Week Ending

I'm sure all comic readers and collectors have a period or format that they consider 'just right' or that generates an optimal amount of nostalgia. This week, Marvel UK take a step closer to my personal version of comic nirvana with the addition of an extra strip in two of their weekly titles. Mighty World of Marvel #69 Daredevil is back! Shouts the cover. Which probably comes as salt in the wound for the FF, who despite never going away, only get a rare cover appearance because of the return of Johnny-come-lately DD. It's a mash up cover with elements of Romita, Kirby and Trimpe, with Mike Esposito papering over the joins. The Incredible Hulk: World's End? Reprinting The Incredible Hulk #117 The Leader and his giant forehead are hell-bent on nuclear armagedon, while the Hulk is once again trapped in a large blob of bubblegum. This situation is not a sustainable one, and the green goliath frees himself with the aid of an attractive Herb Trimp

Marvel UK was now taking an extra two pence a week out of your pocket money, teaching a lesson about rampant capitalism a decade before the arrival of the yuppies. So strap on your red braces and go heavy on the hair product for another week of comic goodness. Mighty World of Marvel #68 Here it is, the first appearance anywhere of The Incredible Orange Hulk. Sorely tempted to start a viral campaign to artificially inflate the value of this issue, in which a colour separation error sees our hero take on a tangerine hue. The real irony being the text, not an inch above, actually referring to him as 'green-skinned'. It's not actually a bad cover from Ron Wilson and Mike Esposito, but with that colouring, who would notice?  The Incredible Hulk: The Eve of Annihilation. Reprinting The Incredible Hulk #116 The Hulk is still trapped in the Leader's rubber prison, while the green tefal-head's (Google is your friend non-British or non-old readers) pla

After spending a solid quarter of an hour trying to work out how to type a drumroll or trumpet fanfare, I have given up in abject failure. So instead, here we are, glossy covers all round for Marvel UK this week. It is pretty hard to communicate the importance of this event (possibly harder than arranging letters that would signify a musical flourish) but those of us who grew up on gloriously shiney Marvel weeklies are probably experiencing a stirring in the old nostalgia gland right now.  Mighty World of Marvel #67 Making the absolute most out of the new coated-paper cover format, Ron Wilson and Mike Esposito/John Tartaglione sear our eyeballs and blow our tiny 1974 minds with a cover that must have been at risk of setting fire to its shelf-mates in the newsagents all those years ago. The Incredible Hulk: Lo, The Leader Lives! Reprinting The Incredible Hulk #115 Hulk finds himself captured on Gamma Base (are we calling it that yet?) with General Ross in search

Marvel UK had a strong finish to 1973, but I suspect things got a bit out of hand at the office Christmas party though, because their comics for the first week of 1974 appear to be what you would get if the technology existed to print a hangover. Mighty World of Marvel #66 Here we have the 'treat' of an edited and shortened version of the US original by Herb Trimpe and Dan Adkins, with the added bonus of the Sandman continuing to rock his shortlived go-go dancer look.  The Incredible Hulk: At Last I Will Have My Revenge! Reprinting The Incredible Hulk #114 In a break from my usual practice of a loose, stream of consciousness style review, I won't be making any effort to explain what happens in this story, mainly because a lot of it is missing. Marvel UK would often delete a panel or even a page as a space saving exercise, most of the time you would hardly notice. However, here they make the bold choice to completely remove pages 15, 16 and 18 of the

Christmas 1973, I don't know what you were up to, but I suspect I had spent the last two weeks playing with my Lone Ranger action figure at night, having discovered that A: Father Christmas was not real, and B: my parents were not particularly inventive when it came to hiding presents. Mighty World of Marvel #65 Ron Wilson and Mike Esposito give us a fairly direct reworking of the Herb Trimp/Dan Adkins original cover. Apart that is from the strange stylistic decision to have the Sandman recently returned from Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. The Incredible Hulk: Where Fall The Shifting Sands? Reprinting The Incredible Hulk #113 Fresh from one of his surprisingly frequent adventures in space, Bruce Banner hurtles back to Earth in a badly pressurised spaceship. Rather than, ooh I dunno, adjusting the pressure, our genius scientist exposes himself to the gamma-driven engines of said spaceship. As a result, it is the Hulk who crash lands in the desert, oddly close to