This week’s Spider-Man comic, inserted in the Sunday paper, starts reprinting issue #5, from 1963. Spidey is hopelessly mis-matched, battling Doctor Doom, one of the principal character inspirations for Darth Vader.
I was impressed that the colorist for this little freebie comic made the TV a black & white set, as it was originally, 43 years ago; emphasizing that the comics were in color, but TV (for the most part) wasn’t. Nice touch.
Lately, the fun in the Sunday comics hasn’t been in the strips, which are mostly mediocre, but with a comic-book that’s being inserted with the flyers. It features reprints of the earliest Spider-Man stories by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.
Each comic is 16 pages total, the printing quality is excellent and, hey, they’re free! This nifty promotion is from SmartSource, the coupon distributor. To see a list of all the participating newspapers, click here.
You can learn a lot from reading old comic-books.
Click the picture below to see the entire cover to the January, 1965 issue of a humor magazine called HELP! The Beatles’ movie HELP! wasn’t released until August, 1965, leading one to speculate what possible influence Terry Gilliam’s bit of airbrushed artistic whimsy may have had on the title. Yes, that’s Terry Gilliam the animator, director and Monty Python troupe member who is listed as contributing editor.
HELP! was the brainchild of Harvey Kurtzman. In an earlier posting I have a link to a gallery with one of Kurtzman’s early comic-book stories. Kurtzman is still remembered today as the man who started MAD Magazine. One evening, Gilliam, who had replaced HELP! staffer Gloria Steinem, went to an off-Broadway show that featured a performer named John Cleese. They met and Cleese was talked into performing a photo comic strip for the magazine. Look for that in a future posting. After HELP! folded, Gilliam later caught up with Cleese in London, and then there was something completely different.
In an earlier posting I introduced Eva•tone Soundsheets. Forty years ago, Stan Lee of Marvel Comics put out a couple of flexi-discs. The first was “The Voices of Marvel,” and the other was “Scream Along with Marvel.” Face Front!
I was known to have read a few comic books in my younger days. A few thousand. Click the picture to read a fun 8-page story, “Lost in the Microcosm,” by Harvey Kurtzman. For easier reading, select “full-size” in the gallery.
