Kate Bush: the campaign starts here.

Reader, this woman must represent this nation!

As we all know, Steve Does Comics rarely ventures into the realms of Politics, viewing such a pursuit as the first refuge of the scoundrel. However, sometimes an issue raises its head, an issue so vital that even I can't ignore it. So it is that I have to announce I've launched a government e-petition calling for Kate Bush's Oh England, My Lionheart to be the official English National Anthem. I'm sure you're aware that if a government e-petition gets 100,000 signatures it has to be debated in parliament and thus might become law.

But why? I hear you ask.

Well, the truth is that no one knows more than me the power of a National Anthem to unite people. One of my happiest childhood memories is of the communal mass scramble to flee the cinema before the National Anthem started. Hundreds of total strangers united in one cause - escape.

While the plucky Scots and Welsh have their own National Anthem, England still doesn't, relying on the horror that is God Save the Queen. Leaving aside the fact it's presumptuous for us to use the UK anthem as the English anthem, it's such a rotten song, a one-note dirge that no one knows the words to beyond the first verse. Everything after that verse just seems to be an exhortation to kill the Scots. This is clearly not a good thing.

Admittedly, during those dense, dark months of 1994 when Wet Wet Wet were Number 1 for 87 consecutive weeks, such a course of action suddenly seemed tempting - but then I look into the eyes of Wee Jimmy Krankie and think how could we do it? How could we take the life of that innocent child whose life has barely begun?

Clearly therefore, if only for Jimmy Krankie's sake, England needs a National Anthem of its very own.

Unfortunately the contenders that people always put forward tend to be bombastic shouty nonsense about global supremacy and killing even more foreigners, or are on the geographically-challenged side. Not only that, they're the sort of things that get played at The Last Night of the Proms, thus multiplying their misery-inducing powers a hundredfold. Therefore I've decided it's vital that, before anyone can inflict one of those songs on us, we need to head them off at the pass by demanding an actual good song as the National Anthem. Therefore I'm proposing Kate Bush's gentle tribute to all things Englishness.

Unlike those other songs about crushing people, Oh England, My Lionheart is about the last thoughts of a Spitfire pilot as his plane crashes towards the ground. This is appropriate, as watching an England World Cup campaign is like watching a plane crashing - very slowly. Amazingly, despite being launched only last night, and me not yet having told anyone about it, the petition's already got two signatures. I'm assuming one of them's me. I don't have a clue who the other person is but, whoever you are, if you're reading this, thank you for your support.

As for you, Dear Reader; if you want an actual good song as a National Anthem, please sign the petition. If you want something that isn't a rampant exercise in bombastic nationalism, please sign the petition. If you're a Kate Bush fan, please sign the petition. If you hate Kate Bush, please sign it, because she doesn't like the song and therefore you'll probably annoy her. Most of all. If you want to ruin The Last Night of the Proms, please sign it. The petition in question can be signed here: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/12159.

Marvel Essentials.

Sometime in the late 1990s, I walked into the now-deceased Star Store on Sheffield's Cambridge Street and stumbled across a humble little book on a low shelf. It clearly hadn't been cut right - the cover being marginally smaller than the pages it was meant to be covering.

However, a close inspection revealed it reprinted the first 20-or-so issues of The Amazing Spider-Man - in glorious black and white, just as I remembered them as a child.

Needless to say I had to buy it.

That slightly dog-eared book was of course The Essential Spider-Man and, since then, those mind-controlling villains at Marvel have taken full advantage of my mental weakness by bringing out ever-more Marvel Essentials to prise my money from me. Creaking are my shelves with the weight of Essentials.

Well, there's no fool like an old fool and, still bitten by that bug, I've just gone mad and bought a whole slew more of the things: Thor Volumes 4 and 5, The Avengers Volume 6, and even the first two Captain America Essentials, even though I have no great interest in Captain America.

In terms of consistency my favourite run of Essentials is The Amazing Spider-Man from the start of Steve Ditko all the way through to the end of Ross Andru. The ability of that strip through the first fifteen years of its life to keep improving as it went along's genuinely astonishing and reflects just how strong the central concepts and characters of the title really were.

My favourite individual volume's probably Essential Avengers Volume 3 with all those Roy Thomas/John Buscema/George Klein tales.

My least favourite so far's been the Essential Killraven which totally failed to engage me despite me having loved the strip as a child. And I can't ignore the fact that Volume 1 of The Incredible Hulk's mostly poor, with even the likes of John Buscema and Gil Kane somehow failing to bring it to life.

Even for one with my addiction to the books, I can't deny there are certain Essentials I'll probably never own. With all the will in the world, I can't see myself ever buying The Essential Human Torch or Essential Ant-Man. However, Essential Sub-Mariner and Captain Marvel are on my future shopping list, as are all the Tomb of Dracula and Defenders books.

All this rambling is of course not done without ulterior motive. It's simply my way of leading up to the big question. Are you a fan of the Marvel Essentials and which have been your favourite and least favourite ones so far?

Amazing Spider-Man #36. Steve Does Comics gets topical.

As I'm sure you've noticed, there've been two big events this week. First has been the looting that afflicted large parts of this land. The other's been the arrival of the Perseid meteor shower. Sheffield, being the action-packed centre of the world that it is, managed to miss out on both.

But you couldn't say the same of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Somehow, way back in the 1960s, they managed to predict it all as they gave us a villain created by a meteor and calling himself The Looter.

How did they know the two events would be so linked?

I have no idea.

Perseid Pete Runs awok.

All I know is that, given the nature of the villain's origin, I'd've called him Perseid Pete but that's probably why no one ever listens to me.

In Amazing Spider-Man #36, Norton G. Fester's doing a Fred Hoyle, convinced that meteors hold the secret of life itself. Unlike Hoyle, his experiments on one make it release a gas that grants him super-human strength. Also unlike the late Professor Hoyle, he turns to crime.

Mad! Mad! Completely mad!

Mad! Mad! Completely mad!

Mad! Mad! Completely mad!

Quickly does he become rich. But it's not enough. He decides he needs to steal another meteor, from the local museum, in case the effects of the first one wear off. Happily Spider-Man's on hand to thwart him, with a good old fashioned knuckle sandwich.

Much as we all love Spider-Man and much as we all love Steve Ditko, you can't get away from it, the Looter's a terrible villain, lumbered with a mediocre costume, strength as his only super-power, and a lame motivation of stealing a meteorite. The tale also suffers from the less than clever resolution that Spider-Man wins-through simply by hitting the villain. It'd be fair to say the issue's plotting isn't complex and goes against Stan Lee's early rules that Spider-Man should beat foes as much by wit as power. Clearly Ditko, who by this stage was being left alone to plot things as he saw fit, took a different view.

Where the issue's more interesting is it features the very early days of Peter Parker's relationship with Gwen Stacy. Judging by some of Parker's thoughts, it may even be the first time he's ever spoken to her. What leaps out at you though is that this isn't the wholesome girl we remember from later years. The truth is that, as well as somehow managing to look more evil than the tale's official villain, she really does come across as a complete and total madwoman, endlessly stalking Parker, never thinking of anything but him and spontaneously bursting out in delirious fits of maniacal laughter. Frankly, if you met someone like her in real life, you'd take out a restraining order.

So, there you have it, a tale where the love interest seems more threatening than the villain, and the creators knew nearly fifty years ago of the mysterious link between meteor showers and civil disorder. What would've happened had Steve Ditko not left the strip within two issues of this one? Who can know? Would Gwen Stacy have been revealed as the Green Goblin? Who can know? Do I have the slightest clue how to end this post? Who can know?

The Fantastic fifty for the Fantastic Four.

Apparently, it's the fiftieth anniversary of the very first appearance of the Fantastic Four, making Reed Richards approximately 95 years old but still as limber as ever - assuming Marvel haven't killed him off while I've not been looking.

Well, Steve Does Comics has never seen a kitten it couldn't hug, nor a bandwagon it couldn't leap on, so this is all the excuse I need to ramble on aimlessly about the book they called, "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine."

I first encountered the Fantastic Four in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man Annual #6 when they took on everyone's favourite web-headed wonder. What most impressed me about them was Reed Richards' ability to make his hands into giant ping pong paddles and the fact they didn't seek to make money from their powers.

My next encounter came in Mighty World of Marvel #4, in which we got the concluding part of their first battle with the Skrulls. Although I loved the Skrulls ending up thinking they were cattle, what most impressed me about that tale was I got the idea into my head that Benjamin J Grimm had three nostrils. From where I got this notion, I don't have a clue but it took many a long month of reading their adventures before I realised he didn't.

From that point on, the thrills came thick and fast as the FF took on Dr Doom and the Sub-Mariner, battled for control of their very limbs with the Puppet Master, encountered the Watcher and, erm, killed Hitler.

Other early highlights were their first encounter with Kurrgo: Master of Planet X, and their once having to be rescued from a crisis by Ant-Man, making Ant-Man officially the greatest hero in comics to my then tiny mind.

But it wasn't all plain sailing. Frankly, the Invisible Girl's uselessness in any crisis, leading to her getting kidnapped in what seemed like every issue, rankled with my youthful sensibilities so much I used to fill in her dots with a marker pen, so the bad guys could see her and kill her.

They never did.

There was also no denying that sometimes Mr Fantastic could be a bit of a jerk, with his constant ordering around of his team mates, especially his oft declaimed demand of his own wife; "Silence!" The Thing probably turned against his own team mates one time too many to be forgiven and the Torch never did seem to learn to think before flying off.

But of course, despite all this, the strip hit its peak in the mid 1960s with the wedding of Reed and Sue and then that astonishing sequence of stories where they first met the Inhumans, met Galactus, met the Black Panther, met the Negative Zone, met the Kree and came up against a Cosmic-Powered Dr Doom.

As I roam the streets of Sheffield, no one whatsoever asks me what my favourite Fantastic Four tale is.

That won't stop me from telling everyone.

It was the FF's first encounter with the Inhumans. I know popular consensus goes for the first Galactus tale but I've never been popular and it was the Inhumans' debut that really grabbed me, as our heroes discovered a a hidden race of super-beings running around New York.

In hindsight, the tale made no sense at all, with the Inhumans failing miserably to work out whether they were trying to get away from or to the Great Refuge. It didn't matter. The madness of the tale just swept you along.

Sadly, as the 1960s entered their late afternoon, a fed-up Jack Kirby started to put less effort into things and the quality and freshness of stories tailed off noticeably. Ideas got recycled, sometimes from the comic itself, sometimes from movies and TV shows.

But still, even amongst such derivative stuff, there was The Prisoner-inspired tale of the FF trapped in Latveria, and the Thing being taken to another world to fight Torgo the robot. The roots of these stories might've been obvious but that didn't make them any less effective. And, as a Hammer Horror fan, how could I not love our heroes' first encounter with Agatha Harkness, their very own Mary Poppins?

Jack Kirby left the strip in 1970 and, thanks to the likes of John Romita, John Buscema, Rich Buckler and George Perez, I still loved it all through the 1970s. I even enjoyed it when the Impossible Man reappeared - although replacing the Human Torch with H.E.R.B.I.E. the flying robot stretched even my patience.

Shortly after that period, I lost touch with the Fantastic Four, mostly because the UK reprints disappeared from the newsagents.

In the last reprint I read, Galactus was halfway through a fight with the Sphinx. I never did find out how that story ended.

But, despite my total ignorance of almost everything that's happened in the Fantastic Four since, I still retain my soft spot for them, the squabbling heroes who couldn't even muster a single secret identity between them. And if they each had their failings as human beings, I suppose that was what ultimately marked them out as human beings and therefore more interesting than the perfect heroes who'd preceded them.

Well, that's the bandwagon jumped on. All I need do now is find a kitten to hug.

But where will I find such a thing at this time of night?

Planet of the Apes.

It's time for me to lay my dirty stinking paws on my keyboard and remind us all - with the escape of the Rise of the Planet of the Apes movie - that, when it comes to simian antics, there was once something far better than any mere film.

There was a comic.

That comic was Marvel UK's Planet of the Apes.

Planet of the Apes Weekly kicked off with the beautifully painted cover to the left, Part 1 of an adaptation of the original Charlton Heston Apes movie, and a poster that at this very moment sits just two feet away from me, rolled up in a tube.

Happily, I remember more about the Planet of the Apes' title strip than that of the Star Wars comic I blathered on about the other day. I recall that, after the Charlton Heston Apes adaptation, we were given a beautifully rendered Mike Ploog series about two characters who may have been called Jason and Alexander. As that serial went along, it drifted a little too far from the feel of the original movies for my liking but at least it always looked great.

Later we got the legendary Apeslayer and his remarkable resemblance to Killraven. I also recall a Tom Sutton series set on a giant ship - and an ape-tastic reworking of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

But the truth is such stories paled besides the back-up strips.

They kicked off in issue #2 with a Ka-Zar series that started off unpromisingly with a Jack Kirby adventure involving Kraven, before taking flight with a classic bunch of Barry Smith reprints that introduced Zaladane and Garokk the Petrified Man. Those early days also brought us Gullivar Jones on Mars while we later got Gil Kane and Roy Thomas' Warlock, the start of Marvel's Captain Marvel, the seemingly obligatory Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars and yet more Ka-Zar. There were also the delights of War Toy, Day of the Triffids and Farewell to the Master.

Arguably most impressive of all, we got the whole of Don McGregor's Panther's Rage, as the Black Panther tried to thwart a would-be revolution in his kingdom of Wakanda. We also got Mike Ploog's Man-Thing.

Later, as Marvel UK's decline began, the comic merged with Dracula Lives before merging with The Mighty World of Marvel. It was an uneasy fit; Planet of the Apes stories in a comic otherwise devoted to the likes of the Hulk and Daredevil.

Still, at least - as far as I remember it - the stint in Mighty World of Marvel gave the Powers-That-Be the chance to run the adaptation of Battle for the Planet of the Apes, meaning the whole Ape cycle was completed before the strip disappeared from the UK forever.

And so the reign of the apes had proven to be as doomed as the reign of man before it.

But at least it was fun while it lasted, and through it I learned the meaning of the word "lobotomy." Now it's time for me to grab my mute girlfriend, climb on my horse and set off into the Forbidden Zone of watching Sunday night TV.

What will I find there?

My destiny.

Either that or the millionth series of John Craven's Countryfile; whichever is most likely to make me fall to my knees, punching the sand in despair at the mad folly of the human race.

Once, twice, three times a maybe.

If you're in the habit of reading this blog with a calculator in one hand and a slide rule in the other, you'll have noticed that Steve Does Comics has smashed through an obstacle to compare with the famed Sound Barrier itself.

That's right, Steve Does Comics is now a walloping 3 megabytes big. Frankly I don't know how Google can take the strain. They're probably ordering a van-load of new servers right now. But that magical number 3 is all the excuse I need to look at what our favourite Marvel heroes were up to on their third ever appearance.

As we'll see, like Steve Does Comics itself, it's a totally random mixture of the inspired and the hopeless.

After two issues of behaving like you and me, the Fantastic Four suddenly start acting like proper super-heroes, getting themselves costumes, a fancy HQ and a flying bath tub.

They also get to come up against the disgracefully under-rated Miracle Man. I don't care what anyone else says about the Miracle Man, I still love him.

The Amazing Spider-Man celebrates its third outing in style as Spidey meets Dr Octopus for the first time ever. That's what Peter Parker gets for complaining there're no real challengers in this world for a man with the powers of a spider.

Still, it could've been worse. Our wall-crawling wonder could've come up against Man-With-A-Giant-Glass-And-Sheet-Of-Paper Man. Then he'd've really been in trouble.

The green goliath's membership of the Avengers doesn't last long as, faster than you can say, "Hulk smash!" he's turned against his former team mates and linked up with the Sub-Mariner to give them no end of trouble.

With his third appearance, the man without fear finally gets a super-foe of his own to fight as he comes up against what I suppose you have to count as his arch-enemy.

With his awesome power of gliding and not much else, the Owl's not exactly Dr Doom but he's still almost too much for DD to handle.

Everyone else in the world can say otherwise till they're blue in the face but I still prefer Daredevil's original costume to that fancy new red one he's been wearing for nearly fifty years.

The ever-changing feast that is the early run of The Incredible Hulk takes yet another turn as he develops the ability to leap but loses the ability to think, becoming nothing but a puppet of Rick Jones.

You can't get away from it, Lee and Kirby really were struggling to get the strip to work in its early days. Even the Ring-Master and his Circus of Crime couldn't get it going.

In his third outing, Thor meets his deadly ancient enemy Loki - even though Thor's only been around for three issues and therefore can't have an ancient enemy. I wonder how they'll ever get round that conundrum?

Personally, I'd love to read Filbert's Frightful Future but I fear I'll never get the chance.

Iron Man takes on Dr Strange but not that Dr Strange.

With his mind-control powers and his wholesome daughter, this Dr Strange was like the Puppet Master without the puppets. Was he ever heard from again? I'd like to think he was but suspect he wasn't.

The Blob makes his first ever appearance, and the world of comic books would never be the same again.

Well, OK, it would.

I don't know much about the Blob. Is he one of those villains you could defeat by locking him in a closet? I always feel any villain who can be defeated by being locked in a closet probably isn't worthy of the title, "Super."

In his third adventure, the mighty Ant-Man comes up against the Protector.

The Protector? He sounds nice - unlike that creepy sounding Ant-Man.

I love the tiny cannon sticking out of Ant-Man's house, capable of firing him all of two feet through the air.

And to think they called Henry Pym mad.



PS. A special celebration 3 megabyte Steve Does Comics No-Prize goes to the first reader to spot the "deliberate" mistake in this post. Never let it be said this isn't the Steve Does Comics Age of Megabytes.

Star Wars. A comic not that long ago, in a galaxy not that far away.

I must confess I wasn't the biggest Star Wars fan in the world.

I liked the look of the thing; the flying car and the robots and spaceships - and I wouldn't have said no to owning my own real-life Millennium Falcon in which to zoom about the universe. But the story and the characters always lacked a certain something for me. Not least Luke Skywalker who was always a bit Waltons for my liking.

The truth is that, at a time when I was big on Killraven and Panther's Rage, Star Wars' characters and plot lines seemed more than a little simplistic in comparison. Not even the sight of Princess Leia chained half-naked to a giant slug while teddy bears acted like Tarzan could convince me otherwise.

That of course didn't stop me from having the famous Hildebrandt poster on my wall, nor from reading Marvel UK's Star Wars mag each week for years on end.

Nor did it stop me assembling the cardboard X-Fighter that came free with issue #1.

I have a feeling issue #2 came free with a DIY cardboard Darth Vader plane, which was also dutifully assembled.

Sadly, I don't think they ever did a DIY Millennium Falcon.

As for the comic, I always lumped it in with Marvel UK's Planet of the Apes weekly, in that I was always more interested in the back-up stories than the main strip itself. In all honesty I can't even remember anything about the main strip other than it was drawn by Carmine Infantino at one point, which presumably meant that everyone suddenly started to look very wide.

But the back-up strips? Well, there was a whole other matter. Thanks to Star Wars Weekly, I got to catch up on all the adventures of Jim Starlin's Warlock, John Byrne's Starlord, the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Tales of the Watcher. Plus I got another chance to read Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars.

On the downside, it also ran Deathlok, one of the few 1970s' Marvel strips I could never get on with, and there was a thing called Sword in the Star which made so little impression on me that all I recall is its title and that I didn't like it.

I also can't neglect the oddity that was Micronauts, a strip I never knew quite what to make of. On one hand it was clearly classier than it should've been, bearing in mind it was based on a set of toys. Then again, I could never quite get past the fact it was based on a set of toys. It was also the strip that introduced me to the work of Jim Shooter's favourite writer Bill Mantlo.

Sometime in the early 1980s, Star Wars Weekly moved to a monthly format and I still kept on reading it, though my memories of that stage in its history really are vague. In fact, I can't even remember what the back-up strips were during that era - assuming there were any and it wasn't all wall-to-wall Star Wars.

Taking it all into consideration, as Denny Laine once said, I'm not sure The Force was strong in me and I'd rather have a light snack than a light sabre but, if Star Wars never quite set my soul on fire the way it was meant to, it did at least allow stuff that I preferred to sneak in through the back door, and therefore did me a service even greater than blowing up the Death Star.