May 1st, 1976 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

This being a bank holiday weekend, less than a day ago, I was in front of my TV, watching the Peter Cushing monster-fest At the Earth's Core. How I thrilled. How I gasped. How I wondered why Doug McClure was incapable of going anywhere without encountering supposedly extinct creatures.

But what was Marvel UK giving us in this week of the year in which that film was first released?

There's only one way to find out...

Our heroes are still teaming up with the Squadron Supreme on an alternate Earth.

I'm not totally sure though why the Vision's telling his colleague things they already know.

The X-Men swap places with the Fantastic Four in Marvel UK's flagship book.

Given that I loved the Fantastic Four and hated the Original X-Men, this was not seen by me as being a good thing.

Jason and Alexander are still having all kinds of problems.

It's all getting exciting for me. Only one week to go before Spider-Man's mag returns permanently to my local newsagent's.

I think the Thor tale in this issue may be the one where he swaps bodies with Loki.

Vlad the Impaler meets Juno the Impaler.

What with recent events in Planet of the Apes and now in Dracula Lives, Marvel UK was giving us more evil brain shenanigans than we could have known what to do with.

Hooray! With this issue, The Titans returned permanently to my local newsagent's.

I do remember being very pleased with Gil Kane's art on the Captain America strip.

I believe the Captain Marvel tale was drawn by Jim Starlin.

I was enthralled by the FF's travails in Latveria.

All in all, what a magnificent issue it was.

The artists least likely to make you buy a comic.

Only the other day, I pontificated on which artists were most likely to make me buy a book when I was a youth.

But that raised the obvious point; which artists were most likely to make me not buy a book when I was a youth.

I clearly wasn't very fussy as a child because there really weren't many artists whose work was sufficient to put me off a comic.

In fact, in terms of pencillers, the only two I can think of are Frank Robbins and Don Heck.

In both cases, it wasn't totally black and white. I actually really liked Don Heck's work on the early Avengers and I loved it on the pre-Colan Iron Man stories.

Sadly, after that period, I found his work increasingly off-putting and there were times when his jagged, scratchy lines and areas of flat, dead black positively hurt my eyes. However, as I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, even after his mid-1960s heyday, I did quite like his work on Savage Sub-Mariner #68, in which he seemed to regain some of his lost elegance.

Frank Robbins was another odd case. For the most part, I couldn't stand his work. His figures looked to be filled with a weird, frenzied energy that threatened to make them fly apart at any moment and I found such strips as The Invaders next to impossible to read when he was working on them. Then again, I did really like his work on The Shadow, a strip his retro style seemed perfect for.

In fact, I would say that the artist whose presence was most likely to put me off buying a comic wasn't a penciller at all. It was an inker. And that inker was Jack Abel whose flat line-work, tendency to simplify anatomy to near-geometric shapes and his fussy hatchings, seemed to diminish the work of any artist he delineated. I'm sure he was a very nice man but I could never bring myself to like his output.

I also had an antipathy to the efforts of Syd Shores whose inks seemed far too heavy-handed for my liking. I especially struggled to like them over the work of Gene Colan and Jack Kirby, two pencillers his style seemed particularly ill-suited to.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. What are yours? Feel free to use the comments section below to get your childhood frustrations off your chest.

The artists most likely to make you buy a comic.

You can never accuse this blog of not being clued-up. After all, it's only taken six years of its existence for it to occur to me to do a post about who my favourite Bronze Age artists were.

It's easy, of course, to make the mistake of doing this in a rational manner, informed by adult knowledge of who did what and how well.

But that would be to ignore the fact that I read those comics when I was a youth and had nothing to go on back then but gut instinct as to what I did and didn't like.

Therefore, I'm going to, as I type these magic words, try to cast my mind back to the 1970s and remember which artists' presence in a mag would have been most likely to make me buy it in those days.

As far as I can remember, these are the artists in question: John Buscema, Jim Aparo, E.R. Cruz, Jim Starlin, John Byrne, Barry Smith, Mike Grell, Dave Cockrum, Alfredo Alcala, Walt Simonson, Paul Gulacy, Nestor Redondo and Neal Adams.

It's interesting that, since then, my tastes have changed somewhat. Of those, I must confess that Mike Grell's work no longer grabs me overly much, as I can spot its anatomical weaknesses and his debt to Neal Adams that I somehow missed as a child.

Neal Adams himself, while I can still see how accomplished and creative he was, doesn't hold the same appeal for me as he did back then. There's something about the rubberiness of his figures and the ad-campaign quality of his work that distances me from the stories in a way they once didn't.

Paul Gulacy's a strange one. Somehow, at the time, I totally failed to spot that, in his work on Shang-Chi, he was totally channelling Jim Steranko. As an adult, it simply leaps out at me. The odd thing is that I don't care about that because I actually prefer the look of Gulacy's work to Steranko's. Truly, the human mind is an odd thing.

All the other artists on the list, I think I still perceive in the same light as I did back then.

As for people who don't make that list, the likes of Sal Buscema and John Romita always appealed to me but never enough to motivate me to buy a comic just because they'd drawn them.

Oddly, even though Gil Kane was one of my favourite artists of all time, his presence in a comic was, likewise, never an actual motivating force for me buying it.

Anyway, who were the artists whose work was most likely to make you buy a comic back in the days of your youngsterdom? And have your views on them changed over the years?

April 24th, 1976 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

It's been a very strange and depressing year so far. Virtually everyone famous in the whole world has died, often with no warning.

There are times when you're glad there's a place called The Past where all your showbusiness idols were still alive and you could, every week, read about the adventures of people for whom death was never more than a temporary setback.

It's a salutary warning to us all to never trust evil children who have gigantic heads, flying chairs and super-powers.

It's a warning I shall make sure to heed at all times.

That's a very dramatic cover.

I can say nothing else about it, as I don't have a clue what happens on the inside.

I suspect it might be yet more of the Jason and Alexander saga but I refuse to be quoted on that.

Dracula's still causing trouble in the New World.

The Disruptor gives a masterclass in how to conduct a political campaign.

Interesting to see that Ghost Rider manages to be in two Marvel UK mags this week.

In fact, wasn't he in The Titans as well? Good grief! He was practically ubiquitous.

Hooray! It's the Hulk vs Black Bolt. I loved this tale when I was a youngster.

Even more hooray! For no noticeable reason, the FF move to The Titans and we get Jack Kirby's tribute to The Prisoner, as our heroes find themselves being guests of Dr Doom.

Even more excitingly, this means I only have to wait one more week for The Titans to return permanently to my local newsagents. Soon, I'll be getting four Marvel UK comics a week!

Truly, this was the golden age of Marvel UK.

At least, in my house, it was.

2000 AD - March 1978.

It's time once more to look at what the galaxy's greatest comic was giving us one month and thirty eight years ago. Taking a look at what a comic was doing one month and thirty eight years ago is such an obvious idea that I'm amazed no one has ever done it before.

In fairness, there seems to be have been little happening in that month that inspires me to make comment. Therefore, I shall skip making comments on each issue and, instead, summarise my thoughts, right here, at the beginning of the post.

I do note that M.A.C.H. 1 is drawn in some of these issues by Jesus Redondo, raising the question in my mind as to whether he's related to Nestor Redondo of DC Comics fame. It would appear, from my in-depth research on the internet, that there's no reason to believe he is, as he's from Spain and Nestor was from the Philippines.

I also note that Dan Dare is having that age-old problem of what to do when confronted by a bunch of people who all look the same but are mostly evil. Obviously, the answer is to shoot them all and worry about it later. I can't imagine why they've never put me in charge of any space missions.

I also note that Dan Dare's shuttlecraft thing has the Eagle Comic logo on it. Putting comic book logos on spaceships is a marvellous conceit that I'd hope to see copied by other spacecraft in future.

April 17th, 1976 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

On this day in 1976, BBC One was showing the legendary cartoon that is Marine Boy.

All I can remember about Marine Boy was that he could breathe underwater, possibly with the aid of chewing gum and he had an electric boomerang.

Given that he lived underwater, I'm not sure how wise it was for him to be using electrical implements.

Then again, perhaps he didn't have an electric boomerang. Maybe I'm just imagining it or indulging in some sort of wishful thinking based on the fact that I think we'd all like to own an electric boomerang of our very own.

How people would tremble as they saw me gearing up to fling it at them.

Then again, that'd make me basically the old Hulk foe The Boomerang who, let's be honest, made Paste-Pot Pete look like Galactus.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in this week in 1976...

I assume the Iron Fist story is still his epic battle with Radion and their epic destruction of the Post Office Tower.

I remember my first ever visit to London, where we stood in some park or other (possibly Green Park) and the teacher pointed out the Post Office Tower and said it was the tallest building in Britain.

It did seem a bit rubbish that that was the tallest building in Britain. It barely seemed taller than the tallest buildings in Sheffield. It gave me a very negative image of our fabled land.

I do remember loving the Hulk tale in this and the next issue, especially Hulkie's confrontation with Black Bolt.

Argh! The brains are escaping, even though they look more like giant maggots.

Iron Fist is in England. Dracula is in America. It's like some sort of super-powered student exchange programme.

Politics comes to the Spider-World as the Disruptor shows us all how democracy should be done and Mary Jane reveals that she votes for candidates because they're dishy.

I'm assuming, from the bad guys' blue faces, that the Plunderer in this tale is not the one who was in the habit of causing trouble for Ka-Zar?

Forty years ago today - April 1976.

First up, I'm contractually obliged to mention that my legendary fourth novel Keep Those Things Away From Me has now hit the bookshelves of Amazon's Kindle Store. It's 92,000 words of unlikely sci-fi goodness. So shocking are its contents that, already, Hollywood is refusing to film it - just as it's refused to film any of my previous novels.

You can find it at your local branch of Amazon, such as Amazon UK, Amazon.Com and various others.

In another mind-numbing development, after fifteen years, Harper/Collins have finally got round to releasing my first two novels on Kindle. Should you choose to, you can find them here and here and at the various other Amazon sites around the world.

In the meantime, let's take a look at what our favourite Marvel heroes were up to in this month of forty years ago and see if it can possibly compare to such power and drama.

At last, Conan takes on his deadliest foes yet.

Moths.

Possibly more importantly, he comes up against Amra, the titanic Tarzan-alike whose identity, I believe, he ends up adopting for himself.

It's the one where Captain America and the Falcon find themselves in a deadly skateboard derby.

Is this the one where Cap loses his shield and pretty much has a total psychological meltdown over it? It's always struck me that it wasn't a very dignified response to something that happens to him almost every time he sets foot out of the house.

I think I might have had this one.

Sadly, I can't remember anything that happened inside it.

I do wonder if Bullseye's devoted any thought at all as to what he's going to do when gravity kicks in and he has to start coming down from being fired from that cannon.

I assume this is the issue where Power Man replaces Benjy in the FF?

Tragically, I don't think I've ever read any of the Power Man Fantastic Four issues.

At last, it's a comic where I know what happens in it.

The Hulk and the Man-Thing tackle the Collector and, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the Captain Omen story, it has a not altogether happy ending for some of its participants.

I'd love to know what the promised dramatic new change is in Iron Man's armour.

It's not him getting rid of his nose-piece, is it?

Spidey does the Ellery Queen routine as he turns super-sleuth.

I remember watching the first episode of the 1970s Ellery Queen show and - when they stopped the show to challenge you to work out who the murderer was - concluding that Ellery Queen was the murderer.

In my defence, I didn't realise it was a series and that, therefore, the star wasn't likely to be the murderer.

Unlike Murder She Wrote, where we all know Jessica Fletcher was always the murderer.

I must confess that Firelord is high on my list of annoying Marvel characters. His head might have been on fire but he never seemed to be too hot between the ears.

Hooray! The Sentinels are back, in a tale that gave me much pleasure as a youth!

My love for Dave Cockrum's X-Men was beyond measure. I even had a dream about them once. They went to Ireland and, as they were flying around, a mountain suddenly shot up and hit their plane. I have no recall as to what happened after that but am sure it was suitably dramatic.

The Assassin's still up to no good.