Week Ending March 3, 1973

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Another week, another cracking pair of covers from Marvel UK, even if the quality of the reproduction lets things down a bit.
I had a request on Facebook after last week's post for more pics and details of the internal art and features, because frankly I had been cutting some corners due to having two titles to read and review. As this gives me the perfect opportunity to use the time-honoured Marvel phrase "Because you demanded it!" how could I say no...

Mighty World of Marvel #22


The dynamic cover art of this issue promises much that the contents fail to deliver. The Hulk has his first face to face meeting with the Leader and is apparently killed for his troubles by the end of the installment. This actually sounds a lot more dramatic than the reality merits, and the cliffhanger ending is immediately defused by a text box in the last panel to soothe the panic of worried readers.
UK edits this week appear to be limited to Rick Jones' "Presidential Clearance" continuing to stand in for his Avengers ID.


Daredevil receives his second proper outing, and it is quite the disappointment after his crowd pleasing debut. Vince Colletta takes over art duties from Bill Everett and the cartoonish result is a huge drop in quality. This isn't helped by Stan Lee's compulsion to up the stakes and have the Fantastic Four as gratuitous guest stars. DD is up against Electro this week, but his real enemy is some pretty shocking comicbook storytelling. I'm not sure if this is a result of trimming down the panel count for MWOM or if the original story is complete and just a mess.


Our colour center pages this week are dedicated to the promise of free cut out and keep mini posters next week (great, I will have to be on high alert for missing pages) as well as a house ad for Spider-Man Comics Weekly and an opportunity to join Foom.


Next we get what could have been a fun little fourth-wall breaking filler story from Fantastic Four #11, instead it pretty rapidly turns into something a little darker.
The premise is simple enough, the FF spend their day reading their fan mail while addressing the readers directly and retelling their origin story. The problems start when Stan, and I have to assume it is Stan rather than Jack, uses this conceit to tackle reader criticism of the handling of Sue Storm's character. Framing readers letters as an attack on Sue rather than fair comment on the way her character was written, Stan's defense, voiced by Reed Richards, is aggressive and only serves to undermine Sue further by basically being: "women do lots of important stuff in the background thus allowing men to do the heroics, and anyway, fighting is unbecoming for a lady."
Marvel rightly get kudos for being ahead of their time on a number of social issues, but they really fumble the ball on this one.

Spider-Man Comics Weekly #3


Not quite in the same league as this week's MWOM cover, it is a nice effort nonetheless from SCW. Hopefully the contents are an inversion of its sister publication's external/internal quality ratio.


This week's Spider-Man story fully embraces its soap opera tendencies as Peter Parker's love life becomes entangled with his crime-fighting career. Pete is in full-on mope mode over the missing Betty Brant when he learns of the imminent release of Dr Octopus from prison. That at least should take his mind off his romantic troubles, well it would if Betty wasn't meeting the newly freed Doc Ock at the prison gates. Drama, suspense and double-crosses ensue, along with a nautical showdown and the kind of ironic tragedy that only a Spider-Man story that features a love interest can deliver.


We get another double page of promotions that threaten the disfigurement of future issues. There should actually be a law against any feature that requires the cutting out of coupons, pin-up pages or vouchers from comics. Preferably backed up by long prison sentences.


This week sees the introduction of Loki and a lot more Norse mythology to the pages of Thor. This definitely feels like the hand of Jack Kirby at work (probably with trademark foreshortening) as he tries to shift the character towards actually being the god of thunder rather than just being some doctor dude with his powers. This definitely seems like a better direction for the character than his pulpy origin.

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