Adam Warlock. Strange Tales #181. It's all turned out mad again.

Was there ever anybody less suited to having his own super hero comic than Adam Warlock?

Yes there was.

Me.

...

...

...

And George Formby.

Admittedly Adam Warlock had a bit more power than me and George but, being more than a man, he was also less than human. When introduced in the pages of Fantastic Four #66, he was the living embodiment of the Jack Kirby, "Concept Is Everything," approach to comics, a character with no personality, no goals, no needs, no friends, no history and, apart from total a lack of life experience, no flaws. He didn't even have a name, being introduced to us merely as Him. On top of that, he was so powerful that, like the early Silver Surfer, he could basically do anything he wanted.

So, a hero who's basically an empty shell and all-powerful. If anyone thinks they can get good drama out of that they're nothing if not optimists.

Clearly Marvel were nothing if not optimists and so he got his own strip in which he ventured to Counter-Earth to fight the naughty Man-Beast who'd corrupted it. While that strip grabbed me initially, it soon ran out of steam as they bashed you over the head with the, "He's Jesus," stuff and even had him crucified and resurrected.

Happily, by then, he'd lost his own book and had to do his resurrecting in the pages of the Incredible Hulk.

I say happily because it's hard to see how such a storyline could possibly have worked if he'd been the star of the comic it happened in instead of a guest in someone else's.

But, as somebody else once proved, you can't keep a good Messiah down and so it was that Jim Starlin brought him back.

I can't say how much I loved Starlin's take on the character but, when I first got this - Strange Tales #181 - and saw the new Adam Warlock, I was hooked. With Warlock's tendency to stand around debating philosophical and metaphysical points with himself, he had a touch of the Don McGregor Killraven stories that I reviewed a bit back, aiming at something more than just the usual super-heroics.

The difference being that Jim Starlin was an artist as well as a writer and so wasn't going to let the words get in the way of the pictures.

Was Starlin an artist who wrote or a writer who drew? It was impossible to say. Unlike most who attempt the creative double, he seemed equally adept at both. This issue is a perfect example as our hero finds himself in a landscape so inspired by Steve Ditko's Dr Strange you wouldn't be surprised to see Dormammu show up.

Instead, a bunch of clowns show up.

They're not meant to be clowns. They're supposed to be heroes of the Magus' religion, there to convert Warlock to the cause but Warlock's mind-set warps his vision of them so much they appear to him as clowns. Either this is a sign of his iron will resisting indoctrination or proof that he's actually a bit bonkers.

I like to think the latter.

And clearly, so did Starlin because at, the climax, the enemy of the piece, the Magus shows up; a purple, future version of Warlock with a huge Afro. He looks terrible but conceptually he was a perfect foil for our hero. In the end, other heroes had to fight other people. Unlike me and George Formby, Warlock had to fight himself.

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?

War is Hell - literally. Weird War Tales #23.

If names are for tombstones that could explain why the artists with the best names seemed to draw tales from beyond the grave.

It could also explain why DC's horror mags grabbed me more than Marvel's. Marvel's horror anthologies were always produced by people with names like Stan and Don and Jack.

But DC?

Ah, DC, they knew a horror tale should be brought to you by people with names like Ruben, Alfredo, Nestor and Luis.

Top of the tree for me when it came to DC horror anthologies was Weird War Tales. This was odd, as one of the reasons I quickly gravitated towards American comics was that British comics always seemed to be full of plucky Tommies battling Germans who only ever said things like, "Gott in Himmel", "Achtung", and, "For you, Britisher dog, the war is over." Needless to say, thanks to this sophisticated level of characterisation, I was not a fan of war comics.

Perhaps inevitably though, war and horror go together and, thus, as a lover of horror, I was more then willing to make an exception for Weird War Tales.

Issue #23 is, I think pretty typical of the mag. In the first tale, the mighty Alfredo Alcala shows us his illustrative chops, as an American GI keeps seeing a bird of death hovering over anyone who's going to die. Needless to say he uses this "gift" to lure his nasty German captor to the doom he so richly deserves. The second story's a Day After Doomsday scenario with a man who's starving and finds a snack machine that only dispenses money. Although well done, they're pretty much standard fare for the title.

But the final story's one of my favourite Weird War Tales ever; Corporal Kelly's Private War, in which a radar operator, bored by the lack of action in the modern army, finds himself transported to another dimension where he single handedly wins a war, only to find, when he returns home, that his absence is to blame for Pearl Harbour.

It's quite untypical in that way. Mostly DC horror stories saw their protagonist get the comeuppance he so richly deserved, whereas poor old Corporal Kelly's done nothing whatsoever to deserve his fate. George Kashdan wrote it but a huge chunk of the thing's appeal is that it's drawn by the fabulous Alex Nino, a man whose twisted and demented artwork defies all description. In his hands, even a tin of beans becomes a strange and alien thing.

A couple of years back, I got my hands on a job lot of Weird War Tales, including virtually all the issues I had as a kid and, reading them all back-to-back, it quickly becomes clear how limited the comic's palette was, with the same ideas turning up time and again. How many times someone invaded another community with surprising ease only to discover their new "subjects" were all vampires who'd allowed themselves to be "conquered" so they'd have a ready supply of food. Or, as in this issue, a man with a curse/gift who uses it to die a hero. Not to mention endless doomed attempts to achieve literal or metaphorical immortality.

It's also clear that, strangely, it didn't seem able to move readers to strong opinions, judging by editor Joe Orlando's constant pleas for them to actually send in some letters so he could have a letters page. Still, as a kid, none of that ever struck me. All I knew was that war is hell and, for the twenty minutes it took to read an issue, I was in a minor kind of heaven.

Savage Tales #6. It's all gone Ka-Zar.

It was either smoke and mirrors or it was page count and covers but was there anything more exciting in the 1970s than getting your hands on one of Marvel's magnificent monochrome mags?

It's ironic that a large part of what made the monthly titles seem special to British eyes was that - unlike Marvel UK's output - they were in colour... ...and yet the black and white US mags somehow seemed more glamorous than the monthlies.

Savage Tales #6 was a perfect example of that, announcing its presence with a dramatic cover by Neal Adams. I have to admit that, at the time, I didn't know who Neal Adams was. Oh I'd seen his work before. I'd seen it in the Batman, and X-Men comics but, although I'd seen it, it'd somehow failed to make an impact on me. For that, I had to wait until the Mighty World of Marvel's reprints of the Kree/Skrull War. But, despite not knowing who'd done it, this cover certainly got my attention and, inspired by it, I remember copying parts of it, on various scraps of paper we had lying around the house.

For me, what makes this comic stand out is that it stars Ka-Zar. Thinking about it, Ka-Zar's the only major Marvel hero who I can't imagine being able to beat any other Marvel hero. Even the less than mighty Ant Man could probably sort him out, by summoning the (presumably) huge insects of the Savage Land and getting them to gang up on him. But it's all about context and, while many of Marvel's heroes were extraordinary people in a more-or-less ordinary (New York) setting, Ka-Zar was a more-or-less ordinary man in an extraordinary setting.

In an oddly bitty issue, we kick off with half a Ka-Zar story drawn by John Buscema and inked by Tony DeZuniga. Although I like DeZuniga, I'm not convinced his inks were ever a good fit for Buscema. Buscema's own style here's virtually eliminated by DeZuniga, making it almost unrecognizable. As for it only being half a story, we're told it wasn't meant to be but DeZuniga fell ill during production and so the tale just stops at the point at which his kidney let him down. Such misfortune seems to have been a common problem with Marvel's black and white mags. I had an issue of Monsters Unleashed which seemed to have suffered a similar crisis.

Then we get a reprint of a Jan of the Jungle story then something about some bloke looking for dragon's teeth before we get the highlight of the issue, which is a Ka-Zar story reprinted from Savage Tales #1. It seems an odd decision to fill the gap left by the deadline emergency with a tale that'd been published only five issues earlier. Fortunately, I didn't have Savage Tales #1 so it didn't bother me but it must've left readers who had that earlier mag feeling somewhat cheated that they'd handed over the then hefty sum of 75 cents for virtually no new material.

The story's basically a big bag of clichés as a man and a woman who looks like Mary Jane Watson turn up in a very naff-looking tank, aiming to steal the Savage Land's supply of Vibranium which bears no resemblance to the Vibranium found in the Black Panther's kingdom of Wakanda. His metal absorbs vibration, this destroys metal. Presumably, this Vibranium would therefore destroy the Black Panther's Vibranium.

In truth the story feels like it could've been written for a colour monthly, and it's only a touch of mild nudity that would've prevented it being published in one. It seems to me this was the major failing of Marvel's black and whiters. To justify their high cover price, they were supposed to be aimed at a more mature readership but, when you read them, it's hard to spot where the greater maturity actually is. Even here, to no doubt protect the mature reader's delicate sensibilities, the scheming antagonist has a noticeable lack of nipples when her chest is exposed.

So, it's an oddly bitty mag featuring half a story, some characters you've never heard of before, some reprints, a woman without nipples, and arguably Marvel's weakest hero but the odd thing is that, for some reason, this is my favourite issue of any of Marvel's black and white mags. Maybe it's because I've always had a soft spot for Ka-Zar - basically a Conan the Barbarian who's free to move in both the modern and the archaic world as the writers see fit. Or maybe it's because his lack of glamour's better suited to black and white than some other Marvel heroes. Maybe it's something else - the sheer deadline-crisis-enforced quirkiness of its story choices - but when I started re-buying my old mags, on eBay, this was the first black and whiter I set out to get.

Action Comics #440. Of Superman and Superdog.

Many and varied are the powers of Superman but clearly his greatest is the ability to make you believe you think the opposite of what you actually do think.

My memory is that, as a kid, I never had much time for the Kryptonian clobberer. The big blue cheese was, after all, a bit square, a bit dull, a bit 2D and had far too many powers for the good of dramatic tension.

The odd thing is that, as I've started to rebuild the comic collection I had back then, what's struck me is how many Superman comics I had. I must've had more Superman issues than comics featuring any other hero.

Such a mystery needs reinvestigation. After all, If I was buying them in industrial quantities, there must've been something about them that grabbed me.

But what?

The obvious first answer is the covers. Just as I had a blind spot to my love of Supes, I seem to have had a blind spot to the existence of Nick Cardy. Until I started re-buying these old issues I'd somehow never heard of him.

I had, however, seen his covers.

And you know what?

They were fantastic.

I knew they were fantastic at the time but I never knew they were all by the same man. Now, it seems incredible to me that one artist could have done so many covers to so many comics to so high a standard. I definitely have to put together a post of my Nick Cardy favourites at some point.

But that's for the future.

For now, we'll have to settle for this one, the cover to Action Comics #440. Has there ever been a more potent cover to a comic book? You can practically feel the weight of the world on Superman's shoulders.

But it takes more than just a pretty picture on the front to make you love a comic. What about the contents?

Well, clearly this is the key to it all. It can't have been easy writing Superman in the 1970s. How do you come up with interesting stories about a hero who can basically do anything but whose tales have to be kept fairly light?

As the likes of Cary Bates and Elliot S! Maggin knew, mostly you do it by confronting Superman with a puzzle or mystery that has to be solved and have him think his way to a solution. It's an irony that the way to get the best out of the world's most physically adept super-hero is to get him dealing with problems primarily with his mind.

This issue is a perfect example as Elliot S! Maggin gives us a bunch of crooks who try to get rid of Superman by convincing him the ghosts of his parents are disappointed in him for having gone native and adopting too many Earth customs. All but disowning him, the "ghosts" order him to go and live on another planet. Needless to say, Superman quickly sees through this ruse and turns the villains' own plot against them.

This elegance, I think, is the clue to the strip's appeal. There's no peril here, no danger, just a slight conundrum. It's such a contrast to the ramped-up drama of the average comic book that it can't help but grab you. It's the super-hero equivalent of sitting on the front lawn, on a sunny day, drinking Earl Grey and nibbling cucumber sandwiches.

Meanwhile, in the back-up strip, the Green Lantern and Black Canary stumble across a super-intelligent stray dog with superpowers. Although we're never told it in this story, it doesn't take a genius to work out it's Krypto, Superboy's old dog. But where's he been and why's he lost his memory?

Come to think of it, why hasn't Superman noticed he's missing and gone looking for him? I always felt Kal-El was somewhat neglectful of his cousin Supergirl - putting her in an orphanage the moment she got to Earth - now he's abandoned his dog? maybe it's time the social services had a word with him.

I'm fairly sure this tale features as back-up strip in another issue of Action Comics from around the same time, although, off the top of my head, I'm not sure which one. Was it a mistake? Were they so proud of it they were determined to reprint it? Was there a deadline problem that meant they had to grab the first story at hand and hope no one noticed?

But who cares, these things happen and it's a cute tale beautifully drawn by the mighty Mike Grell who, for a relative novice, seemed to have been given a fair old workload at the time.

Tomb of Dracula #23.

What would happen if Dracula came up against Aleister Crowley?

He'd flatten him of course.

And that's exactly what happens in this tale, as the count of crepuscular comes up against the ghost of Alestar Dunwick, a villain so clearly based on, "The world's wickedest man," that writer Marv Wolfman couldn't even be bothered with changing his name completely.

Dunwick's ghost is being a naughty boy, keeping his niece prisoner in his ex-home for purposes of evil-doing. Needless to say, Dracula soon puts a stop to that and, in the niece, has a new recruit to his cause,

I might as well own up, when it comes to my favourite Marvel title of the 1970s, it's a toss-up between Steve Gerber's Defenders and Marv Wolfman/Gene Colan's Tomb of Dracula, and this issue, #23, was the first TOD tale I ever had.

It shows how perspective changes as you get older because, aside from the fact it was about Dracula, the thing that made me buy this issue as a kid was the front cover. Which is ironic because, with its cheap melodrama - not to mention wild misrepresentation of events within - I'd now see it as the weakest thing about the comic. Still, it does give Gil Kane and Tom Palmer a chance to join forces and I'm not sure if they ever did so outside the covers of Tomb of Dracula, so at least it has something to recommend it.

As always with this strip, the story inside's a wonderfully atmospheric thing. Gene Colan had a style that wasn't always suited to super-heroes - although he did have distinguished runs on Daredevil and Iron Man - but, when it came to horror, his love of light, shade and awkward angles was perfect. And who better to ink him than Tom Palmer, a man equally adept with light and shade and who was, along with the now sadly departed Dick Giordano, my favourite inker of the era.

With a villain clearly modelled on Crowley and a plot lifted from Roddy McDowalls' Legend of Hell House, Marv Wolfman wasn't exactly being original with this tale but that doesn't matter. Tomb of Dracula was always about style and mood and, as with most of the Wolfman/Colan run, this has it in spades. The only negative I'd have to make about it is it features a quick glimpse of Dracula's daughter Lilith who always tied Dracula's comic too closely to the mainstream world of Marvel by running around dressed like a super-villain. Whereas Werewolf by Night could somehow get away with inhabiting the same world as the likes of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, the presence of such things in the world of Dracula was always jarring and, for me, had a weakening effect on the strip whenever they appeared.

Killraven. Amazing Adventures #31

I was an undemanding child. Generally speaking, as long as a comic didn't star Nick Fury I was happy, which means a mag had to work really hard for me to hate it.

Clearly the snappily titled Amazing Adventures featuring Killraven Warrior of the Worlds, worked incredibly hard because, when I first got my hands on it, I instantly decided it was the worst comic I'd ever read; pretentious, dull and meaningless. Not only that but it bore a noticeable resemblance to the distinctly lame Apeslayer in Marvel UK's weekly Planet of the Apes title.

A quick check made it clear that, in those tales, some crafty personage had redrawn ape heads onto mutants and robots to make Killraven look like a Planet of the Apes series. At the time, such an act seemed a con but looking back on it, I greatly admire the ingenuity concerned and wish they'd continued with the policy after they finished the Apeslayer run. I'd have loved to have seen the adventures of the Apetastic Four or Tomb of Ape-ula.

But Killraven himself was another matter. For those who don't know, the series was based on the idea that, having failed to invade the Earth last time around, in HG Wells' War of the Worlds, the Martians who'd stayed at home had developed a cure for Earth's diseases and, in the early years of the 21st century, had re-invaded, this time succeeding. Now Killraven and his motley band of Freemen were battling to liberate their world from the Martians.

Having decided Killraven was a total dud, I then changed my mind and went on to buy practically the whole run of Don McGregor and Craig Russell's series. After just two issues I was convinced it was the greatest comic ever, full of wisdom, insight and profundity, raising the American comic book to the status of genuine art form.

But Amazing Adventures #31, The Day The Monuments Shattered, was where my Killraven experience began. Reading it now as an adult, I find my opinion's swung completely back the other way. The story's just an unfocused mess. The Freemen hang around a bit, fight a monster for no noticeable reason, other than that it's there, and then kill the bad guys. What the monster's tossed into the mix for, I don't know. It just seems to be there for the sake of throwing yet another element into a story that already has two bad guys for our heroes to fight.

What never occurred to me as a kid was that the golden arches that feature so prominently in this tale are meant to be the McDonalds logo. Therefore, this tale's making a point about McDonalds, or fast food, or the consumer society, or something.

Isn't it?

The only problem is I can't figure out what that point is. And that's the trouble I have with Killraven these days which is that it seems to me that, ultimately, Don McGregor didn't actually have an awful lot to say but insisted on saying it in as many words as he possibly could.

I also wonder how Craig Russell felt about the whole thing. He was producing some of the finest art you'll ever see in a comic book, only to see McGregor plastering captions and speech balloons all over every single millimetre of it.

On top of so many words being used to say so little, there's the problem that the people in Killraven don't speak like people. They speak like poets would if poets spoke like people imagine poets speak. Even this issue's derelict sailor speaks like he majored in philosophy before becoming a booze-befuddled drunk.

And so we get the odd dichotomy, because, if anyone asked me was Killraven any good, in all honesty, I'd have to tell them no. If anyone asked me should they buy McGregor and Russell's entire run on the series, I'd have to tell them yes. Not just because it's a beautiful looking strip but because, although the thing didn't work, at least it tried to raise the American comic book to another level. And because not many comics of that time even tried to do that, it at least deserves some love for that.