With Great Power

 Stand by for a blast of rambling nostalgia for my earliest childhood...
I read a significantly large number of DC comics in the Silver and Bronze Ages, as my Materioptikon blog attests. But my loyalties always lie first and foremost with the House of Ideas and my first memories of Marvel super-heroes stem from Power Comics. 

The first British weekly comic I remember reading every week was The Topper:

Although never a big fan of The Beano or The Dandy, I did skim other kids' copies of The Beezer, Lion, Valiant and improving but dull things like Look and Learn. But super-heroes consumed me from around the age of four. Pow! looks like D.C. Thomson fare but it was so much more vibrant and exciting. Here, the boastful Sandman and a sombre Spider-Man were burned on my mind: such surreal, nightmarish figures.

As you know, I also read Solo, TV Tornado and TV21 (or had them read to me) This was a Golden Age for adventure comics in Britain. I also picked up the occasional copy of Wham and Smash, especially for the Batman newspaper strip on the cover.When Wham amalgamated with Pow, I saw the Fantastic Four more regularly.

Unlike my father, my mother was not a hoarder. In the early 70s, therefore, I would find the odd browning, mouse-eaten copy of a Power comic consigned to the old smithy at the back of our cottage, which my dad used as a garage and dumping ground. A gap of four or five years felt like an eternity at that age and these were relics of an unfathomably distant past.

The Evil of the Daleks, starring Patrick Troughton, is on tv this week in 1967!

I realise now I pored over several issues of this comic, because I remember Giant-Man's battles with the Porcupine and the Human Top; the Avengers' foe Power Man; and Dr. Strange's adversary Kaluu, brother to the Ancient One! These covers recall sunny Seventies afternoons, the whirr of the wings of Dad's racing pigeons and the acrid odour of the cats they attracted.

My favourite of the Power stable was Fantastic, however, especially the distinctive logo and the seminal line-up. Prompted by Kid Robson's blog, I bought three issues on ebay some weeks ago. Issue 50 remains etched on my consciousness forty-five years later. The advertised free gift of stick-on tattoos in the amalgamated Pow and Wham was instantly recognisable.

X-Men: This is one of my favourite eras of the Merry Mutants- the early days of the Factor Three plotline.  Angel has been injured by Cyclops during their encounter with "the dread Kukulcan" ( who sounded amazing). The winged X-man's place is taken temporarily by Cal Rankin. With his distinctive design and funky visor, the X-men's original bad seed is one of my favourite Silver Age characters. For continuity reasons, a cameo by Wanda and Pietro has been cut from the strip. I don't think Werner Roth gets enough credit for the charm of the preppy mutants' soap operatics. It would be about another four years before I would see the climax of this story, reprinted in the regular American comic
Iron Man stars in  two strips here: Gene the Dean's moody drama opera with the Fearsome Freak and Count Nefaria's one-off stint as the Dream-Maker.I can remember being fascinated by the panels featuring the ungainly Crimson Dynamo.  

 Johnny Future: the homegrown hero (who resembled the Golden Age Starman if designed by Kirby) thwarts the Secret Society of Science and their Living Metal. This distinctly European strip, by Spaniard Luis Bermejo, seemed inferior- to my childish sensibilities.
The Thor strip is the Thunder God's first battle with the virtually unstoppable Destroyer (the one from the movie!)
News from the floor of 64 reminded me of nearly-forgotten Power fare, Rubberman and Brian's Brain. Since I've been reading kids' writing for a living for about three years, I was especially touched by a letter from a Rory Slaytor, who had lost his pet falcon, Sonny Jim. Rory wrote about the care and training of the bird earnestly and at length. I wonder if he got the bird back? A sweet, sad glimpse into another life.

This issue is dated 27th January 1968, which was the broadcast date of the final episode of The Enemy of the World, a Dr.Who serial of which I have absolutely no recollection. I wonder why? Was there something more appealing on The Other Side? I was back with Who for The Web of Fear the following week, in any case.

Memories of the free Star Target Pistol, which operated by elastic band power, cane flooding back with this issue. I also recall a cardboard press-out flying saucer, not unlike the one that ELO would feature on lp covers a decade later. The eagle-eyed will have spotted that Terrific has amalgamated with Fantastic. Also, these issues carry the first appearance of another X-Men favourite, the bizarre and striking Irish mutant Banshee.

Over the next couple of decades, Banshee's distinctive features would be altered dramatically and his apparent age tweaked until, in the Nineties, he was a buff and rugged thirty-something!

  Alongside the X-Men, the roster of features in the revamped Fantastic included Thor, the Avengers (with Goliath about to make his début) and Dr. Strange versus Umar the Unmentionable, sister of dread Dormammu. Johnny Future appears not to have had one and is missing from these issues.


The self-assembly Apollo capsule oddly made less impression than some of the adverts in Power Comics, such as Mod-styled bubble gum hero, Anglo Ace. I don't know how much gum you'd need to purchase to win a luminous watch; I imagine it was a jaw-breaking amount.

In a far cry from our "five a day" culture, ice cream was also promoted; here Crackerjack presenter Leslie Crowther's image is used for Mighty MagicWiz. "Banoffee" is not in our vocabulary yet.

Next, an archetypal Sixties brand name, accompanied by Carnaby Street imagery. I remember buying a Kinky lolly in Girvan's Sunny South cafe.

Finally, I longed to buy one of Tonibell's innovative ice-cream filled "Miniballs" but, to my knowledge, they were never available in my area.

Do children even play rounders by choice now?

By November, 1968, Fantastic had been absorbed by Smash. I was now in primary school, and the Cybermen launched their Invasion of London on tv. The US strips in Power Comics had vanished from the newsagents by the spring of 1969.But even so, they had established firm favourites for me among the scarce colour American comics that replaced them: X-Men, Thor and the Fantastic Four. And within a couple of years, the Mighty World of Marvel would re-assert itself so that, at a fundamental level, I would always remain a "Power-Packed Person".


Coming soon: The Foe from the Future; Spider-Woman; and the vengeful Aakon.


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