Your Bronze Age Marvel Horror Fave?

As I prowl the graveyards of Sheffield, people often say to me, "Steve, you really do have a Lovecraftian capacity for bringing fear, terror and horror into our lives."

And I say, "Blimey, I didn't know anyone had even noticed my attempts at busking. And there was me thinking my version of In A Broken Dream brings a dimension to the song that Rod Stewart could only ever dream of."

"No, you silly sausage," they declare. "We mean your legendary tales of terror and horror what have made your name in this town and are readily available from Amazon and all other reputable book sellers."

And that brings us to my latest post. With Halloween a mere few weeks away, it's time to ask the question that refuses to remain unasked. Who was your favourite Marvel horror character of the 1970s?

With the Bronze Age easing of the Comics Code's restrictions, Marvel were free to bring us terrors that left our nerves in tatters and tingled our spines to the point of snapping.

Well, not really. The truth is their 1970s horror mags would have struggled to frighten the most timid of kittens but that doesn't mean I didn't love them. We had the werewolf by night, Dracula, the monster of Frankenstein, Ghost Rider, Morbius, Man-Wolf, Satana and a whole bunch more. But who was your favourite?

For me, there's no doubt Tomb of Dracula was Marvel's best horror comic of the 1970s but, in terms of characters, I have to go for the Son of Satan. He had a trident, he had fangs. He had pointy ears and his dad was Satan. If you couldn't love all that, then what could you love? Not only that but his first two adventures were drawn by Happy Herb Trimpe at the peak of his powers. Tortured and strained did his work on the strip look, proving SOS was the character he was born to draw.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. What are yours?

Your favourite childhood TV memories.

Skagman - Avebury. By John Nuttall from Hampshire, United Kingdom
(AveburyUploaded by ComputerHotline)
[CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

A wise man once said, "Life without variety is like cow heel without tripe," and who could argue with a claim like that?

I certainly couldn't. Nor could Crikey the evil ventriloquist's dummy who guides my every action.

Therefore I thought I'd make a rare drift away from the long-gone world of comics and look at the long-gone world of TV.

This post is, of course, not for mere common-or-garden TV - but for the Sci-Fi/Fantasy and Horror series that thrilled us in our younger days.

Many and splendiferous were the treats that TV gave us during our childhoods. If it wasn't Dr Who or Star Trek, it was the Tomorrow People and UFO.

British TV of course held up its end magnificently during that era, with a whole slew of children's shows that seemed designed to send us screaming to a padded cell. Escape into Night gave us a house surrounded by boulders with eyeballs. While Children of the Stones gave us the Avebury sarsens turned evil.

And there was more.

The Changes gave us a world without technology. Sky gave us a boy from the future, attacked by trees, while Timeslip gave us yet-to-come dystopias of heat and cold.

Then again, there was the nightmarish The Singing Ringing Tree - that East German fairy tale that did more than anything to convince us it was a good idea to keep an iron curtain between us and the Warsaw Pact, if that was what they thought was suitable entertainment for children.

They were classic series all. And there were plenty more where they came from. So, what were your fantastical favourites from your childhood days?