Week Ending

Here we are, in the second week of the Marvel UK Kung Fu era (a name I have just coined for the length of time between April 1974 and the Marvel UK vampire/ape period) it was not all martial arts meyhem though, as we shall now see. Mighty World of Marvel #79 Did Herb Trimpe ever do a stint on the Fantastic Four? Because on the strength of this cover, I would be all over that. A recolouring of the original US that definitely improves on the source for my money. The Incredible Hulk: The Hulk's Last Fight! Reprinting The Incredible Hulk #122 Young Roy Thomas pens another adventure, as a kid I probably credited a lot of Roy's stories to Stan, in no small part due to the prominence of Stan's name everywhere. Reading them now, I can see why that mistake would be easy to make but while he certainly impersonates Stan's writing style, there are definite moments of his own voice there to see on the page. This week's tale pulls double-duty as it guest s

1974, Britain: skateboards are not due to hit our shores for a few years, we are a nation in need of a craze, something that could replicate the thrills and danger of the last playground phenomenon 'Clackers'. As luck would have it, the recently deceased Bruce Lee was back from the dead and on our cinema screens in Enter The Dragon. Keen to cash in on the zeitgeist, Marvel UK were quick to give up some prime comic real estate to the martial arts fad, because as hard as it might be for millennial MCU fans to grasp, superheroes were really not cutting through in the UK comic landscape. For young British fans of the Avengers, this may have been our first experience of the malevolent power of market forces, it would not be our last. Mighty World of Marvel #78 More Glob-based goodness from Ron Wilson and Frank Giacoia/Mike Esposito. We also get a fainting damsel in an outfit entirely inappropriate for swamp exploration.  The Incredible Hulk: A Tale of Two Mon

1974 would have been my second year at primary school, if my finger counting calculations are correct (it was not a school known for its standards of educational excellence) but it is not a period I recall particularly well. Not having the memorable horror of the terrifying first year teacher Mrs Gale, or any notable world-shaking events to stick in my mind many years later. Ironically, these comics which I clearly did not read at the time, have a far more impressive effect of stirring my nostalgia than anything I can actually remember from that year. So, with that in mind, let's take a stroll down a memory lane that exists only in my imagination. Mighty World of Marvel #77 As a youngster I didn't like Herb Trimpe's art, but looking at this cover I really cannot explain why. Maybe I just associated it with being 'old fashioned' because it predated when I came on board with the Hulk stories. I clearly didn't have a rational excuse, because