thing's touch, so I'm not sure why the villains did. They might have many unadmirable qualities but, if they were willing to take our heroes on, they couldn't have been that cowardly. Bearing in mind it's the mid-section of a longer story and therefore we don't know what's happened prior to it or would happen after it, it's all highly enjoyable, mostly because I do dig the Death-Stalker so much.

"No similarity between any of the names, characters, persons and/or institutions in this magazine with those of any living or dead person or institution is intended," a helpful box used to tell us at the start of every Marvel Comic. And so we next get a guest appearance from Richard Nixon, officially therefore designated not a real person. He's in the concluding part of a John Buscema/Stan Lee Fantastic Four tale in which Galactus has yet again returned to Earth in an attempt to get the Surfer to once more be his herald. I seem to recall that, when this tale was reprinted in Marvel UK's weekly comics, Nixon was redrawn as Jimmy Carter. Marvel really did like to pretend its presidents were imaginary. The FF are putting up a fight but, in the end, rely on the Surfer and Agatha Harkness (AKA; DSX McKinna) to sort them out. It's drawn by John Buscema and features Galactus, so, even if we don't have a Scooby what events have preceded it, it was always going to be good stuff.

Finally we get another Fantastic Four tale in which they take on the Hulk. In plotting terms, it's probably the crudest of our stories - the FF go looking for the Hulk, they find the Hulk, they knock him out - but it's drawn by George Perez and you never tire of the Fantastic Four against the Hulk.

It has to be said the choice of tales for the annual's an odd one. The stories themselves are fine but, apart from the Hulk outing, they're all single instalments of two or three part tales, meaning you simply don't know what's happened before and are left wondering what happens after. As a sample of what Marvel had to offer, they clearly worked and, if I were a new reader, they'd've been more than enough to get me hooked. But it would've been nice if they'd chosen single-parters and not kept leaving us dangling. Single-part stories were thinner on the ground in the era the choices come from but, off the top of my head, I can think of stand-alone FF, and Daredevil stories of that vintage that could've taken their place.

PS. Because I'm in a generous mood and I'm too bone idle to look it up, a great big Steve Does Comics No-Prize goes to the first person who can tell me from what original issues the above tales are reprinted.

Mighty World of Marvel #10. How green was my comic book?

There was a time when street lamps could fire laser beams, buses could double up as submarines and the Fantastic Four lived in an alternate world which could be reached by knocking down the back of my nan's closet with a sledge hammer if she'd only let me.

That time was 1972, and I believed all those things to be true because I was eight.

It was also the time when I first started reading American Comics.

I first started reading them in the summer of that year. In fact, I'd read one issue of The Amazing Spider-Man before then but summer 1972 was when American comics became a regular part of my life rather than a rarely glimpsed piece of exotica.

Clearly this was how fate designed it, as, within weeks of this, The Mighty World of Marvel started up and I, thanks to its reprints, could suddenly catch up on the early adventures of my favourite heroes, each and every week.

Sadly, those issues all eventually found their way into the dustbin but, by chance, I recently came into possession of issue #10 of said comic. Yet again it must be fate because (apart from issue #4) issue 10 happens to be the early issue I remember most strongly.

It's certainly something to be reacquainted with. The first thing that strikes me, apart from the non-glossy cover, is the lack of staples. The things were put together so cheaply that even this was presumably seen as an unnecessary extravagance. The second thing you can't miss is the green. Page after page after page is rendered in the hue.

Clearly it was done to compensate for the lack of full colour - something a British editing team would never have felt necessary, as British readers didn't expect comics to be in full colour. Looking at it now, the green's terrible, degrading artwork that'd already been damaged by the seemingly random addition of zip-a-tone at every possible opportunity. Still, kids see things differently and I seem to remember feeling it all seemed rather exciting and special at the time..

But this is all packaging. What about the actual content?

Well, this issue, we get three tales, kicking off with a truly odd one wherein the Incredible Hulk decides to take on the hordes of would-be-Genghis-Khan General Fang, by disguising himself as the Abominable Snowman for no good reason. This is from the era when Stan Lee'd decided the Hulk should talk like a cross between the Thing and Al Capone and spend as much time threatening Rick Jones as he did the bad guys. Frankly, with its clichéd enemy and unsympathetic "hero" you can see why the Hulk lost his own comic after just six issues. The big mystery at this stage must've been how he ever got it back again. Fortunately, more impressive days were ahead for Jade Jaws.

Next we get part of Spider-Man's first battle with the Sandman, whose artwork suffers more than the other stories under the twin assaults of zip-a-tone and green.

Finally, we get the mid-section of the Fantastic Four's first battle with Dr Doom, in which they go back in time to retrieve Blackbeard's treasure, only to learn the Thing was in fact Blackbeard. It's clearly the best of the tales we're presented with here and, thanks to Jack Kirby's relatively simple artwork, suffers the least badly from the greenification of its world.

But the comic, overall, is an odd thing. The lack of staples and the fact the cover doesn't even get the name of the Hulk's foe right (it claims he's up against Tyrannus) suggests it was knocked together with little love. Then again, it has a cover specially drawn by industry great Jim Starlin. Then again, it looks like he bashed it out on the bus on the way to work. Then again, it does have a maze, part of a poster, a pin-up and a letters page so, at least there, more effort was put in than strictly needed. Tony Isabella in this article gives an insight into how the UK comics were put together and leaves us in no doubt that Marvel weren't exactly pulling out all the stops in their production.

But, in the end, despite the implied lack of respect for the British readership (you couldn't see Marvel cutting such corners for a US audience) production flaws don't matter. The comics weren't designed to be read by men in their mid-forties. They were meant to be read by eight year olds, and you can't get round the fact that, for a kid in the early 1970s, there were two things in life that made the wait for each weekend a long and torturous thing. One was the wait for the latest adventure of Dr Who and the second was the wait for the arrival in your newsagents of the latest issue of The Mighty World of Marvel.

Marvel style, done the Fleetway way. Marvel Annual 1972.

I was in the grip of madness. A madness that had led me, for long and bewildered years, to believe that, long before the Mighty World of Marvel comic hit UK news stands, I'd had three issues of TV21 that featured the Silver Surfer fighting the Abomination.

Apart from the fact that this meant "Abomination" was probably the biggest word I knew at the age of six or seven, such a thing made no sense. After all, TV21 famously published Gerry Anderson stories, and in what way was the Silver Surfer either TV or Gerry Anderson?

So, over the years, I decided I must have got confused and that it must've been a comic like Terrific, which did indeed publish Marvel reprints and, crucially, also began with a T.

But the Internet's a wonderful thing and, through it, I recently discovered that, in its dying days, TV21 did indeed publish Silver Surfer adventures. It seems Fleetway had a deal with Marvel to reprint their tales and no longer had the rights to the Gerry Anderson shows. Hence we suddenly got the likes of Spider-Man and the Surfer in the pages of TV21.

It also explained my Christmas disappointment of 1972 when I eagerly received that year's Marvel Annual, only to discover that most of the tales therein had been published in the Mighty World of Marvel just a few weeks earlier. Given their massive back catalogue of stories, what had possessed the House of Ideas to make such a perverse decision?

I now know the answer to both mysteries was the same. That year's Marvel Annual wasn't published by Marvel at all but by Fleetway, taking advantage of their reprint rights. I admit, you don't have to be a Sherlock Holmes to know that. After all, it says on the front cover that it's a Fleetway publication and, even at that age, I knew Fleetway and Marvel weren't the same thing. Fleetway, after all, did Whizzer and Chips. But I assumed Marvel'd got Fleetway to publish it on their behalf, because Marvel didn't traditionally do hardback annuals and Fleetway did.

Time, however, heals all wounds and while I felt let down as a kid, I now see the book as a treasure trove of ancient Marvel tales. It doesn't hurt that it features some of my favourite outings of that era. Spidey's first meeting with the Scorpion's always been my favourite Spider-Man epic of the Ditko run. It's so hard and violent, with Spider-Man nearly beaten to death twice by his specially created nemesis, and Ditko's art's at its peak here. I also love the Terrible Tinkerer's debut for its off-beatness. The Hulk comes up against Tyrannus, a cross between Alexander the Great and the Mole Man. The Fantastic Four come up against Kurrgo and his robot, and the Hulk comes up against the Toad Men.

I have to admit the Hulk v the Toad Men might not be Marvel's greatest achievement but it was drawn by Jack Kirby and inked by Steve Ditko, and Bruce Banner looked like Eric Morecambe in one panel, which always gave me great pleasure. The book also had a Barry Smith Conan tale. I'd never seen Conan before and, for some reason, had it in my head he must be Thor - who I'd also never seen before - even though everyone kept calling him Conan!

What really stands out about the annual though is that, in its pages, it has a couple of articles. One deals with the various villains in Spider-Man's life. The other gives an overview of the world of Marvel and those who inhabit it. Given that they still had the rights, using the reprints made sense but it does seem odd that, through those articles, Fleetway was needlessly giving publicity to a rival publisher's entire pantheon but perhaps, it being Christmas, they were in a generous mood.

The other matter of interest is the cover. What a thing of beauty it is. Who did it? I don't know. Is it by a British artist?

I only ask because I've always felt there's something oddly continental, maybe Italian, about the thing. I base this on no knowledge whatsoever of Italian comic book covers of the early 1970s but, for some reason, whenever I look at it, the world "Italy" always bursts into my head.

That aside, I always felt there was something oddly camp about the soldiers in this picture and, looking at it now, it's suddenly occurred to me what it is.

It's the footwear.

Were those men really sent into battle with those things on their feet?

Of Miracle Men and Invisible Girls. Fantastic Four #139

By the time I was eight, I'd realised a marker pen was a wonderful thing. For one thing, you could sit there smelling it - although you had to give up after a while, as you started to get dizzy - and, for the other, you could use it to join the dots on the Invisible Girl.

For those unaware of the significance of the Invisible Girl's dots, way back in the weekly Mighty World of Marvel reprints of the early 1970s, jolly Jack Kirby used to get round the problem of how to let us see an invisible character by drawing her with dotted instead of full lines. "Well," I reasoned, if being dotted meant her foes couldn't see her, then joining those dots meant she'd no longer be invisible and the enemies of the Fantastic Four could find her and kill her.

Now, this may seem a mean thing to do but, even at that tender age, I'd decided Sue Storm was a bit of a useless article. All she ever seemed to do, for issue after issue, in those tales was get kidnapped and have to be rescued.

On top of that, there was the whole Reed vs Sub-Mariner thing with her. Catch yourself on, love, you're supposed to be a good guy. Stop lusting after someone who wants to destroy the human race - especially one who's half fish - and find yourself a proper boyfriend.

So, you can imagine my delight when I got the Fantastic Four #139 home from Sheffield's Sheaf Market and discovered Sue Storm was no longer a member of the world's greatest super-team.

Instead, she'd been replaced by Medusa.

Now, as an adult, I can see that Medusa's power - being able to trip people up with her hair - wasn't any better than Sue's power of invisibility and, given that she was in the habit of wearing a halter-neck top, despite being a well-endowed woman with a lot of running about to do, clearly wasn't of a very practical bent either but I didn't care. When it came down to it, useless power aside, there was always something more kick-ass about her than Sue.

She wasn't the only one because this issue featured someone else gone kick-ass; the Miracle Man.

I knew of the Miracle Man from those reprints and knew his miracles were no more than hypnosis.

From that we were supposed to view him as a fraud - although hypnosis seemed as valid a super-power as any to me.

Still, a fraud he was declared to be and a fraud was how we were meant to see him. But here, somehow, by means never really explained, hanging around with Wyatt Wingfoot's tribe had made him all-powerful.

Needless to say, being all-powerful didn't stop him quickly getting his come-uppance again, this time at that hands of those self-same Indians who were now giant ghosts.

The other great thrill for me was the tale was drawn by John Buscema. If someone forced me to name my favourite comic book artist of all time, I'd have to go for Buscema. He might not have been an innovator like Kirby or Adams, or have put in the care and attention of a Barry Smith - and he might have had an alarming tendency to not be able to remember anything at all about any of the comics he'd drawn - but his work was just so easy on the eye that, heretical as it might be, I do enjoy actually enjoy reading his FF and Thor tales more than the Kirby ones.

Anything else about this tale stand out for me?

Not half.

The Human Torch.

His costume was red.

It might not seem important now but, for a kid, that was more than enough to seal the deal.