I took a trip up to Strathaven earlier, by train and bus: something that's become quite a tradition in the last six or seven years. It was a bit damp but the sun broke through, granting spectacular views of Loudoun Hill.
Loudoun Hill: a bump on the horizon.
I was very fortunate with my Christmas gifts earlier in the week- there's a lot of reading still to do but I had a quick skim through Alex Ross's Marvelocity and the Twomorrows book on Mike Grell.
I wasn't terribly interested in this year's Merry X-Men Special but the morbid DC Nuclear Winter Special was a little better than I'd anticiapted. I didn't feel very festive this year, I'm afraid to say. Maybe Christmas starts too early and then goes on too long, for me. But I did keep the Marvel UK annual tradition of recent years with the 1979 Mighty World of Marvel annual.
This is a Daredevil annual by any other name. Stablemates the Hulk and the FF had annuals of their own. In fact, I leafed through the Fanatstic Four annual on 23rd December 1978- the same day episode one of the Power of Kroll was broadcast on BBC1, after a couple of days of industrial action. That was our Xmas shopping trip to Lewis's on Argyle Street; I don't know why I didn't get any Marvel UK annuals that Saturday ( since the Torch/Quasimodo reprint wasn't one I'd read at that point). I suspect I felt too old for them. Ironically, I did get the Dr. Who annual from my mum & dad.
The MWOM annual reprints two stories unseen in the UK before. The first is the DD annual from 1976. "The Name of the Game is Death" was plotted by Marv Wolfman and scripted by Chris Claremont; the art was by Tuska and Chiaramonte.
DD becomes involved in the kidnapping of the son of an inventor whose tidal power station needs Vibranium to operate, The Black Panther is on hand, therefore and Namor is concerned about the impact of the project on his subsea realm. DD and T'Challa team up against a Maggia capo who is transformed into the Mind-Master via Comic Book Science. With a mind-dominating gimmick like the Purple Man or the Controller, "Mindy" pits the Panther against the Sightless Swashbuckler. But Matt waits for him to burn out and revert to normal.
Daredevil has two clashes with Namor, which pad out the story. There's essentially one guest-star too many: either it should have been a sequel to the often- reprinted first clash between DD and Subby OR a team-up between the Wakandan Avenger and Matt against the Maggia hoods. Neither guest-star gets enough face-time and the new villain is so forgettable, I can't see why it couldn't have been Killgrave.
The second story by Mantlo and Sal Buscema was from Dardevil 140, cover-dated Dec '76. DD saves the passengers of a bus when the driver has a heart attack. Then the Gladiator and the Beetle hijack a train and crash it into Grand Central Station. Daredevil defeats them both after a long battle. It's a vanilla, done-in-one story with no sub-plots, but nonetheless quite a satisfying one. I enjoyed a little Easter Egg: covers of Wolfman's Nova and Tomb of Dracula in a shop on panel.
Three pages of Gene Colan pin-ups and DD info pages from the first DD US annual (1967) make up the rest of this hardback one .There's a charming endpapers illustration of Marvel heroes playing musical instruments- Subby on lyre, Hulk on double bass. I think it's by Marie Severin.
This wasn't an essential read but it was mildly diverting. There are very few of these 70s annuals left to buy. Maybe next year, I might go for the FF one I mentiond above- or the Spidey annual for '79.
I might have the opportunity to post again on Hogmanay- we'll see. It might be a later post on the Doctor Who special and the Dalek Audio Annual. Here's to a peaceful 2019, in any case.
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