Marvel Comics

SO IT WAS MID-1965,  I was just coming up to my eleventh birthday and I was leaving the kids-stuff comics of DC behind and discovering the wonderful new world of Marvel Comics, masterminded by a cheery bloke called Stan Lee. I had found a character called Captain America that I thought was really cool, with his lack of superpowers, his natty spinning shield and his eye-catching Stars-and-Stripes costume. But it didn't take me long to figure out that this Marvel outfit had other titles and pretty soon, I'd found Fantastic Four and Spider-Man comics as well, and they were just good as the Captain America and The Avengers stories I'd read. Back in the 1960s, comics companies had no advertising budgets, and there were no comic stores or fanzines or internet to keep customers informed of what other books the company was publishing. If you picked up a Fantastic Four comic and you liked it, the chances were you might be interested in X-Men as well. So the publishers would hea...

SO ... IN THE FIRST HALF OF 1965 , I had discovered Marvel Comics and thought they made DC Comics look like kids' stuff by comparison. But then I was ten years old and didn't have a clue why Marvel Comics seemed quite a bit more grown up. It's possible that now, almost fifty years later, and having worked as an editor in comics for something like fifteen years, I may have a better insight into why that might have been. But for the moment, I want to continue to retrace my first steps through my transition from a casual DC reader to a fully-formed Marvelite … Now, this wasn't some kind of magical, overnight transformation. Through 1965, as I started to look for more of those cool Marvel Comics, I was still reading a smattering of DCs. In 1964, when I first discovered Marvel, one of the DCs that still stands out in my memory was an issue of World's Finest , issue 139, "The Ghost of Batman". It had one of those typical early Sixties DC covers that make you wan...

"The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve." THOUGH THAT STATEMENT has been variously attributed to Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, turns out it was credited by SF editor Terry Carr to his friend Peter Graham. But the fundamental truth of that is more important than who said it first. So for me, the best era ever in comics was my pre-teen years, in the early 1960s. I'd started off on the Weisinger and Schwarz edited DC Comics, which really were aimed at kids of 8-10. But then Stan Lee came along with his strange Marvel books. And I suppose that's what stopped me growing out of comics. The first American comic I remember seeing was an early DC science fiction book. It was on the counter of a newsagent, somewhere in London. It had a couple of kids in a canoe and they'd hooked a green monster on their fishing line. I could only have been about five. Boy, I wanted that comic ... but my mum didn't approve of horror comics, so that was that. The comic that ca...