THE GHOST RIDER HAD ENJOYED A LONG RUN at his original home, Vin Sullivan's Magazine Enterprises, from late 1949 right through to the spring of 1955, in a variety of titles: Tim Holt (which became Red Mask), Best of the West, Bobby Benson and, of course, his own title The Ghost Rider. Dick Ayers, later to be one of Jack Kirby's most important Marvel inkers during the early 1960s, was the artist on every single episode of the character. So when comics fan Roy Thomas landed a job at Marvel Comics in 1965 as Stan Lee's assistant, he brought with him a broad knowledge of characters from earlier pe ..read more

BACK IN THE 1960s IT WAS THE SUPERHEROES THAT CAUGHT MY ATTENTION. First, the colourful DC heroes like Flash and especially Green Lantern. Then by the mid-Sixties, I'd focussed more on the Marvel heroes. I was aware that Marvel published other titles from the house ads in the superhero titles, but as I've mentioned before in this blog, I was never much of a fan of war comics or cowboys. It wasn't until much later in my comic collecting endeavours that I began to appreciate that Stan was a pretty good writer in almost any genre. Marvel had three western characters that stood the test of time ..read more

WHEN I FIRST STARTED READING COMICS IN THE 1960s, not even the writers and artists were mentioned anywhere in the DC books I cut my teeth on, let alone the editors. It wasn't until I became involved in professional publishing that I began to grasp the scope of just what it is an editor does do. My editorial life was never as glamorous or as important Ben Bradlee's, but I do love movies that depict the rigours and responsibilities of being an editor. Back at the beginning of the 1970s, I had an aspiration to be a comic artist. I had all the kit ... Windsor & Newton sable brushes, a ..read more

MY A-LEVEL ART TEACHER, MR HUSSEIN, would always talk about the importance of composition when it came to paintings and drawings. In fact he went to far as to spend one entire lesson showing us how to find the geometrical shapes in classical paintings, then he encouraged us to use the same techniques in our artwork. Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man can be used to demonstrate how the Golden Rectangle works. There was also much talk of Golden Triangles, and Golden Rectangles, and even something called the Fibonacci Spiral, but I'd stopped listening by that point. It wasn't until I became involv ..read more

A YEAR ON FROM THE GREAT MARVEL EXPLOSION OF 1968 and it was becoming noticeable that Martin Goodman's grand plan to increase Marvel's output wasn't going to be sustainable. When Marvel's total monthly page output went up from around 280 pages per month to about 400 pages, Editor Stan Lee needed to find more creators to produce the extra 120 pages of original story art he'd need just to keep the Marvel machine fed. He already had Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich helping out on scripting. He'd added Archie Goodwin and Arnold Drake in 1968 - both looked great on paper, Goodwin with long experience ..read more

MARVEL COMICS MIGHT HAVE OWNED THE NAME CAPTAIN MARVEL, but I'm not entirely sure writer Stan Lee quite knew what to do with the character, after publisher Martin Goodman insisted the superhero be added to the company's lineup. After writing the first appearance himself, with the ever-capable Gene Colan on art, he handed the reins over to Roy Thomas, for me an indication that Stan didn't have a great deal of faith or interest in the project. The first appearance of Captain Marvel in Marvel Super-Heroes 12 was scripted by Stan Lee. With the second appearance, Roy Thomas took over as write ..read more

THE ORIGINS OF CAPTAIN MARVEL ARE MIRED in a minefield of trademark and copyright legal battles, some ill-advised, most poorly handled. But that acrimonious history between DC Comics' Harry Donefeld and Jack Liebowitz, sleaze publisher Myron Fass and Marvel publisher Martin Goodman ultimately brought us to the Carole Danvers version of the character. Marvel's version of Captain Marvel has undergone a long and complicated evolution before becoming the female warrior best-known to modern audiences, starting in 1967, with the alien spy, Captain Mar-Vell. It was 1967, and Marvel publisher ..read more

I DON'T THINK STAN LEE LIKED DOCTOR STRANGE, at least not at first. In a letter to Jerry Bails dated 9th January 1963, Stan mentioned a new strip for Strange Tales, Dr Strange, with hardly a hint of his usual enthusiasm. "We have a new character in the works for Strange Tales. Steve Ditko is gonna draw him. Sort of a black magic theme. The first story is nothing great, but perhaps we can make something of him — 'twas Steve's idea, and I figgered we'd give it a chance, although again, we had to rush the first one too much. Little sidelight: Originally decided to call him MR. STRANGE, but though ..read more

SUPERHEROES WERE MY MAIN FOCUS, during the Silver Age of the 1960s. Very occasionally I'd pick up a "horror" or science fiction title. The concept of Magic in comics fiction was barely touched upon. The Justice League had battled magicians a couple of times during the 1963 - 1964 period that I was reading their adventures, and the 1940s hero Dr Fate was one of their "Crisis" allies. But no one was really doing magicians as heroes in those formative Silver Age years. Mandrake the Magician launched as a daily newspaper strip on 11 Jun 1934. A little less than four years later, Zatara made ..read more

IN THE EARLY 1960s I EXPERIMENTED WITH DC COMICS. It was only for a couple of years before I moved on to the good stuff - Stan Lee's Marvel Comics - but for those first tentative steps into the four-colour world, I knew only the implausible coincidences and plot-driven stylings of Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz. And while I still much prefer Marvel to DC, especially the comics of my youth, there are a few DCs that I still remember with love and affection. It's true ... there's a lot of Mort Weisinger books in my top five, but these stories were pitched perfectly at my age-group at t ..read more