Week Ending

I'm assuming that most readers of this blog are, how can I put this nicely... getting on a bit. As such, a lot of us might have our own kids who we have probably tried to introduce to the joys of comics. I don't know what level of abject failure you experienced, but it did help me realise how much of my interest is rooted in nostalgia as well as the appreciation of the art form and its history. Also, I learnt how hard it is to keep your cool when the fruit of your loins is holding a comic all wrong. Mighty World of Marvel #74 This Herb Trimpe cover gets some tweaks to give Maximus a more active role, rather than his more symbolic appearance on the original. The Incredible Hulk: The Rage of Battle! Reprinting The Incredible Hulk #119 Still struggling with how to handle the need for extra splash pages, Marvel UK blow up another panel and cram in a large Hulk-head to tide us over here. Which would probably be fine if the exact same panel and text weren't on

Intellectually I know that there is no difference between how a kid of today feels when their favourite YouTuber drops a new video and how we would have felt on new comic day when we entered the newsagent to pick up the latest Marvel weeklies. However, nostalgia and grumpy old man snobbery insists that the thrill we got was somehow 'better' or more pure. A bit like how aging ravers will tell you how pills back in the day were superior to the rubbish you get these days, waxing lyrical like a wide-eyed, gurning Jack Hargreaves talking about a 1920s farm implement. Mighty World of Marvel #73 This is a Marvel UK exclusive cover by Ed Hannigan and Mike Esposito. Hannigan's name was not immediately familiar to me but a quick search of Google informs me that I have seen his work before, and Wikipedia leads me to think that this cover might be among his earliest work for Marvel. The Incredible Hulk: At The Mercy of.. Maximus The Mad! Reprinting The Incredibl

I have very little memory of 1974, it is a year that lacks a record breaking heatwave to lock it into our collective conscious and on a personal level it is a few years before my parents would make the dubious choice to send me to school in brown corduroy bell-bottoms, a purple paisley shirt and sandals to ensure I received just the right amount of character building bullying from my peers and thus not burnt into my memory as particularly significant. Had I have purchased these Marvel UK weeklies, it is possible that my recollection of the year would be improved. Mighty World of Marvel #72 I'm not going to pretend this is Ron Wilson and Mike Esposito's finest cover work, but the poor print reproduction of at least this particular copy does their efforts no favours at all. The Incredible Hulk: Disaster In The Depths! Reprinting The Incredible Hulk #118 Concluding last week's Hulk/Namor slug-fest, we open with another example of an enlarged panel doing

Some weeks when I dig out the issues for this blog, I just look at the covers and get that same thrill I would have got when they turned up in my local newsagent. This week's offerings are a great example of that, even though this is one year before I would start regularly picking up the Marvel weeklies, these covers transport me back to a time that technically didn't exist, a Mandela effect of nostalgia if you will.  Mighty World of Marvel #71 Now here is a cover. Herb Trimpe delivers an absolute belter, he really had a knack for art that was both old fashioned and yet somehow timeless. I am even willing to forgive him giving Hulk two right feet.  The Incredible Hulk: A Clash of Titans Reprinting The Incredible Hulk #118 Trimpe's dad-bod Hulk takes on his Johnny Weissmuller Namor in undersea battle. Aided by the very Stan Lee conceit of an Atlantean pill that allows the unconscious Bruce Banner to breath underwater for 24 hours. Herb provides some b

As touched on last week, I feel Marvel UK had really found their winning formula with their weeklies in 1974. There were missteps and improvements to come, but the format they hit upon in early 74 takes some beating. Let us breath deep the nostalgia and see what lurked within those semi-gloss covers of yesteryear... Mighty World of Marvel #70 Here we have a recoloured version of the original Herb Trimpe cover and the Super Humanoid has obviously been raiding the same dress-up box as the Sandman used for recent UK outings. The effect it has on reducing the menace of the original makes me wonder if that was the reason for such a bold sartorial choice. The Incredible Hulk: Dooms-Day! Reprinting The Incredible Hulk #117 One of the unique aspects of the Marvel UK reprints were the additional panels or splash pages made necessary by the breaking up of the original stories into weekly portions. Thus far the weeklies have mostly got round this by using cover art made re