April 5th, 1975 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

Hooray! It's Easter!

Needless to say, in order to celebrate, I've spent all day biting the heads off bunnies.

Wait. What's that you say? You can get them in chocolate form these days?

Well, don't I just feel like a fool?

That's all well and good but what were our favourite Marvel UK mags up to in the week that the Bay City Rollers were Number One on the UK charts with Bye Bye Baby?

By the looks of it, it's going to be a case of, "Bye bye, baby," for Gwen Stacy.

However, if this issue contains the story I think it does (the one where Spidey announces his true identity at a party and then gets Hobie Brown in to cover for him), I can confirm that Gwen Stacy is in no danger at all and that this cover is a great big fib-monster

Gwen Stacy might be in no danger but Shall-Bal certainly is because Marvel UK reprints my favourite Silver Surfer story, as Mephisto  makes his diabolical debut.

I've no idea what's going on on this cover but it certainly looks striking.

Hooray! Apeslayer's still sorting out those naughty apes.

I  do believe that this is the one where the Hulk lifts up an entire cliff in one of the most memorable comic book images of my childhood.

It's another of those covers where Dracula grabs someone and threatens them.

I do feel it's high-time they had a cover that features Dracula as the one who's being threatened.

It's the first Conan story I ever read, as Zukala and his daughter make their first appearances.

And you can read my review of that story, right here.

April 1965 - Marvel Comics, Fifty Years Ago Today.

April the First has just been and gone but were our Marvel heroes of exactly fifty years ago finding themselves being made fools of?

It's after twelve o'clock, so let's find out.

It was only recently that I discovered that the Baron Zemo in the Silver Age comics wasn't the original Baron Zemo from World War Two. Truly my ignorance knows no bounds.

Giant-Man and the Melter are clearly having a contest here to see who can have the worst costume. Despite Giant-Man's best efforts, I think the Melter's won. Just what are those weird bat's ear things on his head for and how do they relate, conceptually, to the power of melting things?

It's a bit of a classic, as our hero comes up against his mightiest foe yet.

I do like this tale because it's one of those rarities, an early Marvel tale where two of their heroes meet and there's no doubt at all about who wins.

And it's a classic FF tale as they decide to invade the Skrull homeworld.

I did always wonder why the only Skrull female in this story looks an awful lot prettier than the Skrull males do.

But I do remember being very taken with those aliens who look like dandelion clocks.

I have always thought this was a very strange cover, with Loki just floating there in mid-air. I wonder if he was added after the rest of the artwork, at Stan Lee's insistence?

One of my favourite Steve Ditko Spider-Man covers, showing off the elegance of both his figure-work and composition.

Dr Strange is relegated to being a cover insert by The Bouncing Ball of Doom! Oh the grave indignity. No wonder he looks so peeved.

I did always like it when Hawkeye and the Black Widow used to show up in Iron Man's strip. Even though they shouldn't have been any real threat to him, they had a certain soap opera charm to them. Maybe in my subconscious they were some sort of criminal counterparts to Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts.

I have no idea at all who Madam Macabre is, nor just what's going on on the cover.

The south east Asian appearance of Madam Macabre and her lackey/boss hints that the surprise guest villain of this tale might be the Mandarin but I'd hope not. Not wanting to put him down but I couldn't see Giant-Man surviving for five seconds if the Mandarin showed up.

2000AD. March 1977.

You the reader demanded it and I the Steve Does Comics delivers it - a startling new feature that's bound to shake the cosmos to its very foundations, as I take a look at what 2000AD was up to this month exactly thirty eight years ago.

It's going to be a challenge because, having taken a sneak peak at the covers to come, I can't recall anything that happened in any of them.

For this month, it's going to be even harder because I never owned the first few issues and so never even knew what was going on in them in the first place.

Still, I shall endeavour to proceed and hope that someone can furnish the insight and information that're going to be so woefully lacking from my posts.

So, grip my space hands, gird up your sci-fi loins and leap with me, way back in time to the future to find out just what the world's going to be like in March of 2000AD.

PS. The comic was actually launched in February of 1977, so, for this inaugural post, I've included that month's covers as well. Who says you never get anything for free in this life?

Not Tharg. That's for sure. He's giving us a free Space Spinner, which I'm assuming is one of those circular, red plastic boomerangs that seemed to be compulsory for every British comic to give away at some point.

I don't think I've ever met anyone who exclaims, “Aieeeeeee!” in times of stress. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd want to.

Cowboys vs dinosaurs. All it needs now are giant robot gorillas and it'll be the perfect comic cover. 

Dan Dare gets his first frontispiece But we don't care about that. We're all too busy worrying about the terror baron of Dinosaur City.

Mention a giant robot gorilla and one's sure to show up.

In the past, I have referenced Exposition Man, that staunch character who used to show up on the front of early 1960s Marvel Comics. It's nice to see he's also managed to find work on this side of the pond as well.

March 29th, 1975 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

The whole nation may have turned its clocks forward this weekend but Steve Does Comics has no time for such progressiveness. Instead, it's turning its clock back; back to this weekend of forty years ago when Marvel UK were giving us their latest offerings.

I never had this issue, and first read the enclosed tale in one of the Essential Spider-Man volumes.

The thing that struck me when reading it was that the art on it doesn't look quite like that in any other Spider-Man story from this era, even though it was produced by the frequent team of Mooney and Romita. I have no answer to this mystery.

Is that a Bill Everett cover I espy?

Sadly, there are few clues as to what happens inside, and my memory refuses to tell me.

Zut alors! It's the fight that had to happen! Hands vs feet! Iron Fist vs Batroc!

I believe this may have been the first time I ever encountered Batroc. If I was a mean-spirited individual, I might declare that I wish it had been the last. But I'm not mean-spirited, so I won't.

Hooray! History is made as Marvel UK create their first ever super-hero - and Apeslayer is born.

More on that subject, right here.

Dracula, still being a pain in the neck.

Who wouldn't want this issue? It's a straightforward rule of drama that you can never go wrong with giant spiders.

I'm generally a defender of the use of speech balloons on front covers but even I can't claim that it was a good idea to have them on this one.

I think this may be the second part of the Surfer's battle with the Badoon.

To some degree, I can't help feeling that the Badoon were to Outer Space species what Batroc was to martial artists.

Steve Does Comics - A Man Of Letters: Part II.

Gasp, primitive humans, for I am now going to try and write an interesting post about sheets of paper.

I could claim that I'm doing this as a personal challenge designed to explore the very depths of my literary talent.

But the truth is I can't think of anything better to write about.

Admittedly, this isn't strictly speaking true.

Excitedly inspired by recent talk of Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Liverpool and Manchester agglomerating into one huge mega-city of ten million people, I was going to declare that the only thing wrong with the plan is that Mr Bumbleton, my local Community Support Officer, has now been replaced by Judge Dredd and that the bottom of my street is now populated entirely by hostile mutants. I was then going to use this as an excuse to write a review of a Judge Dredd tale from the 1978 2000AD Annual.

Sadly, this scheme hit the buffers when I actually read the tale and decided it wasn't a substantial enough story to  review, and then remembered that scanning hardback books is difficult. I must confess that, while I might live in a mega-city, I somehow fail to have mega levels of commitment.

So instead I fall upon my back-up plan, much as a failed samurai falls upon his sword, and bring you my thoughts on writing paper.

It's not just any old writing paper, of course.

That's because it's Marvel writing paper, as advertised on the back of early 1970s Marvel UK mags.

It's at this point that I must confess that my mind has long been tortured by thoughts of chocolate bunnies.

The reason for this is that fifty percent of the reason you buy them is that they look like bunny rabbits. But, the moment you start to eat one, you begin to wreck its innate bunniness and therefore diminish its spiritual appeal to you. Therefore, you don't want to eat it.

But the other fifty percent of the reason you bought it is that it's made of chocolate and can be eaten. Therefore, if you don't eat it, it fails to serve its purpose as chocolate and is therefore a waste of money.

That very same dilemma smacks you in the face when it comes to the subject of writing paper letterheaded with your favourite super-heroes. If you use it for its intended purpose and send it, in the form of letters, to other people, you won't have it anymore, depriving you of the item you coveted enough to hand over money for.

On the other hand, if you don't use it, then it has no purpose and you've wasted your money.

What is the solution to this emotional trial?

I have no idea.

That aside, the one thing that does always strike me whenever I see an offer on the back of an old comic is what happens if I cut out the coupon and - over forty years later - send it off?

Will I still get my goodies? Will I get a reply from a totally unrelated body telling me that Marvel UK no longer live there anymore? Will the coupon and the postal order simply disappear, never to be seen again? Perhaps all such orphaned coupons are placed in bottles by a government agency and then flung into the sea to float forever, gaining, in the process, a romance that one could hardly ever imagine would be bestowed upon a forty five pence postal order.

And there was me thinking that sheets of paper were less interesting than mega-cities. What a fool I was. Judge Dredd and his big stroppy Chopper bike might be one thing but I see now that, within that very subject of writing paper, lies the route to a madness from which no human mind could ever hope to escape.

March 22nd, 1975 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

Galloping galaxies! What an astronomical week we've had in Blighty. Within mere days of each other, the Northern Lights, a supermoon and a solar eclipse have all occurred above the city in which I live.

Needless to say, I missed all of them, thanks to it being cloudy.

Still, at least I can find comfort in looking back, through my Telescope of Time, at what our favourite Marvel UK mags were up to in this week of exactly forty years ago.

The Black Widow's still tangling with Spider-Man.

And you can read my review of this tale, right here.

It's the cover that infamously redraws the Vision as Thor because no stories featuring the Vision had yet been reprinted in the UK.

You can read my review of this story right here.

Meanwhile, it's exciting for me to see that, in this issue, we also get the only Sons of the Tiger tale I've ever read.

Hold on a minute. Didn't the Hulk vs Inheritor story get reprinted just a few weeks ago, in the issue before he met Jarella?

You do have to congratulate whoever it was who noticed that, "Inheritor," is a very similar word to, "Inhumans," and that, therefore, minimal changes would need to be made to Jim Steranko's original artwork if it were to be re-used for this tale.

Call me a Luddite but I'm not at all sure that Dracula and motor bikes will ever belong on the same cover as each other.

I never had this issue but I have read this tale reprinted in an issue of Guardians of the Galaxy. Presumably, the dreaded deadline doom must have stricken them.

Conan about to go on a chopping expedition.

Covers commissioned especially for Marvel UK tended to be less than memorable but I have always liked this one. It has a level of drama to it that appeals to me.

Worlds Unknown #4 - Arena!

It's Saturday evening.

It may be 1969.

Before my very eyeballs, a new TV show's appeared.

It features a strange man in a ripped shirt.

It features another man, with the head of a dinosaur.

I know at once that this isn't Antiques Roadshow. Mostly because Antiques Roadshow hasn't been invented yet and, in my innocence, I have no reason to fear that it ever will be.

It turns out it's a new show, a show from a land far across the sea, where everything's bigger than it is over here. It's called Star Trek and it's the sort of thing anyone with any sense would want to see on their TV on a Saturday.

That episode was, of course, Arena, in which Captain Kirk's dumped on a planet by some all-powerful aliens to scrap it out with a ruffian to decide which of their two races deserves to live.

Kirk's outmatched in both the brute force and shirt-strength departments and his foe is cunning. But Kirk finally comes to realise he has one advantage.

He knows how to make a bamboo bazooka.

As I'm sure we all know, that episode wasn't an original tale. It was based on a story of the same name by Fredric Brown.

Except it seems it wasn't. Apparently, when it was written, the producers knew nothing of Brown's tale but, upon being informed of their own tale's resemblance to it, they promptly had the episode re-titled Arena and credited it as an adaptation of his story in order to make sure the lawyers wouldn't be calling.

Marvel, however, suffered from no such ignorance and so gave us their own straight adaptation of the tale in Worlds Unknown #4, later reprinted in Marvel UK's Planet of the Apes comic.

What happens is this. Bob Carson, an Earth astronaut, suddenly finds himself on a strange planet, having been teleported from his spaceship just as he was about to open fire on the craft of a pilot from a mysterious race known only as the Outsiders, with whom Earth's at war.

It turns out that an all-powerful being has put him and his foe on the planet, to fight it out.

After much scrapping and scheming and exposition, Carson finally achieves victory in his personal battle and instantly finds himself back on his ship - only to be told that the entire Outsider fleet has blown up for no noticeable reason.

Everyone else assumes it was down to a structural flaw in their ships but, alone of all the human race, Bob Carson knows what really happened.

It has to be said that Carson wins thanks to a plan that has to be the worst plan ever devised. It basically involves him knocking himself out and then hoping he'll recover his senses before the Outsider can tear him to pieces.

Luckily for him, it works but, given that the Outsider is only yards away when he knocks himself out, you have to say that, in the real world, it'd need a miracle for it to succeed.

Other than that, there's no bamboo bazooka, no tearing off of shirts and, most differently of all, upon achieving his victory, Carson doesn't give an impassioned speech at thin air about not killing a helpless foe, he just gets stuck into the task of killing him in the most basic manner possible.

On the plus side, there are a couple of lizards. One of which suffers a tragic fate, and another which reveals it has the power of speech. Regardless of the presence of a protagonist and an antagonist, the lizards are definitely the stars of the show.

"...from bamboo!"

As seen in the treatment of the first lizard, the tale's more sober than the Star Trek version but I must admit I do prefer the Star Trek one, simply because it features Captain Kirk and, no matter how melodramatic Kirk is as a character, he does have a certain vigour that helps to keep an episode bowling along energetically.

Star Trek also has that music. That music we all like to sing along to whenever there's a fight scene. No matter how hard it tries, no comic can ever hope to give us that.

Admittedly, I say that but I don't remember if that episode actually does use that music at any point.

But in my head it does. And that's good enough for me.