When I Paint My Masterpiece

This week, I have to make a work-related train journey to Hamilton in Lanarkshire. My senior school years were spent in the town at the very beginning of the Eighties. The magazines below were a vibrant splash of colour in those drab days.

The media tend to paint a neon-bright picture of the 80s: all brash pop music and big hair. But I remember it as a time of mass unemployment; rioting; and bleak synth-bands alternating with the Ska revival and the cock-rock posturing and Tolkienesque imagery of Heavy Metal.
Marvel UK was floundering around, launching a flurry of cheap-looking  reprint titles. Meanwhile, Egmont  produced the glossy monthly The Super Heroes between 1980-1981. It had been a year or two since Superman the Movie and the Wonder Woman tv series but in the days before I frequented Edinburgh's Science Fiction Bookshop or Glasgow's Photon Books, you could actually buy this mag in John Menzies in Hamilton's Regent Way or in East Kilbrde's Plaza.
The painted covers drew me to leaf through the issue above and the reprinted plan of the Legion of Super Heroes HQ (from Adventure 403, 1971) sealed the deal. This mag appeared about five years after my mother convinced me to part with my collection of  US DC comics pre-1975. As previously mentioned, I had taken to buying  60s comics through the Exchange and Mart, so a b/w reprint series was a bonus.

It seems I would pick and choose when purchasing this mag. The issue above featured the first Brave and Bold appearance of the Silver Age Hawkman, so that swayed me.

My fondest memory is of the origin of the Huntress, probably my favourite heroine of DC's Bronze Age. She does look a little too "streetwalker" in this MTV -style image but the covers were always striking.

The Super Heroes folded in the summer of 1982, unfortunately. A couple of annuals were published, IIRC but in a sense the magazine foreshadowed the imminent British invasion of DC: when artists and writers from the UK would retell some of those Silver Age legends. Egmont are still publishing children's books and magazines: Spider-Man activity books  and Batman, Superman and Green Lantern easy readers. As an English teacher, thirty years later, this makes me happy.

Speaking of the Legion as we were earlier,  posters on the blog, Diversions of the Groovy Kind have been celebrating the work of Dave Cockrum. I had speculated what might have happened if Cockrum had stayed with the LSH for another year or two. No Tyroc? No Dawnstar? Nightcrawler as a Legionnaire?
What would have become of the All-New X-Men? Without Cockrum's sketchbook, there might have been no Colossus, Thunderbird or Storm.

Yet Thomas and Wein were trying to pitch a Blackhawk-inspired comic to their overseas markets. The All-Different X-Men might have become a project for George Tuska or Herb Trimpe. I can envisage a team led by Cyclops and featuring Ireland's Banshee and Japan's Sunfire. Canada's surly, vicious Wolverine (designed by John Romita) would be included of course. I think the Wolverine and Sunfire would be over-egging the pudding with sheer unpleasantness. So, although a favourite of long standing, it could have been sayonara, Atomic Samurai. Perhaps in Valhalla Mountain? 

Who would contribute the all-new element? Madrox the Multiple Man was created by Wein and scripted by Claremont.Obviously, calling him Zerox, as he was originally trailed, might have ended in litigation.

As for the 70s token female, perhaps Wein would create a new character: possibly Afro-Caribbean or South American. But maybe if a neophyte named John Byrne was offered the comic, his White Raven  fanzine character could be the female lead.

And as for villains, FOOM Magazine, trailing the new X-Men, promised Sentinels. But what about Magneto's evolved creation, Alpha the Ultimate Mutant? Or the Soviet Union's own Gremlin? Or a new incarnation of the Mutant-Master?

In the tough marketplace of 1975, perhaps a bi-monthly Wein/Claremont/Tuska/Byrne X-Men would have been lucky to last a dozen issues and in 2000, we might have seen a Legion of Super-Heroes movie starring Hugh Jackman as Timber Wolf. So, maybe things turned out for the best...

Coming soon: UNIT Dominion and Dr. Who's 49th birthday.

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