Today's post is still about Christmas: the Marvel UK annuals I bought on ebay last month. Annuals were a staple present in my childhood and adolescence- Star Trek often, the increasingly feverish Dr. Who annuals in the mid-70s regularly and more occasionally, Marvel. Sometimes, frustratingly, the reprints inside had already been seen (in black and white) in the weeklies; sometimes, however, they were of impossibly rare Marvel giants and annuals which hadn't - and wouldn't- be seen in this country.
I never owned the 1976 annuals, launched in the autumn of 1975, which was a year of expansion for Marvel UK. My parents were both working- my dad was in a bank and my mum was in the typing pool in a police station, so we would be quite well-off but maybe it was a stretch too far, with two wee boys. I did get the surreal Doctor Who annual for 1976 and the Star Trek annual, which I remember for this story:
So, in middle age, I have the income and opportunity to fill in gaps in my Marvel UK annual reading.
Spider-Man Annual 1976 comprises a mix of material which would be seen and unseen and it sports a version of the cover from the first black and white Spectacular Spider-Man magazine from the late Sixties.
Ship of Fiends is a reprint of Giant-Size Spider-Man 1 by the late Len Wein, Ross Andru and Don Heck. It's well-known that Spidey and the Lord of the Undead don't meet in the story although Peter Parker does literally bump into Dracula. This absence of conflict is probably just as well: despite the sci-fi psychosis of Conway/Andru Spidey, with Morbius and Man-Wolf , Dracula by Colan and Wolfman is a more mature and complex milieu.
Ship is a convoluted tale in which Spidey attempts to obtain a vaccine for a fading Aunt May ( again?!) from an eccentric doctor travelling on a cruise liner. There's a bit of an homage to The Masque of the Red Death and a message about sexism, plus two interesting Dick Tracy-style gangsters, Whisperer and Simian. The germ warfare McGuffin reminds me of Satanic Rites of Dracula and I think it was reprinted in the UK around 1978, but I may be a year out.
Perplexingly, Wein sets up the introduction of Equinox, the Thermodynamic Man in Marvel Team-Up here but readers who didn't pick up that story go unrewarded. Of course, despite Johnny Storm's cameo in the Dracula story, the MTU sequel wouldn't be reprinted in this UK annual either, because it's a Torch and Iceman team-up- not Spidey.
The second story, Spider-Man Tackles The Torch is one I first read in the "Sinister Six" Spidey reprint giant in late 1969. It also turns up in the first Marvel Treasury edition. It's a slender Lee/Kirby/Ditko confection in which Spidey just irritates the Torch again, this time over bobby soxer Dorrie Evans. It did serve as a prelude to a charming Busiek/Allred special in 1996, however.
The final story, Dinosaurs on Broadway is, oddly, the second part of a Wein/Sal Buscema MTU. There's a handy flashback to the Ka-Zar episode , which introduced Stegron, the Dinosaur Man ( whose nomenclature is very Gerry Conway c.f. Firestorm the Nuclear Man; Steel the Indestructible Man; Mord the Backwards Man and Wein's aforementioned Equinox ).
Stegron is a more grotesque and largely redundant- version of Spidey's old enemy, the Lizard and the guest-star here is the Black Panther, still one of the Avengers but in the throes of the "Panther's Rage" sequence in Jungle Action. I had forgotten "the world's greatest tracker"-aspect of the character, overshadowed at Marvel by Wolverine and possibly Kraven.
T'Challa doesn't actually contribute much to stopping a dinosaur stampede in NYC however. Stegron plunges from a pterodactyl into the waters off Liberty Island but will return in an even more zany- and seasonal- story involving animated saurian skeletons!
This MTU is frothy, vanilla fare but very typical of Bronze Age Marvel. It's far more wacky than a Haney Brave and Bold and yet Bob has the reputation for "out there" comics!
It would be interesting to speculate who chose these stories for the annual and why: I imagine "Spidey plus Dracula plus dinosaurs!!" was the marketing ploy. It had been a year since this ad campaign:
but the legendary Dracula, Frankenstein and Friends BBC2 double-bill was almost two years away.
In any case, next time, we'll revisit the Punk Era for a look at the Mighty World of Marvel annual for 1978.
All images are presumed copyright of their original owners
Mighty World of Marvel 1978
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