Crossover of the Week - Batman and the Shadow

From the depths of my comic collection, here is Batman #259 a 100 page special (gotta love those) in which Batman meets the Shadow - initially encountering him when Bruce Wayne is still a young boy. NB: Batman also meet the Shadow in #253 (got that around here somewheres). A classic 70's story with the 100 pages padded out with reprints. The story itself is dedicated to Bill Finger.

Crossover of the Week - The Thing and Doc Savage

This crossover does not appear in the first Marvel Two-In-One Essential volume, so perhaps on that basis it is worth seeking out. It is written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by the mainstay artist Ron Wilson. Since the villain's real name is Lightner and his alter ego is Black Sun, In wonder if Doc Savage bad guy John Sunlight was part of the inspiration for this story. Interestingly, (!) there is a typo in my Bantam edition of Fortress of Solitude (in which John Sunlight appears) - he is referred to as John Sunshine. Which, frankly, is not such a good name for a bad guy; too cheerful!

Who, What, Where, and When the Heck?

Congratulations to Jenny Hardy for guessing the previous Where the Heck was - which was the beach at Dymchurch back in 2008 where a battle was in progress between the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh and the Excise Men. Here's a different puzzling image. Feel free to apply Sherlock Holmes style deductive reasoning to determine exactly what is happening.

Where the Heck is this? Mystery Beach

This seems like an easy "Where the Heck?" to me. But I have been known to be wrong. So don't be shy. Have a guess. What's the worst that can happen?

Where the Heck is this? Mystery Forest...

Sometimes I like to play a game called 'Where the Heck is this?' So people...what do you think. Clue 1. Not Loch Ness. Clue 2. Did you ever watch the Gerry Anderson TV Show UFO?

T

From My Bookshelf

It is a particular pleasure to read a book by a favourite* author that you've never read before...in my case I've managed it twice in two months. Firstly with Roger Zelazny's non-SF book The Deadman's Brother...which could almost be a precursor to The Da Vinci Code since it is a tale of art and international Vatican related skullduggery...and secondly with Philip Jose Farmer's Lord Tyger - I am almost at the end of this and now reading at a snail's pace because I don't want it to end. Two copies of this have languished disgracefully on my shelf for years - but now it might just be my fave Farmer novel. The cover is by Richard Clifton-Dey who I know best as the cover artist on the Mayflower Six Million Dollar Man books Cyborg and Operation Nuke.

* Yes US readers favorite has a U in it in England.

The Ghost of Christmas Past 2

Back in 1974, Due to the power of blanket advertising (on the back of my weekly B&W reprint Marvel Comics) I knew that the Marvel Treasury Special - Superhero Holiday Grab-Bag would be the perfect accompaniment to my Christmas, like cranberry sauce and turkey. Even though Marvel had coyly avoided using the word 'Christmas' on the cover, the surfeit of holly wreathing some of my favourite heroes (Spider-Man, The Thing, The Hulk) smelt strongly and evocatively of the festive season. In the UK we still don't opt to say 'Happy Holidays' - afterall, what could be less offensive than Christmas? And I've even known Sikhs who had Christmas presents as children (from their parents) and Jewish friends and co-workers who seemed to send a heck of a lot of Christmas cards. Nearly twenty years ago when I worked for the Attorney General I remember that he received a Christmas card from the CIA. So Christmas really is for everyone...even the CIA.

Pester power failed in 1974 and I didn't get the Holiday Grab-Bag - although I did get the rather more expensive Avengers annual for 1975 (Don Heck, Avengers and X-Men versus Magneto) so I can hardly complain. Those annuals were printed with a garish almost fluorescent ink which emitted a strong smell which filled the whole room you were reading in. The odour has almost gone now, but if I crush my nose against the pages of that annual and breathe deeply it's as good as a time machine- I'm straight back to 1974. I recall that both publications had Captain America on the cover and I had no idea who he was. But I thought he had a cool costume.

I finally picked up the Grab-Bag at a London comic fair in the 1990's. That allows me to give you the Christmas greeting from the back cover which is a 180 reverse view of the heroes leaping through the holly wreath .

May you have PEACE ON EARTH and GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN...UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN!

Ghosts of Christmas Past

It is December 1969 in this picture and so I am three and half years old. It was taken in the Co-op Department Store on Parliament Street in Nottingham. As part of the queueing system that year you took a ride on a rocket ship to Santa's Grotto on the moon. So in this picture I think I am on the moon. The white cap is my complimentary Nottingham Co-op Astronaut hat and I still have the button badge I am wearing on my lapel. I was still in a push chair and my push chair couldn't fit on the rocket so the Co-op ladies wheeled it around to the Moon Grotto while we were "in flight" - watching a graphic representation of our trip to the moon on a circular screen.

I have no clear recollection of what I am saying but the family story is that I am asking for cufflinks for my father (he's had a pair stolen from his desk at work) and that I am asking for a bottle of gin for my mother (she didn't drink gin - obviously) primed to do this by my Dad because it would embarass her.

And this year is the first year I have not had to engage in the compulsory perpetuation of the Santa myth while I've been a parent...oh the relief...the lack of sneaking about...it's like I've been one of the elders in the M. Night Shyalmalan movie 'The Village' these last few years.

From My Bookshelf: Gullivar Jones

I first encountered Lieutenant Gullivar Jones in Marvel's British weekly black and white reprints where he was updated to be a Vietnam veteran transported to Mars by dying Martian wizard Lu-Pov (an in-joke over the name of Richard Lupoff - I guess). He immediately became one of my fave characters and I really loved the art (although I wasn't big on reading credits boxes at age 8) by Gil Kane, Ross Andru and Gray Morrow.

Later I also obtained reprints of the original novel - by Edwin L Arnold (also author of Phra the Phoenician) - as a kid I didn't get too far into this before I realised that it was quite different to the comic book. To be honest, a little tamer... the comic strip had been really jazzed up to make it more like John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Re-reading the novel just recently I found it to be quite beautifully written and very humourous too. I wouldn't be the first person to see the influence of The Time Machine on the story - yes, the Hither and Thither (!) people are reminiscent of the Eloi and the Morlocks but the inclusion of the magic carpet as Gullivar's mode of transport to Mars seems to bring us into the Arabian Nights style of storytelling. Joe Petagno's cover has Gullivar (re-spelled as Gulliver in these editions) surfing to Mars on his carpet while the sublime Frazetta cover of the Ace edition has Gully Jones at the feet of two battling titanic Martian monsters like a character in a Harryhausen movie.

Oh yeah, I mentioned that Arnold's other book was Phra the Phoenician and of course Gullivar in the comic book encounters a huge humanoid amphibian called Phra.

Bonfire Night!

For those suffering the disappointment of a lack of live-blogging regarding trick or treaters on Monday; I was visited by inumerable skeletons, witches, ghosts, vampires and one very tiny Batman.

Tonight is Bonfire Night...which here at Gately Mansion we'll be celebrating with masses of fireworks (a curry!) and no bonfire. And if you're setting off fireworks follow the firework code - as advised by Guy Fawkes himself in this Standard Fireworks ad from 1974.

By the way, I am old enough to remember fireworks that you were allowed to hold - one was called the Olympic Torch - and also a rather terrifying hovering and spinning firework called The Flying Saucer (natch!).

Halloween Part 1 - Growing Up Slightly Spooked...

It felt like I grew up on the very edge of the countryside; only a few hundred yards away were open fields. My street was the penultimate street before farmland, the first house on a development of houses built on sold off land that had belonged to a large house...and if this was a Stephen King story the big old house - it doesn't even seem too big when I look at it now - would be the focus of this tale, but it isn't, so it isn't (if you're still with me).

We had a long thin garden and at the end of our garden beyond the hedge was a group...I hesitate to say street for there didn't seem to be any roads...of derelict cottages. And they were really, really old. I hear 16th or 17th Century most frequently in relation to them and maybe at some stage our garden had been their rubbish heap because it was full of broken fragments of claypipe - little white tubes (my Dad even found a pretty much whole pipe and smoked it for a while...very Solomon Kane!).

These cottages were pretty creepy - and one - seemed to be the largest was very near the hedge and seemed to overlook my garden from a single large broken window. I say overlooked...what I imagined was a witch watching me from the window as I played. A witch probably inspired by the Witch from the Dutch TV show 'Paulus the Gnome' which played on my local ITV station. I sometimes mentioned the witch to my mother at a very young age (4? 5?) but I couldn't have been that scared because I took to creeping through a hole in the hedge into the grounds of the cottages. I tended to confine myself to the 'gardens' rather than dare go into the houses. But I did notice things inside the houses...someone had carried a bale of straw from the fields and opened it up in one room to make bedding. Giving me the erroneous impression that some invisible creature was trying to make the place more comfortable. "Probably a tramp," explained my mother. But we didn't get a lot of tramps out in the country. I suppose teenagers/courting couples was more likely but they too must've been very low profile.

As I grew older I realised that what I had thought was a witch was a broken section of plaster on the far wall beyond the window. I now perceived the shape to be more like a sailing ship...broad sails and gib instead of pointy nose and hat.

Around the age of six I came home one day and the quality of light in the back garden seemed different...and I swear...I was able to relax and breathe slightly more easily. It took a moment to realise what had happened. Without warning, in the course of a single day the spooky old cottages had been demolished. The setting sun made long shadows on our vegetable patch and lawn in ways it had never been able to previously.

That evening I snuck through the hedge again and surveyed a mass of broken bricks that stood in front of me like a mountain. Whatever lived in there ghost, monster or witch could not have survived that...

Then a voice suddenly shouted at me in the semi-darkness of this overgrown and wrecked garden.
"Little boys aren't allowed to play in here!" The black and beastly monstrous shape resolved itself to be a security guard with a big German Shepherd dog. With my heart in my mouth I dove through the hedge like a rabbit and never returned (to what would soon be just a rather mundane building site).

The cottages only exist now in the terrain of my imagination and a totally unreadable novella I penned at age 16 under heavy Stephen King and James Herbert influence. And if I have chance tomorrow I'm going to try live blogging updates on the number of trick or treaters who come to my door with general observations on the celebration of Halloween during my lifetime in the UK. See you then my people.

Paul Temple - The Gilbert Case

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/rlb29/

If there are any other obsessive Paul Temple fans out there, don't forget that a new story started this week and is available on BBC iplayer.

Where the Heck...

I've wanted to visit Meteor Crater in Arizona since I first saw a picture of it in a Ladybird Book circa 1972. The Apollo astronauts used the bottom of the crater for training purposes hence the spacesuit 'standee.'

The Surprise Return of 'Where the Heck'

It's been a long time since we played...but where the heck is this? And for those who find this too easy: Where am I in the image I'm currently using as a Facebook profile image?

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

It takes very little provocation for me to witter on endlessly about the genius of Billy Wilder's movie 'The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes' - the plot is quite twisty and turny so it seems strange that the movie poster (as seen here on the cover of Movie Collector Magazine July/August 1994) looks to me like one massive spoiler...
It also has one of the most haunting musical scores ever written for a movie...and...the most frightening (totally without warning/broad-daylight) TV moment of my childhood in the Glen Nahurich cemetery when the 'little boys' visit the grave of their brother. If you've seen the movie you won't have forgotten that sequence.

Tales of the Shadowmen 8 - Agents Provocateurs

It's the time of year when your mind is probably turning to the Christmas gifts you intend to buy for your hard to please relatives. I suggest that Tales of the Shadowmen Volume 8 - Agents Provocateurs from Black Coat Press http://www.blackcoatpress.com/talesshadowmen09c.htm
would probably make an ideal gift for well, practically anyone who enjoys well written fantastic fiction. Modesty very nearly prevents me from pointing out that this volume contains my story 'Leviathan Creek' - which coincidentally features Gaston Leroux's character Joseph Rouletabille - who is kinda sorta the inspiration for the TV character Jonathan Creek. Oh, take a risk and buy a copy for everyone you know...

What to do when your son outgrows Spider-man and you still haven't...

And so it came to pass, in early December 1974 (when I was almost eight and half years old) that I trudged through the snow the mile and a smidge from my parent's house into town to the bakers to buy several large 'bloomer' style loaves of bread (don't laugh). My imagination is summoning up a recollection of deep snow drifts that probably comes from the movie the Thing rather than what I actually trudged through...anyway it was cold and even the big empty red shopping bag I'd been dispatched with seemed heavy. The most difficult part of the task was actually getting noticed and served in a busy bakers where the counter seemed to be a good two and half feet above my head and all the serving ladies seemed to think I was there with another adult who was being served rather than on my own. What seemed like an eternity later I lugged the now full shopping bag (full of still warm, beautiful smelling crusty bread) out into the street and towards home. Then it hit me...it was a Saturday morning and it was still early. There would be new British Marvel Comics in the newsagents - and just to explain - they would not be there for long. There only ever seemed to be a handful delivered and they soon disappeared from the shelves. Getting comics at this time was entirely predicated on having a regular order with your newsagents - my regular order at this time was for Planet of the Apes and Dracula Lives* (which contained little in the way of the superhero stories I longed for (and superhero stories were not approved of, well by anybody really. Admitting to liking superheroes was like admitting to having a low IQ: irrespective of the reading age that they were aimed at, they were universally condemned as 'being for babies'). I digress. So to recap: it is Saturday morning. There are comics. And I have the change from the bakers. Who can stop me? What can possibly go wrong? Nothing. The manager of the newsagent had once said to me "Hey, this isn't a library!" as I was reaching for a comic with the money to pay for it in my hand, er having not been reading the comic at any time. Idiot. The moron was not present. A pleasant lady served me. I trudged home through the snow drifts that you will have seen in both versions of the Thing (Hawkes and Carpenter) except probably bigger. The comic I bought was Spider-Man Comics Weekly #96 - offsale date December 14th 1974 - a reprint of Spider-Man's first encounter with The Prowler. Phenomenal John Buscema art and a backup Kirby Thor strip. My Mother was not impressed with the selection of this classic comic and the spending of the 7p of her change on it. "Well, I did walk through the snow," I offered lamely. She explained that if she had known I was going to spend the 7p she would've walked throught the snow herself. Yeah, right.

So I told you that so I could tell you this. My hypothesis is that you will not now find an eight and a half year old boy with that level of interest in Spider-Man any more than you would find an eight year old boy who is interested in Thomas the Tank Engine. My son 'outgrew' Spider-Man some considerable time ago (he is 8). In the UK vast majority of Spider-Man related clothing finishes at age 6. Why is this? Particularly when there are 12 certificate Spider-Man movies and there is nothing infantile (I would contend!) about the character. This is only a theory, but I think Spider-Man has become some sort of 'avatar' (or maybe poster-boy) for the beginnings of the sort of adventurous play in which boys first stray out of parental reach when climbing and jumping around ("Look at me! I'm Spider-Man!). And so, it has become somthing to grow out of rather than something to enjoy at any age (Like Star Wars and Lego now seem to be).

So to answer my own question: I shall continue to buy Spider-man comics even though my son has grown out of them. In particular, reprints of the classic Romita/Gil kane era. Last month I bought from the Works a bargain basement digest sized reprint vol of Spider-Man 86 onwards. The final story is a Prowler story and I haven't read it before. Son, you don't know what you're missing...


*NB my order for Planet of the Apes and Dracula Lives was at a different newsagent nowhere near the bakers. Glad we cleared that up.

Luke Starkiller...I mean Skywalker...

I guess it is something of an open secret that Jack Kirby influenced George Lucas...Doctor Doom is like Darth Vader yadda yadda etc. But I've also had an inkling that the Kenneth Robeson Doc Savage stories were also an influence - "Phantom Menace" could almost be Doc Savage book title. Sorting through a pile of old comics I was reminded today of this when I saw the cover to Justice Inc. #2. Well, there aren't many places outside the context of Star Wars where you can see the words Sky and Walker in such close proximity. If I'm ever stuck in an elevator with George Lucas I'll be able to ask him if Justice Inc was his favourite Kirby comic. If memory serves, Luke's name was changed to be Skywalker and the last minute from Starkiller (which hardly rolls off the tongue but is quite Kirbyesque).

From My Bookshelf: Damnation Alley

So you see, in simpler times you could sell more copies of your film novelization if you could point out that you were also the publisher of the novelization of Star Wars...well you could if you were Sphere Books circa 1977. Roger Zelazny is, of course, one of my favourite authors and probably the one I am most likely to be busted for ripping off the style of (I throw myself on the mercy of the court and ask for several offences to be taken into consideration). From left to right we have Jackie Earle Haley who did a nice line in post apocalyptic kids (cf Planet of the Apes TV show) and Jan Michael Vincent drawn by somebody who probably wished they were drawing Charles Bronson, by the look of it. The Paul Winfield likeness is OK but George Peppard (complete with bad moustache) and Dominique Sanda could be practically anybody.

Damnation Alley was also the 'inspiration' for the Judge Dredd Cursed Earth sequence which contributed to my childhood lack of understanding of the laws of copyright. And the movie was the first time I came across the idea that the lights in Vegas would never go out (due to the automation of Hoover Dam - though I'm not sure this was properly explained).