Category: Graphic Novels

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The Invincible Iron Man Epic Collection volume 1: The Golden Avenger 1963-1965


By Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Robert Bernstein, Don Rico, Al Hartley, Don Heck, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-8863-6 (TPB/Digital edition)

There are a number of ways to interpret the creation and early years of Tony Stark, glamorous millionaire industrialist and inventor – when not operating in his armoured alter-ego of Iron Man.

Created in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis and at a time when “Red-baiting” and “Commie-bashing” were American national obsessions, the emergence of a brilliant new Thomas Edison using Yankee ingenuity and invention to safeguard and better the World seemed inevitable. Combine the then-all-pervasive belief that technology could solve any problem with the universal imagery of noble knights battling tangible and easily recognisable Evil and the proposition almost becomes a certainty.

Of course, it might simply be that we kids thought it both great fun and very, very cool…

This fabulous full-colour compendium of the Steel Shod Sentinel’s early days reprints all his adventures, feature pages and pin-ups from Tales of Suspense #39 (cover-dated March 1963) through #72 (December 1965), revisiting the dawn of Marvel’s rise to ascendancy.

This period would see the much-diminished and almost bankrupt comics colossus begin challenging DC Comics’ position of dominance, but not quite become the darlings of the student counter-culture. In these tales, Stark is still very much a gung-ho patriotic armaments manufacturer, and not the enlightened capitalist liberal dissenter he would become…

Scripted by Larry Lieber (over brother Stan Lee’s plot) and illustrated by the criminally unappreciated Don Heck, ToS #39 reveals how and why ‘Iron Man is Born!’, with engineering and electronics genius Stark field-testing his latest inventions in Viet Nam before being wounded by a landmine.

Captured by Viet Cong commander Wong-Chu, Stark is told that if he creates weapons for the Reds he will be operated on to remove the metal shrapnel in his chest that will kill him within seven days.

Knowing that Commies can’t be trusted, Stark and aged Professor Yinsen – another captive scientist – build a mobile iron lung to keep his heart beating. They also equip this suit of armour with all the weapons their ingenuity can covertly construct whilst being observed by their captors. Naturally, they succeed and defeat the local tyrant, but not without a tragic sacrifice.

From the next issue, Iron Man’s superhero career is taken as a given, and he has already achieved fame for largely off-camera exploits. Lee continues to plot but Robert Bernstein replaces Lieber as scripter for issues #40-46 and Jack Kirby pencils for Heck. ‘Iron Man versus Gargantus!’ follows the young Marvel pattern by pitting the hero against aliens – albeit via their robotic giant caveman intermediary – in a delightfully rollicking romp.

‘The Stronghold of Doctor Strange!’ (Lee, Bernstein, Kirby & Dick Ayers) features a gloriously spectacular confrontation with a wizard of Science (not Lee & Steve Ditko’s later Mystic Master), after which Heck returns to full art for the espionage and impostors thriller ‘Trapped by the Red Barbarian’.

Kirby & Heck team again for science-fantasy invasion romp ‘Kala, Queen of the Netherworld!’, but Heck goes it alone when Iron Man time-travels to ancient Egypt to rescue the fabled and fabulous Cleopatra from ‘The Mad Pharaoh!’.

New regular cast members proper – bodyguard “Happy” Hogan and secretary Virginia “Pepper” Potts – and the first true supervillain then arrive as the Steel Sentinel must withstand ‘The Icy Fingers of Jack Frost!’ before facing (and converting to Democracy) his Soviet counterpart ‘The Crimson Dynamo!’

Tales of Suspense #47 presaged big changes. Lee wrote ‘Iron Man Battles the Melter!’, and Heck inked the unique pencils of Steve Ditko in a grudge match between Stark and a disgraced corporate rival, but the big event came with the next issue’s ‘The Mysterious Mr. Doll!’

Here Lee, Ditko & Ayers scrapped the old, cool-but-clunky golden boiler-plate suit for a sleek, gleaming, form-fitting red-and-gold upgrade to aid the defeat of a sadistic mystic blackmailer using witchcraft to get ahead. The new suit would – with minor variations – become the symbol and trademark of the character for decades to come.

Paul Reinman inked Ditko on Lee’s crossover/sales pitch for the new X-Men comic book when ‘Iron Man Meets the Angel!’, before the series finally found its feet with Tales of Suspense #50.

Heck became regular penciller and occasional inker as Lee delivered the Armoured Avenger’s first major menace and perpetual nemesis in ‘The Hands of the Mandarin!’: a modern-day Fu Manchu derivative who terrifies the Red Chinese so much that they manipulate him into attacking America, with the hope that one threat will fatally wound the other. The Mandarin would become Iron Man’s greatest foe.

Our ferrous hero made short work of criminal contortionist ‘The Sinister Scarecrow’, and also the Red spy who appropriated a leftover Russian armour-suit and declared ‘The Crimson Dynamo Strikes Again!’ – scripted, as was the next issue – by the enigmatic “N. Kurok” who was in truth Golden Age veteran Don Rico). The issue also premiered a far more dangerous threat in the slinky shape of Soviet Femme Fatale The Black Widow.

With ToS #53 she became a headliner as ‘The Black Widow Strikes Again!’: stealing Stark’s new anti-gravity ray but ultimately thwarted in her sabotage mission, after which ‘The Mandarin’s Revenge!’ began a 2-part tale of kidnap and coercion that concluded by disproving in #55 that ‘No One Escapes the Mandarin!’…

It’s followed by a “Special Bonus Featurette” by Lee & Heck, revealing ‘All About Iron Man’ detailing how the suit works and even ‘More Info about Iron Man!’ including a ‘Pepper Potts Pin-Up Page’…

‘The Uncanny Unicorn!’ promptly attacked, only to fare no better in the end, his power-horn proving pointless in the end, but segueing neatly into another Soviet sortie as Black Widow resurfaced to beguile a budding superhero. ‘Hawkeye, The Marksman!’ was gulled into attacking the Golden Avenger in #57 during his debut moment: briefly making him the company’s latest and most dashing misunderstood malefactor.

Another landmark occurred with the next issue. Formerly, Iron Man had monopolised Tales of Suspense but ‘In Mortal Combat with Captain America!’ (inked by Ayers) depicted an all-out battle between the Avengers teammates resulting from a clever substitution by evil impersonator The Chameleon. It was a tasty primer for the next issue when Cap would begin his own solo adventures, splitting the monthly comic into an anthology featuring Marvel’s top two patriotic paladins.

Iron Man’s initial half-length outing in #59 was against technological terror ‘The Black Knight!’, and as a result of the blistering clash, Stark was rendered unable to remove his own armour without triggering a heart attack: a situation that hadn’t occurred since the initial injury. Up until this time he had led a relatively normal life by simply wearing the heartbeat regulating breast-plate under his clothes. The introduction of such soap-opera sub-plots were a necessity of the shorter page counts, as were continued stories, but this seeming disadvantage worked to improve both the writing and the sales.

With Stark’s “disappearance”, Iron Man was ‘Suspected of Murder!’, a tale that saw the return of Hawkeye and Black Widow, leading directly into an attack from China and ‘The Death of Tony Stark!’ (complete with a bonus pin-up of ‘The Golden Avenger Iron Man’). The sinister ambusher then provided ‘The Origin of the Mandarin!’ before being beaten by Stark’s ingenuity once again.

After that extended epic, a change of pace occurred as short complete exploits returned. The first was #63’s industrial sabotage thriller ‘Somewhere Lurks the Phantom!’ (by Lee Heck & Ayers), followed by the somewhat self-explanatory ‘Hawkeye and the New Black Widow Strike Again!’ (inked by Chic Stone and with the Soviet agent abruptly transformed from fur-clad seductress into a gadget-laden costumed villain), after which ‘When Titans Clash!’ sees a burglar steal the new armour, forcing Stark to defeat his greatest invention with his old suit (inked by new regular Mike Esposito as “Mickey DeMeo”).

Mike stuck around to see subsea tyrant Attuma as the threat du jour in ‘If I Fail, a World is Lost!’ and crime-lord Count Nefaria uses dreams as a weapon in ‘Where Walk the Villains!’, returning in the next issue to attack Stark with hallucinations in ‘If a Man be Mad!’: a rather weak tale introducing Stark’s ne’er-do-well cousin Morgan. It was written by Al Hartley with Heck & Esposito in top form as always.

Issues #69-71 form another continued saga: a one of the best of this early period. Inked by Vince Colletta, ‘If I Must Die, Let It Be with Honor!’ sees Iron Man forced to duel a new Russian opponent called Titanium Man in a globally-televised contest both national super-powers see as a vital propaganda coup. The governments are naturally quite oblivious of the cost to the participants and their friends…

DeMeo inks ‘Fight On! For a World is Watching!’ which amplifies the intrigue and tension as the Soviets, caught cheating, pile on the pressure to at least kill America’s champion if they can’t score a publicity win, before final chapter ‘What Price Victory?’ affords a rousing, emotional conclusion of triumph and tragedy made magnificent by the super-glossy inking of troubled artistic genius Wally Wood.

That would have been the ideal place to end the volume but there’s one more episode included here: ToS #72 – by Lee, Heck & Demeo – deals with the aftermath of victory as, whilst the fickle public fête Iron Man, his best friend lies dying, and a spiteful ex-lover hires diabolical super-genius the Mad Thinker to destroy Stark and his company forever.

‘Hoorah for the Conquering Hero!’ closes the book on a pensive down-note, somewhat leavened by bonus features including a house ad promoting two new titles out the same month – Tales of Suspense #39 and Amazing Spider-Man #1 – and another plugging all the heroes extant as of May 1963. That one also announced the company rebrand as “Marvel Comics Group”.

We close with a selection of pre-correction original art covers and pages: 8 wondrous treats by Kirby, Heck Wood, Colletta & Ayers.

The sheer quality of this compendium is undeniable. From broad comedy and simple action to dark cynicism and relentless battle, Marvel Comics grew up with this deeply contemporary series.

Iron Man developed amidst the growing political awareness of the Viet Nam Generation who were the comic’s maturing readership. Wedded as it was to the American Industrial-Military Complex, with a hero – originally the government’s wide-eyed golden boy – gradually becoming attuned to his country/s growing divisions, it was, as much as Spider-Man, a bellwether of the times. That it remains such a thrilling romp of classic superhero fun is a lasting tribute to the talents of all those superb creators that worked it.
© 2020 MARVEL.

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Captain Action: Classic Collection


By Gil Kane, Wally Wood, Jim Shooter & various (IDW)
ISBN: 978-1- (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-64936-046-5

These days comics are about kids of varying ages looking back. So too are toys, and baby boomers like me are particularly prone to the fabled golden age and certain “must-have” items – whether we ever actually owned them or not. An added bonus comes if those toys made it to comics and vice versa…

Back then, the ultimate acme for so many of us in the UK was – no, not the Johnny Seven multi-gun, or Man from U.N.C.L.E. briefcase – but the Captain Action nine-heroes-in-1 doll (sorry, Action Figure)… 

Once upon a time comics were considered the nigh-exlusive domain of children, with many scrupulously-policed genres and subdivisions catering to particular and stratified arenas such as fact, fantasy, adventure and humour. They were even further codified by age and gender.

A particular and popular recurring theme was tapping into the guaranteed and hopefully mutual sales boost offered by licensing and cross-marketing. West Coast outfit Dell/Gold Key had early on specialised in out-industry licensing deals and adaptations…

Many titles depended on a media celebrity like Howdy Doody, Charlie Chaplin or Mickey Mouse and in America that eventually spread to the marketing of products also aimed at kids… such as sweets, cartoons and toys…

By the end of that era, comics for kids were almost exclusively released as a minor strand of a major maketing strategy. That comics like Thundercats, Micronauts, Transformers, Rom and G.I. Joe were actually good and entertaining on strictly strip terms was a happy coincidence and thanks solely to the diligent pride and efforts of the creators involved. Sadly, it also led to publishers intensifying efforts to add a toy component to their own properties. Hands up anyone out there who owns a Spider-mobile, Batboat or Supermobile…

For DC, that trend really began in 1968. Although the company – known as National Periodical Publications back then – had long benefitted from creating comics adventures of movie stars like Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis or Dale Evans and shows such as Gang Busters, A Date with Judy and Mr. District Attorney, they had stayed away from the toy biz – unless you count two issues of Showcase (#53 & 54 Novenber/December 1964 and January/February 1965) that unofficially tied-in to Hasbro’s release of the first G.I. Joe line.

Then, just as costumed superheroes boomed, peaked and began an inexorable die-back, an old connection resurfaced…

In 1964 inventor and promotions wizard Stan Weston devised a way to sell dolls to boys: a dilemma that had stumped toymakers for centuries. He devised an articulated mannequin that would represent all branches of the military and could be aurmented by add-on uniforms and equipment. He called it an “action-figure” and sold the notion to Hasbro, who marketed it with great and lasting success as G.I. Joe (in Britain it was rebranded Action Man).

With his remuneration, Weston – whose promotions company Leisure Concepts had secured representation rights to DC, Marvel and King Features characters – devised a similar boys toy figure designed to ride the then-current global superhero wave triggered by the Batman TV show. “Captain Magic” was not only a superhero in his own right but could also transform into other superheroes via costumes and masks purchased seperately…

Released in waves, these alter egos included Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Spider-Man, Captain America, Sgt. Fury, The Phantom, 2 different Lone Rangers, Tonto, Steve Canyon, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and the Green Hornet.

Weston sold this concept to Hasbro’s rival Ideal Toy Company who went all-out in producing and marketing the range. It launched in 1966, redesignated Captain Action…

A huge success, an expansion line in 1967 introduced a kid sidekick, pet panther, villains, an Action-Cave, secret lairs, a super car and lots of other paraphenalia. Latterly, distaff partner Lady Action was joined by doll versions (“Super Queens”) of Wonder Woman, Mera, Supergirl and Batgirl…

The line was an early casualty of the downturn in superheroes and discontinued in 1968. It has, however, cemented itself in popular memory, with the core character returning on many occasions. He now enjoys a new marketing company seeking to rebuild the brand, Since 2005, Catain Action Enterprises have been testing the waters and some of their efforts can bee seen as ads and addenda throughout the book…

However, back at the height if the craze that DC link led to Editor in Chief Mort Weisinger commissioning a comic book tie-in. It turned out to be one of the most lovely, powerful, experimental and maturely sophisticated titles of the era and – finally – all the legal loopholes have been circumvented so you can see it at last …or if you’re truly blessed, once again…

Weisinger tapped his youngest writer – teenager Jim Shooter – and teamed him with veterans on the potentially colossal project. Miracle-working editor Julie Schwartz was in charge, and Wally Wood started the ball rolling artistically, but the real revelation came after replacement penciller Gil Kane took over the writing…

Born Eli Katz and a pre-WWII infant immigrant from Latvia, Kane was one of the pivotal players in the development of the American comics industry, and indeed of the art form itself. Working as an artist, and an increasingly more effective and influential one, he drew for many companies from the 1940s onwards, tackling superheroes, crime, action, war, mystery, romance, animal heroes (Streak and Rex the Wonder Dog!), movie adaptations and, most importantly perhaps, Westerns and Science Fiction tales.

In the late 1950s he became one of Schwartz’s key artists in regenerating and rebooting the superhero concept. Yet by 1968, at the top of his profession, this relentlessly revolutionary and creative man felt so confined by the juvenile strictures of the industry that he struck out on bold new ventures that jettisoned the editorial and format bondage of comic books for new visions and media.

His Name Is Savage was an adult-oriented black & white magazine about a cold and ruthless super-spy in the James Bond/Matt Helm/Man Called Flint mould; co-written by friend and collaborator Archie Goodwin. It was very much a precursor in tone, treatment and subject matter of many of today’s adventure titles.

His other venture, Blackmark (1971, and also with Goodwin), not only ushered in the comic book age of Sword and Sorcery, but also became one of medium’s first Graphic Novels. Technically, as the series was commissioned by fantasy publisher Ballantine as eight volumes, it was also envisioned as America’s first comic Limited Series.

Before them, though, there was Captain Action…

Edited by Schwartz with covers by Irv Novick, Wood, Kane & Dick Giordano, the entire DC run is collected here, preceded by a fulsome and informative Introduction from Mark Waid.

Unable to play with the toy’s major attraction – multiple super-personalities – Shooter & Wood instead went with classical drama for issue #1’s ‘Origin of Captain Action!’: revealing how archaeologist Clive Arno and his assistant Krellik uncover a chest of coins left in antiquity by incredible superbeings remembered by humanity as gods.

These coins allow the holder to access the incredible powers of countless deities, but the temptation proves too much for the scheming assistant.

However, when he tries to steal them, an ancient failsafe painfully prevents him…

Driven away, the scoundrel is then found by the coin vindictively created by primal God of Evil Chernobog: one which imparts astounding magical abilities and feeds his hatred. As Arno designs a costumed identity to help the world via the coins, Krellik spies on and steals his thunder, resolved to taint the project before it even begins…

Returning to America, Arno learns ‘Where the Action is’ from his son Carl, as Krellik plunders museums dressed in Arno’s proposed uniform. A swift chase then results in a cataclysmic clash and brief cameo by Superman…

Trailing his enemy, the true Captain cannot stop Krellik obtaining more deadly artefacts of the lost gods. As the first issue ends he is savagely beaten and apparently defeated before he’s even started …

With Kane pencilling Shooter’s script and Wood inking, the saga concludes in #2 as ‘The Battle Begins!’ with the victorious villain repeatedly failing to appropriate the power coins: stymied by the remarkably astute and valiant Action Boy. When Krellik’s frustration boils over and he starts wrecking the city, our recently returned hero goes all out and at last overcomes in ‘Captain Action’s Reactions!’ Kane was eager to stretch his creative muscles in a period of great change and challenge and Schwartz was happy to oblige…

Although already distressingly high in drama and calamity, the series went into overdrive with #3 as the toy company’s preferred archfoe debuted. A blue skinned humanoid with an exposed brain. Dr Evil was fleshed out as Kane wrote and pencilled ‘…And Evil This Way Comes!’, revealing how a catastrophic earthquake in San Francisco caused hundreds of deaths and triggered an evolutionary aberration in the laboratory of Dr. Stefan Tracy…

The Nobel Laureate was also Arno’s father-in-law and both were united in grief over the death of his daughter (and Arno’s wife) Kathryn. They also shared an abiding love for Carl Arno.

All that seemed over when Tracy was elevated to the status of a futureman resolved to similarly improve mankind, no matter how many perished in the process…

The most telling consequence of the quake is the loss of all but a handful of power coins. Action Boy is given the superspeed inducing Mercury artefact, whilst his dad keeps the tokens of Zeus, Hercules and Heimdall (rationalising why the Captain needs cool tools like his supercar the Silver Streak), and they deploy to save lives in the aftershocks.

They are hindered and countered by Tracy/Dr. Evil: using his devices to amplify the natural disaster. His deed almost kills his grandson, until a fast-fading final shred of humanity hampers his deeds and hold back his damning hand…

The act is his last as a human being and allows the Captain a desperate chance to drive him away…

From this issue on a letters page – Action Line – was included, and they are reprinted from here on.

Kane went even more deeply into mature themes with #4 as ‘Evil at Dead World’s End!’, sees the hyper-evolved savant drawn across the universe to a dying planet peopled with beings just like him. Well, not quite: these beings are at the end of existence on a dying planet, worn out by eons and resolutely awaiting death. Dr. Evil refuses to let them go, inspiring their brief rejection of well-earned rest with the promise of a fresh young world: Earth. To offset his son-in-law’s interference, the mind master distracts the hero with a trio of rampaging monsters and cruel resurrection of dead Kathryn. The alluring spectre then implores her husband to forsake life and join her in the beyond…

The high impact dramas were far from what any kid might expect, and the series closed on an even more shocking premise as ‘A Mind Divided’ revealed a nation torn apart by a racist demagogue inciting insurrection and racial purity: a campaign polarising America’s youth and encapsulated in a single father’s descent into madness. Captain Action might be able to rescue victims, stop bombers, break up riots and beat uniformed thugs but saving a twisted soul from self-inflicted tragedy was beyond even the reach of gods…

Now, rush out and buy the Captain Action Parachute Mortar, kids…

The comics material closes with text and letters page Action Line and a reader competition – ‘The Two Faces of Dr. Evil’ – before even more avarice-inspiring found-features fill out the Captain Action Gallery.

The comics stories preceding this section were packed with ads for old and new Cap merch in the gaps originally filled by DC comics releases (some contemporarily crafted by Michael Polis) for dolls/action figures, toys, accessories, costumes, “Captain Action Action Facts!”, card & board games, choco bars, breakfast cereal, freezer pops and vintage comic book house ads and TV promos for the franchise.

Here however are full-page delights such as paintings of Captain Action; toy ads from the comics for Action Boy, Dr. Evil. Lady Action and pages from the Captain Action Yellow Book by Murphy Anderson, Kurt Schaffenberger, & Chic Stone, plus astondingly lovely original art pages and pencil art by Kane & Wood.

Although Captain Action couldn’t sustain a readership or toy-buying clientele, DC would dabble again and again with related topics (like Alex Toth & Neal Adams’s sublime Hot Wheels comic in 1970, MASK, Masters of the Universe, and DC in-house properties Mego Superheroes and Kenner’s Super Powers action figures) and publishing properities now make a large paart of every successful comics company…

The 1960s was the era when all the assorted facets of “cool-for-kids” finally started to coalesce into a comprehensive assault on our minds and our parents’ pockets. TV, movies, comics, bubble-gum cards and toys all began concertedly feeding off each other, building a unified and combined fantasy-land no kid could resist. That nostalgic force has never been more wonderfully expressed than in the stories in this book and you would be mad to miss it.
Captain Action: Classic Collection © & ™ 2022 Captain Action Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Popeye volume 2: Wimpy and His Hamburgers (The E.C. Segar Popeye Sundays)


By Elzie Crisler Segar with Kevin Huizenga & various (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1- 68396-668-5 (TPB/digital edition)

Popeye embarked in the Thimble Theatre comic feature with the instalment for January 17th 1929. The strip was an unassuming vehicle that had launched on 19th December 1919: one of many newspaper cartoon funnies to parody, burlesque and mimic the era’s silent movie serials. Its more successful forebears included C.W. Kahles’ Hairbreadth Harry or Ed Wheelan’s Midget Movies/Minute Movies – which Thimble Theatre replaced in media mogul William Randolph Hearsts’ papers.

All the above-cited strips employed a repertory company of characters playing out generic adventures based on those expressive cinema antics. Thimble Theatre’s cast included Nana and Cole Oyl, their gawky, excessively excitable daughter Olive, diminutive-but-pushy son Castor and Olive’s sappy, would-be beau Horace Hamgravy.

The series ticked along nicely for a decade: competent, unassuming and always entertaining, with Castor and Ham Gravy (as he became) tumbling through get-rich-quick schemes, frenzied, fear-free adventures and gag situations until September 10th 1928, when explorer uncle Lubry Kent Oyl gave Castor a spoil from his latest exploration of Africa.

It was the most fabulous of all birds – a hand-reared Whiffle Hen – and was the start of something truly groundbreaking…

Whiffle Hens are troublesome, incredibly rare and possessed of fantastic powers, but after months of inspired hokum and slapstick shenanigans, Castor was inclined to keep Bernice – for that was the hen’s name – as a series of increasingly peculiar circumstances brought him into contention with ruthless Mr. Fadewell, world’s greatest gambler and king of the gaming resort dubbed ‘Dice Island’.

Bernice clearly affected and inspired writer/artist E.C. Segar, because his strip increasingly became a playground of frantic, compelling action and comedy during this period…

When Castor and Ham discovered that everybody wanted the Whiffle Hen because she could bestow infallible good luck, they sailed for Dice Island to win every penny from its lavish casinos. Big sister Olive wanted to come along, but the boys planned to leave her behind once their vessel was ready to sail. It was 16th January 1929…

The next day, in the 108th episode of the saga, a bluff, brusquely irascible, ignorant, itinerant and exceeding ugly one-eyed old sailor was hired by the pathetic pair to man the boat they had rented, and the world was introduced to one of the most iconic and memorable characters ever conceived.

By sheer surly willpower, Popeye won readers hearts and minds: his no-nonsense, grumbling simplicity and dubious appeal enchanting the public until, by the end of the tale, the walk-on had taken up full residency. He would eventually make Thimble Theatre his own…

The Sailor Man affably steamed onto the full-colour Sunday Pages forming the meat of this curated collection covering March 6th 1932-November 26th 1933. This paperback prize is the second of four that will contain Segar’s entire Sunday canon: designed for swanky slipcases. Spiffy as that sounds, the wondrous stories are also available in digital editions if you want to think of ecology or mitigate the age and frailty of your spinach-deprived “muskles”…

Elzie Crisler Segar was born in Chester, Illinois on 8th December 1894, son of a handyman. Elzie’s early life was filled with the solid, earnest blue-collar jobs that typified his generation of cartoonists. The younger Segar worked as a decorator and house-painter, and played drums accompanying vaudeville acts at the local theatre and – when the town got a movie house – he played for the silent films. This allowed him to absorb the staging, timing and narrative tricks from close observation of the screen, and would become his greatest assets as a cartoonist. It was whilst working as the film projectionist, aged 18, he decided to draw for his living, and tell his own stories.

Like so many from that “can-do” era, Segar studied art via mail: in this case W.L. Evans’ cartooning correspondence course out of Cleveland, Ohio – from where Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster would launch Superman upon the world. Segar gravitated to Chicago and was “discovered” by Richard F. Outcault (The Yellow Kid, Buster Brown), arguably the inventor of newspaper comics.

Outcault introduced Segar around at the prestigious Chicago Herald and soon – still wet behind the ears – Segar’s first strip Charley Chaplin’s Comedy Capers debuted on 12th March 1916. Two years, Elzie married Myrtle Johnson and moved to Hearst’s Chicago Evening American to create Looping the Loop. Managing Editor William Curley saw a big future for Segar and promptly packed the newlyweds off to the Manhattan headquarters of the mighty King Features Syndicate.

Within a year Segar was producing Thimble Theatre for the New York Journal. In 1924, Segar created a second daily strip. The 5:15 was a surreal domestic comedy featuring weedy commuter/would-be inventor John Sappo …and his formidable, indomitable wife Myrtle (!).

A born storyteller, Segar had from the start an advantage even his beloved cinema couldn’t match. His brilliant ear for dialogue and accent shone out from his admittedly average melodrama adventure plots, adding lustre to stories and gags he always felt he hadn’t drawn well enough. After a decade or so – and just as cinema caught up with the introduction of “talkies” – he finally discovered a character whose unique sound and individual vocalisations blended with a fantastic, enthralling nature to create a literal superstar.

Incoherent, plug-ugly and stingingly sarcastic, Popeye shambled on stage midway through ‘Dice Island’ and once his very minor part played out, simply refused to leave. Within a year he was a regular. As circulation skyrocketed, he became the star.

In the less than 10 years Segar worked with his iconic sailor-man (January 1929 until the artist’s untimely death on 13th October 1938), the auteur constructed an incredible meta-world of fabulous lands and lost locales, where unique characters undertook fantastic voyages spawned or overcame astounding scenarios and experienced big, unforgettable thrills as well as the small human dramas we’re all subject to.

This was a saga both extraordinary and mundane, which could be hilarious or terrifying – frequently at the same time. For every trip to the rip-roaring Wild West or lost kingdom, there was a brawl between squabbling neighbours, spats between friends or disagreements between sweethearts – any and all usually settled with mightily-swung fists.

Popeye is the first Superman of comics, but he was not a comfortable hero to idolise. A brute who thought with his fists, lacking all respect for authority, he was uneducated, short-tempered and – whenever hot tomatoes batted their eyelashes (or thereabouts) at him – fickle: a worrisome gambling troublemaker who wasn’t welcome in polite society… and wouldn’t want to be.

The mighty marine marvel is the ultimate working-class hero: raw and rough-hewn, practical, with an innate and unshakable sense of what’s fair and what’s not, a joker who wants kids to be themselves – but not necessarily “good” – and someone who takes no guff from anybody. Always ready to defend the weak and with absolutely no pretensions or aspirations to rise above his fellows, he was and will always be “the best of us”…

This current tranche of reprinted classics concentrates on the astounding full-page Sunday outings (here encompassing March 6th 1932 to November 1933, but sadly omits the absurdist Sappo toppers. You’ll need to track down Fantagraphics’ hardback tabloid collections from a decade ago to see those whacky shenanigans…

Since many papers only carried dailies or Sundays, but only occasionally both, a system of differentiated storylines developed early in American publishing, and when Popeye finally made his belated sabbath day move, he was already a well-developed character.

Ham and Castor had been the stars since Thimble Theatre’s Sundays since the ancillary feature began on January 25, 1925; they all but vanished once the mighty matelot stormed that stronghold. From then on, Segar concentrated on gag-based extended dramatic serials Mondays to Saturdays, leaving family-friendly japes for Sundays: an arena perfect for the Popeye-Olive Oyl modern romance to unfold. With this second volume, however, we get to play with Segar’s second greatest character creation: morally maladjusted master moocher J Wellington Wimpy…

Preceding the vintage views, this tome offers a lovely laudatory comic strip deconstruction, demystification and appreciation in ‘“Segar’s Wimpy” – An Introduction by Kevin Huizenga’. The experimental fabulist (Glen Ganges in The River At Night, Comix Skool USA, Riverside Companion) probes everything from how different illustrators handle the human dustbin to how Wimpy’s eyes are drawn…

When the wondrous weekend instalments began last volume, we saw Ham Gravy gradually edged out of romancing Olive. From there onwards, done-in-one gag instalments outlined an unlikely but enduring romance which blossomed (withered, bloomed, withered some more, hit cold snaps and early harvests – you get the idea…) as Olive alternately pursued her man and dumped him for better prospects.

To be fair, Popeye always vacillated between ignoring her and moving mountains to impress her. Since she always kept her options open, he spent a lot of time fighting off – quite literally – her other gentlemen callers. A mercurial creature, the militantly maidenly Miss Oyl spent as long trying to stop her beau’s battles (a tricky proposition as he spent time ashore as an extremely successful “sprize fighter”) as civilise her man, yet would mercilessly batter any flighty floozy who cast cow eyes at her devil-may-care suitor…

In those formative episodes, Castor became Popeye’s manager and we revelled in how originally-philanthropic millionaire Mr. Kilph moved from eager backer to demented arch enemy paying any price to see Popeye pummelled. The sailors’ opponents included husky two-fisted Bearcat, Mr. Spar, Kid Sledge, Joe Barnacle, Kid Smack, Kid Jolt, The Bullet, Johnny Brawn, an actual giant dubbed Tinearo and even trained gorilla Kid Klutch.

None were tough enough and Kilph got crazier and crazier…

History repeated itself when a lazy and audaciously corrupt ring referee was introduced as a passing bit player. The unnamed, unprincipled scoundrel kept resurfacing and swiping more of the limelight: graduating from minor moments in extended, trenchant, scathingly witty sequences about boxing and human nature to speaking – and cadging – roles…

Among so many timeless supporting characters, mega moocher J. Wellington Wimpy stands out as the complete antithesis of feisty big-hearted Popeye, but unlike any other nemesis I can think of, this black mirror is not an “emeny” of the hero, but his best – maybe only – friend…

As previously stipulated, the engaging Mr. Micawber-like coward, moocher and conman debuted on 3rd May 1931 as an unnamed referee officiating a bombastic month-long bout against Tinearo. He struck a chord with Segar who made him a (usually unwelcome) fixture. Eternally, infernally ravenous and always soliciting (probably on principle) bribes of any magnitude, we only learned the crook’s name in the May 24th instalment. The erudite rogue uttered the first of many immortal catchphrases a month later.

That was June 21st – but “I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” – like most phrases everybody knows, actually started as “Cook me up a hamburger, I’ll pay you Thursday”. It was closely followed by my personal mantra “lets you and him fight”…

Now with a new volume and another year, we open with more of the same. The romantic combat between Olive, Popeye and a string of rival suitors continues, resulting in the sailor winning a male beauty contest (by force of arms), and brutally despatching a procession of potential boyfriends.

As hot-&-cold Olive warms to the moocher, there’s more of Wimpy’s ineffable wisdom on show, as he reinvents himself as the final arbiter of (strictly negotiable) judgement…

Whether it’s her beaux or who’s hardest hit by government policies – sailors like Popeye or restaurant owners like Rough-House – Wimpy has opinions he’s happy to share… for a price.

Mr. Kilph turns up again, arranging a bout between Popeye and his new million-dollar robot, but even with Wimpy officiating, the sailor comes up trumps. The moocher briefly becomes our matelot’s best pal, but blows it by putting the moves on Olive after tasting her cooking…

Another aspect of Popeye’s complex character is highlighted in an extended sequence running from May 29th  through July 17th1932, one that secured his place in reader’s hearts.

The sailor was a rough-hewn orphan who loved to gamble and fight. He was proudly not smart and superhumanly powerful, but he was a big-hearted man with an innate sense of decency who hated injustice – even if he couldn’t pronounce it.

When starving waif Mary Ann tries to sell him a flower, Popeye impetuously adopts her, inadvertently taking her from the brutal couple who use her in a begging racket.

Before long the kid is beloved of his entire circle – even Olive – and to support her, Popeye takes on another prize fight: this time with savage Kid Panther and his unscrupulous manager Gimbler…

He grows to truly love her and there’s a genuine sense of happy tragedy when he locates her real and exceedingly wealthy parents. Naturally Popeye gives her up…

That such a rambunctious, action-packed comedy adventure serial could so easily turn an audience into sobbing, sentimental pantywaists is a measure of just how great a spellbinder Segar was. Although rowdy, slapstick cartoon violence remained at a premium – family values were different then – Segar’s worldly, socially- probing satire and Popeye’s beguiling (but relative) innocence and lack of experience keeps the entire affair in hilarious perspective whilst confirming him as an unlikely and lovable innocent, albeit one eternally at odds with cops and rich folk…

Following weeks of one-off gags – like Olive improbably winning a beauty contest and a succession of hilarious Wimpy episodes (such as cannily exposing himself to score burgers from embarrassed customers and ongoing problems with sleep-eating) – a triptych of plot strands opens as Miss Oyl engages a psychiatrist to cure Popeye of fighting, even as the sailor discovers Wimpy has such an affinity with lower life forms that he can be used to lure all the flies and sundry other bugs from Rough-House’s diner…

The third strand has further-reaching repercussions. Popeye has been teaching kids to fight and avoid spankings which has understandably sparked a riot of rebellion, bad behaviour and bad eating habits. Now, distraught parents need Popeye to set things right again…

Naturally it goes too far once the hero-worshipping kids start using the sailor-man as a source of alt-fact schooling too…

We constantly see softer sides of the sailor-man as he repeatedly gives away most of what he earns – to widows and “orphinks” – and exposes his crusading core with numerous assaults on bullies, animal abusers and romantic rivals, but when the war of nerves and resources between Wimpy and Rough-House inevitably escalates, Popeye implausibly finds himself as “the responsible adult”.

That means being referee in a brutal and ridiculous grudge match settled in the ring, with all proceeds going to providing poor kids with spinach. The bout naturally settles nothing but does have unintended consequences when the moocher is suddenly reunited with his estranged mother after 15 years…

Tough men are all suckers for a sob story and even Rough-House foolishly amplifies the importance and regard people supposedly feel for the now-homeless little old lady’s larcenous prodigal. It’s a move the moocher can’t help but exploit…

As the Sunday Pages followed a decidedly domestic but rowdily riotous path, the section was increasing given over to – or more correctly, appropriated – by the insidiously oleaginous Wimpy: an ever hungry, intellectually stimulating, casually charming and usually triumphant conman profiting in all his mendicant missions.

Whilst still continuing Popeye’s pugilistic shenanigans , the action of the Sunday strips moved away from him hitting quite so much to alternately being outwitted by the unctuous moocher or saving him from the vengeance of the furious diner-owner and passionately loathing fellow customer George W. Geezil. The soup-slurping cove began as an ethnic Jewish stereotype, but like all Segar’s characters swiftly developed beyond his (now so offensive) comedic archetype into a unique person with his own story… and another funny accent. Geezil was the chief and most vocal advocate for murdering the insatiable sponger…

Wimpy was incorrigible and unstoppable – he even became a rival suitor for Olive Oyl’s unappealingly scrawny favours – and his development owes a huge debt to his creator’s love and admiration of comedian W.C. Fields.

A mercurial force of nature, the unflappable mendicant is the perfect foil for common-man-but-imperfect-hero Popeye. Where the sailor is heart and spirit, unquestioning morality and self-sacrifice, indomitable defiance, brute force and no smarts at all, Wimpy is intellect and self-serving greed, freed from all ethical restraint or consideration, and gloriously devoid of impulse-control.

Wimpy literally took candy from babies and food from the mouths of starving children, yet somehow Segar made us love him. He is Popeye’s other half: weld them together and you have an heroic ideal… (and yes, those stories are all true: Britain’s Wimpy burger bar chain was built from the remnants of a 1950s international merchandising scheme seeking to put a J Wellington Wimpy-themed restaurant in every town and city).

The gags and exploits of the two forces of human nature build riotously in 1933, ever-more funny and increasingly outrageous.

Having driven Rough-House into a nervous collapse, plundered farms, zoos and the aquarium and committed criminal impersonation and actual fraud, Wimpy then relentlessly targets the cook’s business partner Mr. Soppy: bleeding him dry as visiting royalty Prince Wellington of Nazilia…

Even being run out of town and beaten so badly that he’s repeatedly hospitalised can’t stop his crafty contortions. He does, however, discover a useful talent: musical gifts that all but enslave his audiences…

Eventually, the master beggar triumphs over all and gets to eat his fill… and must deal with the consequences of his locust-like consumption…

Popeye seems unable to stop him. Half the time he’s helpless with laughter at the moocher’s antics, and when not. there are his major prize fights with 500lb wrestler Squeezo Crushinski and human dinosaur Bullo Oxheart. Naturally Wimpy is referee for both those clashes of the titans and makes out like a bandit…

The only real pause to the seeming dominance of the schemer is when he falls for new diner waitress Lucy Brown. She’s currently spending all her time with manly stud Popeye, but a quiet word with Olive Oyl should have cleared Wimpy’s path.

Should have, but didn’t, and in truth results in Popeye and Olive opening their own eatery in competition with Rough-House, leading to a ruthless cutthroat culinary cold war with the polite parasite reaping the spoils…

The laugh-out-loud antics seem impossible to top, and maybe Segar knew that. He was getting the stand-alone gag-stuff out of his system: clearing the decks and setting the scene for a really big change….

These tales are as vibrant and compelling now as they’ve ever been and comprise a world classic of graphic literature that only a handful of creators have ever matched. Within weeks (or for us, next volume) the Thimble Theatre Sunday page changed forever. In a bold move, the dailies blood-and-thunder adventure serial epics traded places with the Sunday format: transferred to the Technicolor “family pages” splendour where all stops might be pulled out…

Segar famously considered himself an inferior draughtsman – most of the world disagreed and still does – but his ability to weave a yarn was unquestioned, and grew to astounding and epic proportions in these strips. Week after week he was creating the syllabary and graphic lexicon of a brand-new art-form: inventing narrative tricks and beats that generations of artists and writers would use in their own cartoon creations. Despite some astounding successors in the drawing seat, no one has ever bettered Segar’s Popeye.

Popeye is fast approaching his centenary and well deserves his place as a world icon. How many comics characters are still enjoying new adventures 94 years after their first? These volumes are the perfect way to celebrate the genius and mastery of E.C. Segar and his brilliantly flawed superman. These are tales you’ll treasure for the rest of your life and superb books you must not miss…
Popeye volume 2: Wimpy and His Hamburgers is copyright © 2022 King Features Syndicate, Inc./™Hearst Holdings, Inc. This edition © 2022 Fantagraphics Books Inc. Segar comic strips provided by Bill Blackbeard and his San Francisco Academy of Comic Art. “Segar’s Wimpy” © 2022 Kevin Huizenga. All rights reserved.

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Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil



By Jeff Smith, coloured by Steve Hamaker (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1466-1 (HB) 978-1-4012-0974-2 (TPB/Digital edition)

With the long awaited Shazam movie sequel flashing imminently into view, I’m seizing the opportunity to plug a few of better books old and new starring “the Big Red Cheese”. As far as all-ages material goes, modern superhero comics don’t get better than this…

In a tale originally published as a 4-issue prestige format miniseries in 2007, Jeff Smith (Bone, RASL, Little Mouse Gets Ready, Tüki: Save the Humans) came the closest yet to recapturing the naive yet knowing charm that made the original Captain Marvel – AKA the World’s Mightiest Innocent – far and away the most successful super-character of the Golden Age. Moreover, this epic yet accessible reworking still stands as of one of his greatest adventures…

So, with the latest screen interpretation set to bust all the blocks, it’s well past time to take one more look at the glorious beast – especially as its still available in assorted physical and digital formats.

Following an adulatory Introduction from Alex Ross, the trip back to our communal childhoods kicks off with a scene of appalling deprivation and terror…

Billy Batson is a little homeless boy with a murky past and a glorious destiny. One night, he follows a mysterious figure into an abandoned subway station and meets the wizard Shazam, who gives him the ability to turn into a full-grown superhero called Captain Marvel. Gifted with the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury, the lad is sent into the world to do good.

Accompanied by verbose tiger-spirit Mr. Tawky Tawny, Billy sets out to find a little sister he never knew he had, and even parlays himself into a job as a source for TV reporter Helen Fidelity…

He sets to, fighting evils big and small, but at his heart he’s still just a kid. Thus, when Billy impetuously causes a ripple in the world’s magical fabric, it causes cosmic conniptions that endanger the universe. So, after he finally tracks down his little sister, he accidentally shares (some of) his powers with her and suffers the ignominy of having her be better at the job than he is…

The neophyte champion also encounters evil genius Dr. Sivanna, US Attorney General and would-be ruler of the universe, and the deadly and hideous minions of the mysterious Mr. Mind, whose Monster Society of Evil is dedicated to wiping out humanity! Can he make amends and save the day… Maybe, if Mary Marvel helps…

The original saga this gem is loosely based on ran from 1943-1946 in Captain Marvel Adventures #22-46: a boldly ambitious and captivating chapter-play in the manner of popular movie serials of the day, and still regarded as one of the most memorable achievements of Golden Age comicbooks.

It’s fairly safe to say that this reworking will stay in people’s hearts and minds for a good long time, too. It certainly spawned an excellent spin-off series which I’ll be covering soon, just to cash in on the movie…

Jeff Smith accomplished the impossible here. He (re)created a superhero tale for all ages and returned some part of the genre to the children for whom it was originally intended. Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil is exciting, spectacular, moving and unselfconscious: revelling in the power of its own roots and the audience’s unbridled capacity for joy.

If you can track down the hardback volume, it’s stuffed with added features. The dust jacket opens into a truly magical double-sided poster, there are sketch and script pages for the reader with industry aspirations, biographies and historical sections, a lavishly illustrated production journal, puzzles and even a modern version of the secret code used as a circulation builder in the 1940s. Most importantly though, and irrespective of what iteration you get, it is the mesmerising quality of the story and artwork that you’ll remember, forever.

Words are cheap and I’ve used enough: now you do yourself a big favour and get this truly magical, utterly marvellous book.
© 2009 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Mighty Marvel Masterworks The X-Men volume 2: Where Walks the Juggernauts


By Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Werner Roth & various (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-1-3029-4619-7 (TPB/Digital edition)

These stories are timeless and have been gathered many times so here’s my now-standard advisory on format.

The Mighty Marvel Masterworks line is designed with economy in mind. Classic tales of Marvel – such as birthday boys and girl on show today – have been an archival book staple since the 1990s, but always in lavish, expensive hardback collectors’ editions. The new tomes cited here are far cheaper, on lower quality paper and are smaller, about the dimensions of a paperback book. Your eyesight might be failing and your hands too big and shaky, but at 152 x 227mm, they’re perfect for kids. If you opt for the digital editions, that’s no issue at all…

Way back in 1963 things really took off for the budding Marvel Comics as Stan Lee & Jack Kirby expanded their meagre line of action titles: putting a bunch of relatively new super-heroes (including hot-off-the-presses Iron Man) together as The Avengers; launching a decidedly different war comic in Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos and creating a group of alienated heroic teenagers united to fight a rather specific, previously unperceived threat to humanity. Those halcyon days are revisited in this splendid trade paperback/eBook compilation, gathering from May 1965 to April 1966, the contents of X-Men #11-19.

Way back in the summer of 1963, the premiere issue had introduced Cyclops – Scott Summers, Iceman – Bobby Drake, Angel – Warren Worthington III and The Beast AKA Henry “Hank” McCoy: extremely special students of Professor Charles Xavier. He was a brilliant, charismatic and wheelchair-bound telepath dedicated to brokering peace and integration between the masses of humanity and the emergent off-shoot race: human mutants called Homo Superior. The story saw the students welcome newest classmate Jean Grey, who would be codenamed Marvel Girl. She possessed the ability to move objects with her mind.

No sooner has the Professor explained their mission than an actual Evil Mutant – Magneto – singlehandedly took over American missile base Cape Citadel. A seemingly unbeatable threat, the master of magnetism was nonetheless driven off in under 15 minutes by the young heroes on their first combat mission…

These days, young heroes are ten-a-penny, but it should be noted that these kids were among Marvel’s first juvenile super-doers (unless you count Spider-Man or Human Torch Johnny Storm) since the end of the Golden Age, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that in early tales the youngsters regularly benefitted from a little adult supervision, such as is the case in the landmark tale that opens this book and ended an era…

After spectacular starts on most of Marvel’s Superhero titles (as well as western and war revamps), Jack Kirby’s increasing workload compelled him to cut back to laying out most of these lesser lights. Captain America still offered nostalgic fun through astounding action whilst Thor and Fantastic Four evolved into perfect playgrounds and full-time monthly preoccupations for his burgeoning imagination, but illustrating most of Marvel’s covers and creating a House style for the new Age of Superheroes was unforgiving and all-consuming…

The last series to be surrendered was the still-bimonthly X-Men wherein an outcast tribe of mutants worked diligently and clandestinely to foster peace and integration between the unwary masses of humanity and the gradually-emergent “coming race”. The King’s departure in #11 also marked a major turning point. Drenched in irony, ‘The Triumph of Magneto!’ (scripted by Stan Lee & inked by Chic stone) sees our heroes and The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (Mastermind, The Toad, Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch) both seeking a fantastically powered being dubbed The Stranger.

None are aware of his true identity, nature or purpose, but when the Master of Magnetism finds him first, it spells the end of his long war with the X-Men…

With Magneto gone and the Brotherhood broken, Kirby relinquished pencilling to other hands, thereafter providing loose layouts and design only. Alex Toth & Vince Colletta proved a quirky, uncomfortable mix for #12’s tense drama ‘The Origin of Professor X!’: opening a 2-part saga introducing Xavier’s bully half-brother Cain Marko. It also told how the simplistic thug was mystically transformation into an unstoppable human engine of destruction.

The story concludes with ‘Where Walks the Juggernaut!’: a compelling, tension-drenched, all-action tale guest-starring Johnny Storm, and notable for the introduction of penciller Werner Roth (using the name Jay Gavin). He would be associated with the mutants for the next half decade. His inker for this first outing was the infallible Joe Sinnott.

Roth was an unsung veteran of the industry, working for the company in the 1950s on star features like Apache Kid and the inexplicably durable Kid Colt, Outlaw, as well as Mandrake the Magician for King Features Comics and Man from U.N.C.L.E. for Gold Key. As with many pseudonymous creators of the period, it was his DC commitments (mostly romance stories) which compelled him to disguise his moonlighting until Marvel grew big enough to offer him full-time work.

From issue #14 – still laid out by Kirby & inked by Colletta – ‘Among Us Stalk the Sentinels!’ celebrated the team’s inevitable elevation to monthly publication in the first episode of a 3-chapter epic introducing anthropologist Bolivar Trask, whose solution to the threat of Mutant Domination was super-robots that would protect humanity at all costs. Sadly, they mechanoids’ definition of “protect” varied wildly from their creator’s, but what can you expect when a social scientist dabbles in high-energy physics and engineering?

The X-Men took the battle to the Sentinels’ secret base but became ‘Prisoners of the Mysterious Master Mold!’ before beating their ferrous foes with ‘The Supreme Sacrifice!’

Veteran Dick Ayers joined as inker from #15: his clean line blending perfectly with Roth’s smoothly classicist pencils. They remained a team for years, adding vital continuity to this quirky but never top-selling series.

X-Men #17 dealt with the aftermath of the battle – the last time the US Army and government openly approved of the team’s efforts – and the sedate but brooding nature of ‘…And None Shall Survive!’ enabled the story to generate a genuine air of apprehension as safe haven and citadel the Xavier Mansion is taken over by an old foe who picks them off one by one until only the youngest remains to battle alone in climactic conclusion ‘If Iceman Should Fail..!’

With Roth fully laying out his own stories, ‘Lo! Now Shall Appear… The Mimic!’ in #19 was Lee’s last script: the pithy, semi-tragic tale of a troubled teen possessing the ability to copy the skills, powers and abilities of anyone in close proximity, but not the emotional maturity to handle his power. The writing reins were turned over to Roy Thomas in #20.

X-Men was never one of young Marvel’s top titles but it found a devout and dedicated following as the frantic, freakish energy of Kirby’s heroic dynamism comfortably transited into the slick, sleek attractiveness of Roth and the fierce tension of hunted, haunted juvenile outsiders settled into a pastiche of college and school scenarios so familiar to the students who were the series’ main audience, but that’s the meat of the next volume…

Supplemented by covers from Kirby, Stone, Frank Giacoia, Sinnott, Wally Wood, Dick Ayers & Roth, the extras here comprise the art for a 1965 X-Men T-shirt by Kirby & Stone and a copious gallery of original art pages – by Kirby & Stone, Toth & Colletta &Roth & Ayers – plus a compelling contemporary house ad from August 1965 picturing all 13 Marvel Masterpieces on sale that month!

These quirky tales are a million miles removed from the angst-ridden, breast-beating, cripplingly convoluted X-brand of today’s Marvel, and in so many ways are all the better for it. Superbly rendered, highly readable adventures are never unwelcome or out of favour, and it should be remembered that everything here informs so very much of the mutant monolith. These are stories for dedicated fans and rawest converts. Everyone should have this book.
© 2022 MARVEL.

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Doom Patrol: Silver Age volume 1


By Arnold Drake, Bob Haney, Bruno Premiani, Bob Brown & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-8111-3 (TPB/Digital edition)

1963 was the year when traditionally cautious comic book publishers finally realised that superheroes were back in a big way and began reviving and/or creating a host of costumed characters to battle outrageous menaces and dastardly villains.

Thus it was that the powers-that-be at National Comics decided that venerable adventure-mystery anthology title My Greatest Adventure would dip its toe in the waters with a radical take on the fad. Still, infamous for cautious publishing, they introduced a startling squad of champions with its thematic roots still firmly planted in the B-movie monster films of the era that had not-so-subtly informed the parent comic.

No traditional team of masked adventurers, this cast comprised a robot, a mummy and an occasional 50-foot woman, who joined forces with and were guided by a vivid, brusque, domineering, crippled mad scientist to fight injustice in a whole new way…

Covering June 1963 to May 1965, this stunning compilation collects the earliest exploits of the “Fabulous Freaks”, gathered from My Greatest Adventure #80-85 and thereafter issues #86-95 of the rapidly renamed title, once overwhelming reader response compelled editor Murray Boltinoff to change it to the Doom Patrol.

These dramas were especially enhanced and elevated by the drawing skills of Italian cartoonist and classicist artist Giordano Bruno Premiani, whose highly detailed, subtly humanistic illustration made even the strangest situation dauntingly authentic and grittily believable.

Eponymous premier tale ‘The Doom Patrol’ was co-scripted by Arnold Drake and Bob Haney, depicting how a mysterious wheelchair-bound scientist summons three outcasts to his home through the promise of changing their miserable lives forever…

Competitive car racer and professional daredevil Cliff Steele had died in a horrific pile up, but his undamaged brain had been transplanted into a fantastic mechanical body. Test pilot Larry Trainor had been trapped in an experimental stratospheric plane and become permanently irradiated by stratospheric radiation, with the dubious benefit of gaining a semi-sentient energy avatar which would escape his body to perform incredible feats for up to a minute at a time. To pass safely amongst men Trainor had to constantly wrap himself in unique radiation-proof bandages…

Former movie star Rita Farr was exposed to mysterious gases which gave her the terrifying, unpredictable and, at first, uncontrolled ability to shrink or grow to incredible sizes.

The outcasts were brought together by brilliant but enigmatic Renaissance Man The Chief, who sought to mould the solitary misfits into a force for good. He quickly proved his point when a mad bomber attempted to blow up the city docks. The surly savant directed the trio of strangers in defusing it and no sooner had the misfits realised their true worth than they were on their first mission…

Second chapter ‘The Challenge of the Timeless Commander’, sees an implausibly ancient despot seeking to seize a fallen alien vessel: intent on turning its extraterrestrial secrets into weapons of world conquest, culminating in ‘The Deadly Duel with General Immortus’ which saw the Doom Patrol defeat the old devil and thereafter dedicate their lives to saving humanity from all threats.

My Greatest Adventure #81 featured ‘The Nightmare Maker’, combining everyday disaster response – saving a damaged submarine – with a nationwide plague of monsters. Stuck at base, The Chief monitors missions by means of a TV camera attached to Robotman/Steele’s chest, and quickly deduces the uncanny secret of the beasts and their war criminal creator Josef Kreutz…

Solely scripted by Drake, a devious espionage ploy outs the Chief – or at least his image, if not name – in #82’s ‘Three Against the Earth!’, leading the team to believe Rita is a traitor. When the cabal of millionaires actually behind the scheme are exposed as an alien advance guard who assumed the wheelchair-bound leader to be a rival invader, the inevitable showdown nearly costs Cliff what remains of his life…

In #83, ‘The Night Negative Man Went Berserk!’ spotlights the living mummy as a radio astronomy experiment interrupts the Negative Man’s return to Trainor’s body: pitching the pilot into a coma and sending the ebony energy being on a global spree of destruction. Calamity piles upon calamity when crooks steal the military equipment constructed to destroy the radio-energy creature and only desperate improvisation by Cliff and Rita allows avatar and host to reunite…

Issue #84 heralded ‘The Return of General Immortus’ as ancient Babylonian artefacts lead the squad to the eternal malefactor, only to have the wily warrior turn the tables and take control of Robotman. Even though his comrades soon save him, Immortus escapes with the greatest treasures of all time…

My Greatest Adventure #85 was the last issue, featuring ‘The Furies from 4,000 Miles Below’: monstrous subterranean horrors fuelled by nuclear forces. Despite having tricked Elasti-Girl into resuming her Hollywood career, the paternalistic heroes are pretty grateful when she turns up to save them all from radioactive incineration…

An unqualified success, the comic book transformed seamlessly into The Doom Patrol with #86 and celebrated by introducing ‘The Brotherhood of Evil’: an assemblage of international terrorist super-criminals led by French genius-in-a-jar The Brain. He was backed up by his greatest creation, a super-intelligent talking gorilla dubbed Monsieur Mallah.

The diametrically opposed teams first cross swords after brotherhood applicant Mr. Morden steals Rog, a giant robot the Chief constructed for the US military…

DP #87 revealed ‘The Terrible Secret of Negative Man’ after Brotherhood femme fatale Madame Rouge attempts to seduce Larry. When the Brain’s unstoppable mechanical army invades the city, Trainor is forced to remove his bandages and allow his lethal radiations to disrupt their transmissions…

An occasional series of short solo adventures kicked off in this issue with ‘Robotman Fights Alone’. Here Cliff is dispatched to a Pacific island in search of an escaped killer, only to walk into a devastating series of WWII Japanese booby-traps…

All mysteries surrounding the team’s leader are finally revealed in issue #88 with ‘The Incredible Origin of the Chief’: a blistering drama telling how brilliant but impoverished student Niles Caulder suddenly received unlimited funding from an anonymous patron interested in his researches on extending life.

Curiosity drove Caulder to track down his benefactor and he was horrified to discover the money came from the head of a criminal syndicate who claimed to be eons old…

Immortus had long ago consumed a potion which extended his life and wanted the student to recreate it since the years were finally catching up. To insure Caulder’s full cooperation, the General had a bomb inserted in the researcher’s chest and powered by his heartbeat…

After building a robot surgeon, Caulder tricked Immortus into shooting him, determined to thwart the monster at all costs. Once clinically dead, his Ra-2 doctor-bot removed the now-inert explosive and revived the bold scientist. Tragically, the trusty mechanoid had been too slow and Caulder lost the use of his legs forever…

Undaunted, ‘The Man Who Lived Twice’ destroyed all his research and went into hiding for years, with Immortus utterly unaware that Caulder had actually succeeded in the task which had stymied history’s greatest doctors and biologists…

Now, under the alias of super-thief The Baron, Immortus captures the Doom Patrol and demands a final confrontation with the Chief. Luckily, the wheelchair-locked inventor is not only a biologist and robotics genius but also adept at constructing concealed weapons…

In DP #89 the team tackle a duplicitous scientist who devises a means to transform himself into ‘The Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Menace’ before ‘The Private War of Elasti-Girl’ finds the Maid of Many Sizes using unsuspected detective skills to track down a missing soldier and reunite him with his adopted son.

‘The Enemy within the Doom Patrol’ sees shape-shifting Madame Rouge infiltrate the team and turn them against each other whilst issue #91 introduces multi-millionaire Steve Dayton.

Used to getting whatever he wants, he creates a superhero persona solely to woo and wed Rita Farr. With such ambiguous motivations ‘Mento – the Man who Split the Doom Patrol’ was a radical character for the times, but at least his psycho-kinetic helmet proved a big help in defeating the plastic robots of grotesque alien invader Garguax…

DP #92 tasks the team with a temporal terrorist in ‘The Sinister Secret of Dr. Tyme’ and features abrasive Mento again saving the day, after which ‘Showdown on Nightmare Road’ in #93 features The Brain’s latest monstrous scheme. This results in the evil genius being transplanted inside Robotman’s skull whilst poor Cliff is dumped into a horrific beast, until the Chief out-plays the French Fiend at his own game…

Creature-feature veteran Bob Brown stepped in to illustrate #94’s lead tale ‘The Nightmare Fighters’ as an eastern mystic’s uncanny abilities are swiftly debunked by solid American science. Premiani returned to render back-up solo-feature ‘The Chief …Stands Alone’ wherein Caulder eschews his deputies’ aid to bring down bird-themed villain The Claw with a mixture of wit, nerve and weaponised wheelchair.

This initial outing concludes with The Chief’s disastrous effort to cure Rita and Larry (DP #95), resulting in switched powers and the ‘Menace of the Turnabout Heroes’, so naturally that would be the very moment the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man picks for a return bout…

Although as kids we all happily suspended disbelief and bought into the fanciful antics of the myriad masked heroes available, somehow the exploits of the Doom Patrol – and their surprisingly synchronistic Marvel counterparts The X-Men (freaks, outcasts, wheelchair geniuses, both debuting in the summer of 1963 – so happy shared 60th folks!) – always seemed just a bit more “real” and plausible than the usual caped and costumed crowd.

With the edge of time and experience on my side it’s obvious just how incredibly mature and hardcore Drake, Haney & Premian’s take on superheroes actually was. These superbly engaging, frantically fun and breathtakingly beautiful tales should rightfully rank amongst the finest Fights ‘n’ Tights tales ever told. Moreover, you should definitely own them, so go do that now.
© 1963, 1964, 1965, 2018 DC Comics, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Mighty Marvel Masterworks The Avengers volume 1: The Coming of The Avengers


By Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, Don Heck, Dick Ayers, Paul Reinman, George Roussos, Chic Stone, Sam Rosen, Art Simek & various (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-1302929787 (TPB/Digital edition)

Probably Marvel’s biggest global franchise success, The Avengers celebrate their 60th anniversary in September 2023, so let’s start the New Year with acknowledgement of that landmark event and a promise of more of the same over the next 12 months…

These stories are timeless and have been gathered many times before but here we’re looking at The Mighty Marvel Masterworks line: designed with economy in mind and newcomers as target audience. These books are far cheaper, on lower quality paper and smaller – about the dimensions of a paperback book. Your eyesight might be failing and your hands too big and shaky, but at 152 x 227mm, they’re perfect for kids. If you opt for the digital editions, that’s no issue at all.

After a period of meteoric expansion, in 1963 the burgeoning Marvel Universe was finally ready to emulate the successful DC concept that had cemented the legitimacy of the Silver Age of American comics. The notion of putting a bunch of all-star eggs in one basket had made the Justice League of America a winner and subsequently inspired the moribund Atlas outfit – primarily Stan Lee, Jack Kirby & Steve Ditko – into conceiving “super-characters” of their own. The result – way back in 1961 – was the Fantastic Four…

Nearly 18 months later, the fledgling House of Ideas had generated a small and (mostly) successful stable of costumed leading men (but still only 2 sidekick women!), allowing Lee & Kirby to at last assemble a select handful of them into an all-star squad, moulded into a force for justice and soaring sales…

Seldom has it been done with such style and sheer exuberance. Cover dated September 1963, and on sale from Early July, The Avengers #1 launched as part of an expansion package which also included Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos and The X-Men…

This premier volume gathers The Avengers #1-10 (running to cover-date September 1965): a stellar sequence of groundbreaking tales no lover of superhero stories can do without…

The tense action kicks off with ‘The Coming of the Avengers!’ where – rather than starting at a neutral beginning – Stan & Jack (plus inker Dick Ayers) assumed buyers had a passing familiarity with Marvel’s other heroes and wasted very little time or space on introductions.

In Asgard, immortal trickster Loki is imprisoned on a dank isle, hungry for vengeance on his noble half-brother Thor. Whilst malevolently observing Earth, the god of evil espies the monstrous, misunderstood Hulk and mystically engineers a situation wherein the man-brute seemingly goes on a rampage, simply to trick the Thunder God into battling the monster.

When the Hulk’s teen sidekick Rick Jones radios the FF for assistance, Loki scrambles and diverts the transmission, smugly awaiting the blossoming of his mischief. Sadly for the schemer, Iron Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp also pick up the redirected SOS…

Only after the alerted heroes all converge on the American Southwest to search for the Jade Giant, do they realise that something is oddly amiss…

This terse, epic, compelling and wide-ranging yarn (New York, New Mexico, Detroit and Asgard in 22 pages) is Lee & Kirby at their bombastic best, and remains one of the greatest stories of the Silver Age (it’s certainly high in my own top ten Marvel Tales) and is followed by ‘The Space Phantom’ (Lee, Kirby & Paul Reinman), wherein an alien shape-stealer infiltrates and almost destroys the team from within.

With latent animosities exposed by the malignant masquerader, the epic ends with the volatile Hulk quitting the team in disgust, only to return in #3 as an outright villain in partnership with ‘Sub-Mariner!’ This globe-trotting romp delivers high-energy thrills and one of the blistering best battle scenes in comics history as the assorted titans clash in abandoned World War II tunnels beneath the Rock of Gibraltar. The tale was preceded hereby the galvanic house ad announcing the clash as seen in Avengers #2…

Inked by George Roussos, Avengers #4 was an indisputable, game-changing landmark as Marvel’s greatest Golden Age sensation returns for another increasingly war-torn era. ‘Captain America joins the Avengers!’ has everything that made the company’s early output so fresh and vital. The majesty of a legendary warrior returned in our time of greatest need; stark tragedy in the loss of his boon companion Bucky; aliens, gangsters, tragedy-drenched antagonist The Sub-Mariner and even subtle social commentary, all naturally wrapped up in vast amounts of staggering Kirby Action. It even begins with a cunning infomercial as Iron Man unsuccessfully requests the assistance of the company’s other fresh young stars, giving readers a taste of the other mighty Marvels on offer to them…

Reinman returned to ink ‘The Invasion of the Lava Men!’: another staggering adventure romp wherein the team – with the unwilling assistance of the ever-incredible Hulk – battle incendiary subterraneans and a world-threatening mutating mountain…

However, even all that pales before the supreme shift in artistic quality that is Avengers #6.

Chic Stone – arguably Kirby’s most effective inker of the period – joined the creative team just as a classic arch-foe was born. ‘The Masters of Evil!’ reveals how Nazi super-scientist Baron Zemo (who debuted that same month as a Nazi scientist in Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos #8) returns from self-exile in South America.

The petty tyrant is forced by his own arrogance and paranoia to emerge from the anonymity of the jungle he’s been skulking in since the Third Reich fell, after learning his despised nemesis Captain America has returned from the dead…

To this end, the war-criminal recruits a gang comprising previously established supervillains to attack New York City and destroy the Avengers. The unforgettable clash between valiant heroes and vile murdering mercenaries Radioactive Man, Black Knight (Nathan Garrett) and The Melter is to this day an unsurpassed example of prime Marvel magic.

Issue #7 followed up with two more malevolent recruits for the Masters of Evil, as Asgardian outcasts Enchantress and The Executioner are exiled to Midgard by Odin and waste no time allying with Zemo. This coincides with Iron Man being suspended from the team, due to “misconduct” occurring in his own series at that time. This was the start of the era of close-continuity where events in one series were regularly referenced and built upon in others. The practise quickly became a rod for the creators’ own backs and led to a radical rethink…

It might have been ‘Their Darkest Hour!’, but follow-up Avengers #8 delivered the team’s greatest triumph and tragedy as Kirby (inked with fitting circularity by Ayers) relinquished his full drawing role with a superbly entrancing invasion-from-time thriller. Riffing on The Day the Earth Stood Still, the B-movie-toned classic introduced ‘Kang the Conqueror!’: depicting an impossible powerful foe defeated by the cunning of ordinary teenagers and the indomitable spirit of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes…

Whenever Kirby left a title he’d co-created, it took a little while to settle into a new rhythm, and none more so than with these collectivised costumed crusaders. Although Lee and the fabulously utilitarian Don Heck were perfectly capable of producing cracking comics entertainments, they never had The King’s uncanny sense of panoramic scope and scale which constantly sought bigger, bolder blasts of excitement.

The Avengers evolved into an entirely different series when the subtle approachability of Heck’s human-scaled vision replaced Kirby’s larger-than-life bombastic bravura. The series had advanced to monthly circulation and even King Kirby could not draw the massive number of pages his expanding workload demanded.

Heck was a gifted and trusted artist with a formidable record for meeting deadlines and, progressing under his pencil, sub-plots and character interplay finally got as much space as action and spectacle. After Kirby, stories increasingly focused on scene-stealing newcomer Captain America: concentrating on frail human beings in costumes, rather than wild modern gods and technological titans bestriding and shaking the Earth…

Inked by Ayers, Heck’s first outing was memorable tragedy ‘The Coming of the Wonder Man!’ wherein the Masters of Evil plant superhuman Trojan Horse Simon Williams within the heroes’ ranks, only to have the conflicted infiltrator find deathbed redemption by saving them from the deadly deathtrap he creates…

Another Marvel mainstay debuted with the introduction of (seemingly) malignant master of time Immortus, who briefly combines with Zemo’s devilish cohort to engineer a fatal division in the ranks by removing Cap from the field in ‘The Avengers Break Up!’ A sign of the Star-Spangled Sentinel’s increasing popularity, the issue is augmented by a Marvel Masterwork Pin-Up of ‘The One and Only Cap’, courtesy of Kirby & Ayers, and is followed by a 1963 house ad for Avengers #1 to close this pocket-sized bombshell of wonders.

These are immortal tales that defined the early Marvel experience and are still a joy no fan should deny themselves or their kids. How can you survive without them?
© 2021 MARVEL.

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Mighty Marvel Masterworks Spider-Man volume 2: The Sinister Six


By Stan Lee & Steve Ditko, with Sam Rosen & Art Simek (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-1-3029-3195-7 (TPB/Digital edition)

As any fule kno, The Amazing Spider-Man celebrated his 60th anniversary in 2022. However, I’m one of those radicals who feel that 1963 was when he was really born, so let’s start the New Year with acknowledgement of that opinion and warning of many more of the same over the next 12 months…

These stories are timeless and have been gathered many times before but this time we’re looking at The Mighty Marvel Masterworks line: designed with economy in mind and newcomers as target audience. These new books are far cheaper, on lower quality paper and smaller, about the dimensions of a paperback book. Your eyesight might be failing and your hands too big and shaky, but at 152 x 227mm, they’re perfect for kids. If you opt for the digital editions, that’s no issue at all.

Marvel is often termed “the House that Jack Built” and King Kirby’s contributions are undeniable and inescapable in the creation of a new kind of comic book storytelling. However, there was another unique visionary toiling at Atlas-Comics-as-was, one whose creativity and philosophy seemed diametrically opposed to the bludgeoning power, vast imaginative scope and clean, gleaming futurism that resulted from Kirby’s ever-expanding search for the external and infinite.

Steve Ditko was quiet and unassuming, diffident to the point of invisibility, but his work was both subtle and striking: innovative and meticulously polished. Always questing for affirming detail, he ever explored the man within. He saw heroism and humour and ultimate evil all contained within the frail but noble confines of humanity. His drawing could be oddly disquieting… and, when he wanted, decidedly creepy.

Crafting extremely well-received monster and mystery tales for and with Stan Lee, Ditko had been rewarded with his own title. Amazing Adventures/Amazing Adult Fantasy featured a subtler brand of yarn than Rampaging Aliens and Furry Underpants Monsters: an ilk which, though individually entertaining, had been slowly losing traction in the world of comics ever since National/DC had successfully reintroduced costumed heroes.

Lee & Kirby had responded with The Fantastic Four and so-ahead-of-its-time Incredible Hulk, but there was no indication of the renaissance ahead when officially just-cancelled Amazing Fantasy featured a brand new and rather eerie adventure character…

This compelling compilation re-presents the rise of the wallcrawler as first seen in Amazing Spider-Man #11-19 and Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 (spanning cover-dates April – December 1964) and is lettered throughout by unsung superstars Sam Rosen & Art Simek, allowing newcomers and veteran readers to comprehensively relive some of the greatest moments in sequential narrative.

The parable of Peter Parker began when a smart but alienated high schooler was bitten by a radioactive spider on a science trip. Discovering he’d developed arachnid abilities – which he augmented with his own ingenuity and engineering genius – Peter did what any lonely, geeky nerd would when given such a gift… he tried to cash in for girls, fame and money.

Creating a costume to hide his identity in case he made a fool of himself, Parker became a minor celebrity – and a vain, self-important one. To his eternal regret, when a thief fled past him, he didn’t lift a finger to stop the thug, and days later returns discovered that his Uncle Ben has been murdered by the same criminal…

Crazy for vengeance, Parker stalked and captured the assailant who made his beloved Aunt May a widow and killed the only father he had ever known. Since his social irresponsibility led to the death of the man who raised him, the boy swore to always use his powers to help others…

It wasn’t a new story, but the setting was familiar to every kid reading it and the artwork was downright spooky. no gleaming high-tech world of moon-rockets, mammoth monsters and flying cars here… this stuff could happen to anyone…

Amazing Fantasy #15 came out the same month as Tales to Astonish #35 – the first to feature the Astonishing Ant-Man in costume, but it was the last issue of Ditko’s Amazing playground. However, the tragic last-ditch tale struck a chord with the public and by year’s end a new comic book superstar launched in his own title, with Ditko eager to show what he could do with his first returning character since the demise of Charlton’s Captain Atom…

Holding on to the “Amazing” prefix to jog reader’ memories, the Amazing Spider-Man #1 hit newsstands in December sporting a March 1963 cover-date and two complete stories.

Sans frills and extras, the ongoing saga resumes here with Amazing Spider-Man #11. Ditko’s preference for tales of gangersterism drove the stories and his plot for ‘Turning Point’ involves the reappearance of a major supervillain and a growing dependence on soap opera drama, but his solitary, driven hero was always a loner, never far from the streets and small-scale-crime…

In the aftermath of the webspinner crushing a prison riot single handed and defeating the Big Man and The Enforcers, longer plot-strands were introduced as Peter’s potential girlfriend Betty Brant mysteriously vanishes.

Resolved to find her, Parker discovers she’s somehow involved with the multi-armed menace and the Philadelphia mob and goes after her, clashing again with the lethally deranged scientist whilst seeking to expose a long-hidden secret which had haunted Brant for years. It all ended in a spectacularly climactic fight scene on a ship that has still never been beaten for action-choreography…

The wonderment actually intensifies with ‘Unmasked by Dr. Octopus!’, detailing a dark, tragedy-filled tale of extortion and excoriating tension that stretches from Philadelphia to the Bronx Zoo: cannily tempering trenchant melodrama with spectacular clashes in unusual and exotic locations, before culminating in a truly staggering super-powered duel as only the masterful Ditko could orchestrate it.

A new super-foe premiered in Amazing Spider-Man #13 with ‘The Menace of Mysterio!’ as a seemingly eldritch bounty-hunter hired by Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson to capture Spider-Man eventually lets slip his own dark criminal agenda, whilst ASM #14 delivers an absolute milestone in Marvel History when a hidden criminal mastermind manipulates a Hollywood studio into making a movie about the wall-crawler.

Even with guest-star opponents The Enforcers and The Incredible Hulk (his last true guest shot before moving into his new residency in Tales to Astonish), ‘The Grotesque Adventure of the Green Goblin’ is most notable for introducing Spider-Man’s most perfidious and flamboyant enemy.

Jungle superman and thrill-junkie ‘Kraven the Hunter!’ makes Spider-Man his intended prey at the behest of embittered Spidey-foe The Chameleon in #15, and – after ignominiously failing to trap his target in the wilds of Central Park – promptly reappears in the first Amazing Spider-Man Annual…

A timeless landmark and still magnificently thrilling Fights ‘n’ Tights tussle, the ‘Sinister Six!’ begins after a team of villains comprising Electro, Kraven, Mysterio, The Sandman, Vulture and Doctor Octopus abduct Aunt May and Betty. Briefly deprived of his powers – lost to a guilt-fuelled panic attack – Peter is forced to confront them without nothing but courage & determination.

A staggeringly enthralling combat clash, with Spider-Man systematically taking down each enemy in a death-defying duels, this influential tale featured cameos (or, more honestly, product placement segments) by every other extant hero of the budding Marvel universe: everyone from The Avengers to The X-Men…

Also included from that colossal comic book are special feature pages on ‘The Secrets of Spider-Man!’; comedic short ‘How Stan Lee and Steve Ditko Create Spider-Man’ and a gallery of pin-up pages starring ‘Spider-Man’s Most Famous Foes!’ (namely the Burglar, Chameleon, Vulture, Terrible Tinkerer, Dr. Octopus, Sandman, Doctor Doom, The Lizard, Living Brain, Electro, The Enforcers, Mysterio, Green Goblin and Kraven the Hunter).

There are also pin-ups of Betty and Jonah, Peer Parker’s House and classmates plus a heroic guest stars page…

Amazing Spider-Man #16 extended that circle of friends and foes as the webslinger battles the Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime: consequently meeting – and inevitably battling – a fellow loner hero in a dazzling and delightful ‘Duel with Daredevil’.

We conclude this outing with an ambitious 3-part saga that began in Amazing Spider-Man #17, wherein the rapidly-maturing hero touches emotional bottom before rising to triumphal victory over all manner of enemies. It begins with ‘The Return of the Green Goblin!’ as the wallcrawler endures renewed print assaults from the Daily Bugle and its obsessed publisher J. Jonah Jameson, just as the enigmatic Green Goblin commences a war of nerves and attrition, using the Enforcers, Sandman and an army of bargain basement thugs to publicly humiliate the Amazing Arachnid and make him look like a fool in front of rival frenemy Johnny Storm – The Human Torch.

To exacerbate matters, Peter’s beloved Aunt May’s health takes a drastic downward turn…

In ‘The End of Spider-Man!’ pressure continues to mount and the troubled champion quits, concentrating exclusively on finding money to pay for his aunt’s treatment and leaving the Torch to handle the Goblin’s crime rampage…

It all explosively concludes in ‘Spidey Strikes Back!’ – featuring a turbulent team-up with the Torch – as a powerful pep talk from May galvanises the disgruntled teen terror and sets him back on his fated path: to the everlasting regret of the Goblin, his gangsters, the Enforcers and Sandman… and Jameson…

This extended tale proved fans were ready for every kind of narrative experiment (single issue or even two stories per issue were still the norm in 1964) and Stan & Steve were more than happy to try anything…

I claimed no extras here, but I lied. Closing the book are some lovely art treats: an unedited view of Ditko’s original cover for ASM #11, the original splash page art for #12 plus page 12and the closing page of #18; every one reason enough to buy this book…

These immortal epics are something no serous fan can be without, and will make an ideal gift for any curious newcomer or nostalgic aficionado.

Happy Unbirthday Spidey and many, many more please…
© 2021 MARVEL.

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Best of Year: 2022

Let’s face it: this past year was bloody awful for everybody. Nevertheless some very gifted people created some remarkable comics works and I’ll be damned if I don’t give you all one last chance to see that for yourselves.

Thus here’s our compilation of the best graphic novels of 2022. You should check them out…

Happy New Year from all of us to all of you.

Mature reading/General  

No Surrender
By Constance Maud: adapted by Scarlett & Sophie Rickard (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-91422-406-5 (TPB/Digital edition)
© 2022 SelfMadeHero. Text © 2022 Sophie Rickard. Artwork © 2022 Scarlett Rickard. All rights reserved.

Algorithmic Reality
By Damian Bradfield & David Sánchez (NBM) ISBN: 978-1-68112-306-6 (PB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-307-3
Text and illustrations © 2021, 2022 Damian Bradfield and David Sánchez. All rights reserved. © 2022 NBM for the English translation.

Captain America – Truth
By Robert Morales, Kyle Baker & various (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-1-3029-3427-9 (TPB/Digital Edition) 978-0785136668 (Premiere HB)
© 2022 MARVEL.

The Steel Claw: The Reign of the Brain
By Tom Tully, Jesús Blasco & various (Rebellion)
ISBN: 978-1-78108-681-2 (TPB/Digital Edition) © 1963, 1964 & 2022 Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

White All Around
By Wilfrid Lupano & Stéphane Fert, translated by Montana Kane (Europe Comics)
No ISBN: digital only edition
© 2021 DARGAUD BENELUX, (Dargaud-Lombard s. a.) – LUPANO & FERT. All rights reserved. English translation © 2009 Cinebook Ltd.

Colored – The Unsung Life of Claudette Colvin
By Émilie Plateau, with Tania de Montaigne, translated by Montana Kane (Europe Comics)
No ISBN: digital only edition © 2019 – DARGAUD – Émilie Plateau. All rights reserved. This graphic novel is based on the book Noire, by Tania de Montaigne. © Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2015.

Suzanne: The Jazz Age Goddess of Tennis
By Ted Humberstone (Avery Hill Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-910395-69-1 (HB)
© 2022 Tom Humberstone.

Adam Eterno – A Hero for All Time
By Tom Tully, Tom Kerr, Colin Page Francisco Solano López, Eric Bradbury Ted Kearon, Rex Archer & various (Rebellion)
ISBN: 978-1-78108-869-2 (TPB/Digital edition) © 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, & 2021 Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

One Beautiful Spring Day
By Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-68396-555-8 (TPB/Digital edition) 978-1-68396-588-6 (slipcased HB)
© 2022 Jim Woodring. This edition © 2022 Fantagraphics Books. All rights reserved.

Letters to Margaret
By Hayley Gold, with Andy Kravis, Mike Selinker & various (Lone Shark Games)
ISBN: 978-1-7356380-2-7 (TPB/Digital edition)
© 2021 Hayley Gold, Andrew Kravis and Mike Selinker on behalf of Lone Shark Games, Inc..

Hitchcock: Master of Suspense
By Noel Simsolo & Dominique Hé, translated by Matt Maden (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-296-0 (HB) eISBN: 978-168112-289-2
© 2018 Dargaud-Benelux. © 2020 NBM for the English Translation. All rights reserved. © DUPUIS 2020 by Rubio, Efa. All rights reserved.

Cyberman – An On-Screen Documentary
By Veronika Muchitsch AKA L.B. Jeffries (Myriad Editions)
ISBN: 978-1-8383860-2-3 (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-8383860-3-0
© Veronika Muchitsch 2021.

Georgia O’Keeffe
By Maria Herreros; translated by Lawrence Schimel (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-914224-05-8 (TPB/Digital edition)
Text and illustrations © 2021 by Maria Herreros. All rights reserved. English translation © 2021 SelfMadeHero.

The Boxer – The True Story of Holocaust Survivor Harry Haft
By Reinhardt Kleist; translated by Michael Waaler (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-906838-77-5 (TPB/Digital edition)
© Text and illustrations 2012 CARLSEN Verlag GmbH, Hamburg, Germany. © Appendix 2012 Martin Krau & CARLSEN Verlag. English translation © 2021 SelfMadeHero. All rights reserved.

Boot Black
By Mikael, translated by Matt Maden (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-296-0 (HB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-297-7
© 2019, 2020 Dargaud-Benelux (Dargaud-Lombard s.a.) – Mikael.

Welcome Home
By Clarrie & Blanche Pope (Minor Compositions)
ISBN: 978-1-57027-394-0 (PB) © Clarrie & Blanche Pope, 2022.

Days of Sand
By Aimee De Jongh, translated by Christopher Bradley (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-914224-04-1 (HB) Jours de sable © DARGAUD-BENELUX (DARGAUD-LOMBARD S.A.) 2021, by Aimee De Jongh. All rights reserved.

Alice Guy: First Lady of Film
By Catel & Bocquet, translated by Eward Gauvin (SelfMadeHero) ISBN: 978-1-914224-03-4 (TPB/Digital edition)
© Casterman 2021. All rights reserved.

Big Scoop of Ice Cream
By Conxita Herrero Delfa: translated by Jeff Whitman (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-294-6 (PB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-295-3
© 2016 Conxita Herrero Delfa and apa apa comics. © 2022 NBM for the English translation. All rights reserved.

Dungeon: Twilight Vols. 1-2 – Cemetery of the Dragon
By Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim & Kerascoet, translated by Joe Johnson (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-293-9, (TPB/Digital)
© Editions Delcourt 1999-2005. (Donjon Crepescule #101-104, by J. Sfar, L.Trondheim & Kerascoet). © 2006 NBM for the English translation.

The Con Artists
By Luke Healy (Faber)
ISBN: 978-1-91274-008-6 (HB)
© Luke Healy, 2022. All rights reserved.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
By Robert Tressell; adapted by Scarlett & Sophie Rickard (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-910593-92-9 (TPB/Digital edition)
© 2020 SelfMadeHero. Text © 2020 Sophie Rickard. Artwork © 2020 Scarlett Rickard. All rights reserved.

Kid Friendly Classics
I don’t suppose kids ever rush to the comics racks and shelves these days, but if they did, This Baker’s Dozen is what we think they might like:  a purely random number of potent picture books made with you and me in mind. Enjoy and don’t be snobbish… check out the kids’ stuff too…

Batman’s Mystery Casebook
By Sholly Fisch, Christopher A. Uminga & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-7795-0586-6 (TPB/Digital edition)
© 2022 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

Bunny vs Monkey: Machine Mayhem!
By Jamie Smart, with Sammy Borras (David Fickling Books)
ISBN: 978-1-78845-285-4 (Digest HB)
Text and illustrations © Jamie Smart 2022. All rights reserved.

Primer
By Jennifer Muro & Thomas Krajewski, illustrated by Gretel Lusky (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-9657-5 (TPB/Digital edition)
© 2020 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

Mega Robo Bros: Meltdown
By Neill Cameron with Abby Bulmer & Lisa Murphy (David Fickling Books)
ISBN: 978-1-78845-281-6 (TPB)
Text and illustrations © Neill Cameron 2022. All rights reserved.

Mighty Marvel Masterworks Thor volume 1
By Stan Lee & Jack Kirby with Larry Lieber, Robert Bernstein, Joe Sinnott, Al Hartley, Don Heck & various (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-1-302931681 (PB)
© 2021 MARVEL

The Bible
By Sheldon Mayer & Nestor Redondo, with Joe Kubert (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-3425-6 (HB/Digital edition)
© 1975 National Periodical Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Bunny vs. Monkey: Rise of the Maniacal Badger
By Jaimie Smart, with Sammy Borras (David Fickling Books)
ISBN: 978-1-78845-280-9 (TPB) 978-1-78845-118-5 (Waterstones Exclusive Edition)
Text and illustrations © Jamie Smart 2022. All rights reserved.

Tails of the Super-Pets
By Jerry Siegel, Robert Bernstein, Otto Binder, Leo Dorfman, Bill Finger, Edmond Hamilton, William Moulton Marston, Jim Shooter, Curt Swan, Jim Mooney, Pete Costanza, John Forte, Ramona Fradon, Sheldon Moldoff, George Papp, Harry G. Peter, Sy Barry, Stan Kaye, George Klein, Charles Paris & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1779513397 (TPB/Digital edition)
© 1947, 1955, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1968, 2022 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

Ken Reid’s Football Funnies – The First Half
By Ken Reid (Rebellion Studios)
ISBN: 978-1-78108-883-8 (HB/Digital edition)
© 1970, 1971, 1972, & 2021 Rebellion Publishing Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Cedric vol. 7: Isn’t It Past Your Bedtime?
By Laudec & Cauvin; colours by Leonardo, translated by Jerome Saincantin (Cinebook)
ISBN: 978-1-80044-025-8 (PB Album/Digital edition)
© Dupuis 1995 by Cauvin & Laudec. All rights reserved. English translation © 2021 Cinebook Ltd.

Popeye volume 1: Olive Oyl and Her Sweety
By Elzie Crisler Segar with Sergio Ponchione, Cathy Malkasian & various(Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1- 68396-462-9 (PB/digital edition)
© 2021 Fantagraphics Books Inc. All Segar comics and drawings © 2021 King Features Syndicate. Inc./ Hearst Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.

Young Hellboy – The Hidden Land
By Mike Mignola, Thomas Sniegoski, Craig Rousseau, Dave Stewart & Clem Robins (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1506723983 (HB) eISBN: 978-1-50672-399-0
Young Hellboy ™ and © 2021 Mike Mignola. All rights reserved.

Mighty Marvel Masterworks The Incredible Hulk volume 1
By Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Steve Ditko & various (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-1-3029-3180-3 (TPB)
© 2021 MARVEL

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Mighty Marvel Masterworks Captain America volume 1: The Sentinel of Liberty


By Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, George Tuska, John Romita & various (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-1302946159 (PB/Digital edition)

During the natal years of Marvel Comics in the early 1960s Stan Lee & Jack Kirby opted to mimic the game-plan which had paid off so successfully for National/DC Comics, albeit with mixed results. Beginning cautiously in 1956, Julie Schwartz had scored incredible, industry-altering hits by re-inventing the company’s Golden Age greats, so it seemed sensible to try and revive the characters that had dominated Timely/Atlas in those halcyon days two decades previously.

A new Human Torch had premiered as part of the revolutionary Fantastic Four, and in the fourth issue of that title the amnesiac Sub-Mariner resurfaced after a 20-year hiatus (everyone concerned had apparently forgotten the first abortive attempt to revive an “Atlas” superhero line in the mid-1950s).

The Torch was promptly given his own solo lead-feature in Strange Tales (from issue #101 on) where, eventually (in Strange Tales #114), the flaming kid fought a larcenous villain impersonating the nation’s greatest lost hero…

Here’s a quote from the last panel…

“You guessed it! This story was really a test! To see if you too would like Captain America to Return! As usual, your letters will give us the answer!” I guess we all know how that turned out…

With reader-reaction strong, the real McCoy was promptly decanted in Avengers #4 and, after a captivating, centre-stage hogging run in that title, won his own series as half of a “split-book” with fellow Avenger and patriotic barnstormer Iron Man, beginning with #59.

This premiere Mighty Marvel Masterworks Cap collection assembles those early appearances from Tales of Suspense #59-77, spanning November 1964 to May 1966) in a cheap, kid-friendly edition that will charm and delight fans of all vintages…

Scripted throughout by Lee, it begins with eponymous opening outing ‘Captain America’ – illustrated by the staggeringly perfect team of Kirby & Chic Stone. The plot is non-existent, but what you do get is a phenomenal fight as an army of thugs invades Avengers Mansion because “only the one without superpowers” is at home. They soon learn the folly of that misapprehension…

The next issue offered more of the same as ‘The Army of Assassins Strikes!’ on behalf of evil arch enemy Baron Zemo, before ‘The Strength of the Sumo!’ proves insufficient when Cap invades Viet Nam to rescue a lost US airman. Incidentally, that flyer was a black serviceman, signalling early on Kirby’s resolve to break comic books’ colour bar…

The Star-Spangled Swashbuckler then took on an entire prison to thwart a ‘Break-out in Cell Block 10!’: a glorious action riot simply dripping with irony…

After these simplistic romps, the series took an abrupt turn and began telling tales set in World War II. Crafted by Lee, Kirby & Frank Ray (AKA Frank Giacoia), ‘The Origin of Captain America!’ recounts how patriotic, frail physical wreck Steve Rogers is selected to be guinea pig for an experimental super-soldier serum, only to have the scientist responsible cut down by a Nazi bullet and die in his arms…

Now regarded as forever unique, he is given the task of becoming the fighting symbol and guardian of America, all while based as a regular soldier in a US boot camp. There he is accidentally unmasked by Camp Mascot Bucky Barnes, who then blackmails the hero into making the kid his sidekick.

The next issue (Tales of Suspense #64, cover-dated April) kicked off a string of spectacular episodic thrillers adapted from Kirby & Joe Simon’s Golden Age run, with the flag-bedecked heroes defeating Nazi spies Sando and Omar in ‘Among Us, Wreckers Dwell!’ before Chic Stone returned heralding Cap’s greatest foe in landmark saga ‘The Red Skull Strikes!’

‘The Fantastic Origin of the Red Skull!’ sends the series shooting into high gear – and original material – as sub-plots and characterisation are added to the ardent action and spectacle. At last we learn the backstory of the most evil man on Earth: revealed to a captive Sentinel of Liberty… Then ‘Lest Tyranny Triumph!’ and ‘The Sentinel and the Spy!’ (both inked by Giacoia) combine espionage and mad science in a late-exposed plot to murder the head of Allied Command…

The All-American heroes stay in England for moody gothic suspense shocker ‘Midnight in Greymoor Castle!’ (illustrated by Dick Ayers over Kirby’s layouts) before second chapter ‘If This be Treason!’ finds Golden Age veteran and contemporary Buck Rogers newspaper strip artist George Tuska perform the same function.

The final part – and last wartime operation – then reveals what happens ‘When You Lie Down with Dogs…!’ with Joe Sinnott inking Tuska over Kirby’s layouts to deliver a rousing conclusion to this frantic tale of traitors, madmen and terror-weapons.

We return to the present – that’s 1964 to you – ToS #72 where Lee, Kirby & Tuska reveal that Cap has been telling war stories to his fellow Avengers for our last nine months. The reverie triggers a long dormant memory when ‘The Sleeper Shall Awake!’, kicking off a classic catastrophe countdown as a dormant Nazi super-robot activates 20 years after Germany’s defeat, programmed to exact world-shattering vengeance.

Continuing in ‘Where Walks the Sleeper!’ and concluding in ‘The Final Sleep!’, this masterpiece of tense suspense deftly demonstrates the indomitable nature of the perfect American hero.

With John Tartaglione inking, Ayers returns to pencil Kirby’s breakdown designs in ‘30 Minutes to Live!’: introducing both Gallic mercenary Batroc the Leaper and a mysterious girl who would eventually become Cap’s long-term girl-friend. In deference to the era’s fascination with superspies, S.H.I.E.L.D. was rapidly gaining dominance throughout Marvel continuity and one of their best was Agent 13 – Sharon Carter.

The taut 2-part countdown to disaster ends with ‘The Gladiator, The Girl and the Glory!’, limned by John Romita: the first tale with no official artistic input from Kirby, although he did lay out the next issue (TOS #77) for Romita & Giacoia. ‘If a Hostage Should Die!’ again focuses on WWII, hinting at both a lost romance and tragedy to come, and a possible connection between Agent 13 and the girl Steve Rogers lost in the dying days of war…

Rounding out this patriotic bonanza is a brief gallery of original art pages by Kirby, Stone & Ayers, taken from these tales of dauntless courage and unmatchable adventure.

Fast-paced and superbly illustrated, these adventures introduced a new generation to Captain America, restoring the Sentinel of Liberty to the heights his Golden Age compatriots the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner never truly regained. These yarns are pure escapist magic: unmissable reading for the eternally young at heart and constantly thrill-seeking.
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