Five Batshit Things You Never Knew About Marvel Comics

Thought you knew everything there is to know about Marvel comics? Think again, true believer.

Sgt Fury's treacherous French commando

Marvel's wartime adventure comic Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos featured a cast of stereotypical Allied soldiers, from southerner 'Rebel' Ralston to bugle-playing jazzman Gabe Jones, and even a plummy Englishman called Percival 'Pinky' Pinkerton.

Later plans were to include charming Free French commando 'Toutou' Lefevre, but when the editor read the script for the next issue, called 'Something Smells Vichy', in which Toutou was revealed to be a ratfink Nazi collaborator, the character was quietly dropped for fear of upsetting French readers.

Of course, they need not have bothered as no self-respecting French person has ever read a Marvel comic, preferring to read crap about freakishly strong Gauls and Scrooge McFuckingDuck.

The Fantastic Four Christmas album

Many people remember the Spider-Man album Rock Reflections of a Superhero from the 70s, but few know that it was actually Marvel's second foray into the world of music. Back in 1965, as Marvel mania was on the rise, they brought out The Fantastic Four's Christmas Singalong, an album of original festive songs supposedly recorded by the cast of the Worlds Greatest Comic Magazine themselves.

Tracks included the crooning Ever-Loving Blue-Eyed Christmas, the romantic Reed, My Lips and the oddball Mole Man's Holiday. The true identities of the singers and musicians involved remain unknown, though popular belief has it that they were written by a young Neil Diamond, who rather than accepting payment, asked that Marvel use his likeness when they finally unmasked the Green Goblin in Amazing Spider-Man #39.

Ant-Man vs Clammm

Just as many early Fantastic Four issues pitted the fabulous quartet against the sort of giant monsters that were Marvel's standard antagonists prior to the superhero boom, so too did their costumed stablemates face a bizarre gallery of titanic foes, and none came stranger than Clammm the Man-Mollusc who was pitted against the heroic Ant-Man in an early issue of Tales To Astonish.

Hailing from 'Dimension B', the gigantic ambulatory clam was intent on devouring all of Earth's cereal crops, thus clearing the way for his people to 'conquer Earth with our fast-growing space algae!'. Fortunately the quick-witted Ant-Man spotted a pattern in the malevolent mollusc's attacks and defeated him in a bit of trademark trickery. Noticing that Clammm always avoided eating wheat crops, he commanded his loyal ant swarms to 'disguise these wheat fields as corn!' using tiny ant-sized paintbrushes, thus giving the belligerent bivalve a terrible case of acid reflux which literally cooked the gluten-intolerant Clammm from the inside.

Trucks, Robots and coloured lights

Whilst readers may remember the comic versions of popular toys like Micronauts and the Shogun Warriors, they may not be aware that these were far from the only children's games to be given the mighty Marvel treatment. Tonka! featured a gang of orphans who discover a crashed spaceship full of intelligent - and highly durable - trucks who had rebelled against their masters, aliens intent on making Earth part of 'Space Highway 919'.

Then there was Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, in which two mismatched Earthmen find their minds beamed across the galaxy into the bodies of gladiator robots. Streetwise Benjamin Franklin Jones and bookworm Harold van Hague must work together if they are to break free and fight their way home.

A proposed comic based around the game Simon, in which a succession of ordinary people gain different powers according to the sequence of coloured lights they press on the electronic toy, never got further than the planning stage.

The Rampant Hulk

A notorious image of an apparently naked incredible Hulk in the full throes of arousal very nearly made it to the newsstands, when idiosyncratic bullpen finisher Wink 'The Ink' Benderberg, at the time going through an acrimonious divorce, suffered a complete mental breakdown whilst inking an issue of 1970s team book The Defenders.

The original splash page, as drawn by the penciller, was to have shown the Hulk being swarmed by the Nebulon the space guru's Bozo minions, with the accompanying dialogue, 'PUNY CLOWN-FACES! HULK WILL SMASH YOU ALL! AND SPARKLY YELLOW SILVER HAIR MAN TOO!', with the jade giant wearing his trademark torn purple pants. But by the time a wild-eyed Benderberg had finished with it, the trousers had been removed to reveal a fully rampant Hulk batting the oncoming Bozos away with a sweep of his foot-long gamma-engorged manhood.

Fortunately the offending artwork was spotted during printing and every single copy of The Defenders issue was pulped. Benderberg was immediately fired and never worked in comics again, though he can sometimes be glimpsed at comic cons, offering to recreate his infamous 'Erectable Hulk' for $5 a sketch.

My First Superhero

Another article I wrote for online magazine Journey Planet, for their superhero issue - #21 - in April 2015.

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Appearing here with Sword Girl and Bird Nose

I guess that must have been Hulk. OK, the Hulk if you want to be all formal. I suppose he counts as a superhero, since he had his own weekly Marvel comic (black and white UK reprint The Mighty World of Marvel) at the time, but then so did Dracula and Planet of the Apes. In the comics I first read, Hulk stories consisted mainly of him getting shot at by the US Army, causing innocent bystanders to flee in terror and battling equally muscle-bound monsters like Rhino, Abomination, Zzzax (I had to check the spelling) and the excellently-hatted Xemnu the Titan. Hulk didn’t go much for crime-fighting or making the world a better place.

No good reason for using this - I just love the cover

If Hulk did occasionally save the world, it was more as a by-product of him accidentally pulverizing a bad-guy’s doomsday weapon in the middle of their fight, rather than by any conscious intention to do good. This was the era of the ‘Hulk-Smash’ incarnation - a childlike titan who just wanted to be left alone, but yet was continually hunted and hounded (a term used almost every issue) by those that would seek to capture him, revenge themselves on him or simply prove that they could beat him. That latter motivation was inevitably doomed, because, as was often roared by the jade giant himself, ‘HULK IS THE STRONGEST ONE THERE IS!’. Right on, Hulk baby, as his 70s sidekick Jim Wilson might say.

Just leave him alone!

Hulk was a great character for a young reader like me. He wasn’t that complicated - a childlike loner with Unearthly Strength (‘increases to Shift X when he rages’) and not too much back story (in the days before Joe Fixit and Skaar and Doc Green). And he was easier for me to draw than, say, Spider-Man, whose webbed costume always proved to be a challenge. With Hulk, as long as you had a green and a purple crayon, you couldn’t really fail, although in one very early drawing I did of him he appeared to have the face of the late Norman Wisdom.

HULK TOO MUSCLEBOUND TO BEND LIMBS!

The best thing about Hulk was his own special Hulk-speak, which consisted of referring to himself only in the third person (a classic comic device; see also Dr Doom) and giving everyone else their own unique Hulk nickname. Thus Spider-Man was ‘BUG MAN’ or more often ‘PUNY BUG MAN’, the Thing was of course ‘ROCK MAN’ and so on. For years I thought that the superhero Valkyrie was called ‘SWORD GIRL’*.

* ‘HULK APOLOGISE FOR REDUCTIVE AND SEXIST LABELLING.’

Superhero Movies and Me

I contributed a few articles to online magazine Journey Planet, for their superhero issue - #21 - in April 2015. Prepare for childhood nostalgia and extreme geekery.

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I was always a Marvel kid, growing up. DC comics in the 70s, with their Superman robot doubles and Bizarro Loisses and multi-coloured Kryptonites, were just a bit too old-fashioned for me. Marvel was modern and somehow more real, as far as any superhero comics could be, with their argumentative rock men, wisecracking wall-crawlers and angry adamantium-clawed mutants. They were just cooler. I remember practising folding my middle and ring fingers into my palms and making thwippy web-shooter sounds, then flipping my hands round the other way up and pretending to cast the Roving Rings of Raggador at the other kids in the school playground.

So you can imagine how excited I was when they made the first Spider-Man film in 1977. Spidey wasn’t my favourite hero - that was probably Hulk (oddly, I never felt right calling him The Hulk; I felt, like his teen sidekicks Rick Jones and Jim Wilson, that the jade giant was my friend, so just ‘Hulk’) - but I’d read enough of his adventures, reprinted in Britain in the weekly black and white comic Super Spider-Man and the Titans, to be thrilled at seeing the wall-crawler in a film.

For years, like many British comic publishers, Marvel UK had been in the habit of launching new weekly comics for the initial boom of extra sales, then later merging less successful titles into their more popular sister publications. Thus The Titans, a landscape format anthology of old Avengers, Fantastic Four and Sub-Mariner tales, was merged with the mellifluously-named Super Spider-Man with the Super-Heroes (I never quite understood why he was ‘Super’ Spider-Man) to form Super Spider-Man and the Titans. So now you know.

The Spidey stories I’d read were weird and wild 70s tales from the likes of Gerry Conway and Ross Andru, featuring ghostly gangsters, murderous spider-mobiles and my favourite tale - a locked room mystery where the killer turned out to be (spoiler alert) W.H.O, a wall-sized homicidal computer. So eight-year old me was fairly vibrating with keen when my mum took us to our local cinema - the hoary old Embassy in Waltham Cross  whose resplendent blue and purple neon frontage could be seen as far away as the Little Chef on the A10 - to see Webhead for his big screen debut.

My review? It was… OK I guess.

To be fair to the movie itself, it had been hard to get into the mood when Spider-Man was part of a mismatched double-bill, as was common in those olden days. So we first had to sit through 90 minutes of You Light Up My Life, a teary romance about a struggling singer played by Frenchie from Grease. Ironically, all these years later, I can still sing the first few bars of the title song, which is more than I can say for the bland 70s wah-wah of the Spidey movie, which sounded like the background music to every single Starsky & Hutch episode. Some bright spark at the cinema must have decided that Didi Conn singing her little heart out was the perfect aperitif to Spider-Man, them both being American films and all.

Spider-Man was… alright. It starred a grown-up Von Trapp kid from The Sound of Music, who did a decent Peter Parker. And he looked OK in the red and blue costume, apart from the peculiar mirrored eyes. But, eh, I dunno. He didn’t say much as Spidey, and certainly didn’t make jokes as he swung around mocking the baddies, like in the comics. And the baddies themselves were just ordinary crooks in bad 70s suits. Oh, and three guys in black martial arts gear who chased him around with sticks. There were no proper supervillains with metal arms and goblin gliders and funky costumes. There was a bit of wall-crawling, which was pretty good for time (i.e. better than Adam West bent double in the Batman TV show), but the webbing looked rubbish, ranging from ‘flimsy gauze’ to ‘obvious thick nylon cord from my dad’s camping gear’.

But hey, it was Spider-Man, in an actual film. I couldn’t really complain. Surely this was just the start of all my favourite comics appearing on the big screen. Except, not so much. Of course there was blockbusting Superman the Movie the following year, and on TV we had The Incredible Hulk, now remembered more for its haunting end theme ‘The Lonely Man’, than for its less than super action (reputedly, the show’s low budget decreed that Lou Ferrigno’s Hulk could only make two appearances per show, presumably due to the now-forgotten ‘green body paint’ shortage of 1978).

But that was kind of it, barring the increasingly poor Superman sequels (I never recovered from the ill-conceived casting of Richard Pryor clowning around in Superman III, though strangely the sequence of that woman getting roboticized by the maniac computer at the end still haunts me). There was the disappointing Howard the Duck (1986) of which I can only remember the embarrassing song at the end, the rubbish Captain America (1990) featuring an Italian Red Skull, and of course Batman (1989), a film series that like Superman before it seemed to peak with its sequel and then go markedly downhill from there. Apart from three so-so Hulk TV movies featuring the ageing Ferrigno and Bill Bixby, that was pretty much it for Marvel at the movies.

Meanwhile, the world of actual comics was going through a renaissance with titles like Watchmen, the Dark Knight Returns, Secret Wars, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Elektra Lives Again, The Phoenix Saga in X-Men, Walt Simonson’s Thor, and the classic Masters of Evil storyline in the Avengers. Did we get any of that magic replicated on the big-screen? Did we - to misquote Pete Postlethwaite - bollocks. The closest thing to a Marvel movie at the time was a stop-motion Micronauts film I made with my dad’s super-8 cine camera using my Baron Karza action figure.

Fast forward to right now. As I type this, we are but five days away from the premiere of Avengers: Age of Ultron. And as with all Marvel movies since Spider-Man back in 1977, I just can’t wait. So no change there, but the difference this time is that I can reasonably sure that a) it won’t be mildly (or desperately) disappointing and that b) the rest of the cinema-going world might just agree with me. For this is the age of the Great Marvel Movie, or more specifically to lift a term from a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, the era where Marvel Can’t Fail.

Who’da thunk there’d be a time when Guardians of the Galaxy - an obscure spacegoing team comic from 1969, would be one of the most successful movies of 2014, both commercially, and amazingly, critically? Who’da thunk that Groot (a creature of wood that feeds on wood, to quote his villainous debut in Tales To Astonish, 1960) and Rocket freakin’ Raccoon would have become household names? I am Groot t-shirts? Kids dressing up as Rocket for Hallowe’en? What strange parallel world have I stumbled into, where ordinary folks know and care about characters that were once the secret specialist subject of only the uberest of geeks? Last Christmas I was even able to buy a crocheted Baby Groot pot plant. Strange Days.

You can draw a line tracing the slow but steady rise of the Great Marvel Movie, from Blade - coyly shy of its comic origins, through X-Men and X2 (we won’t speak of The Last Stand) with its Shakespearean heavyweights playing Xavier and Magneto, to Iron Man with its game changing post-credits sequence (‘I’m here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative’) that paved the way for the shared Marvel Cinematic Universe.

And how cool is that idea of the MCU? There’s never really been anything like it before. Linked movies, all inhabiting the same world. Not as a series of increasingly poor sequels, but a genuine shared (with the introduction of the Guardians of the Galaxy) universe with shared heroes and villains, and storylines that criss-cross from one movie to another, and even into Agents of SHIELD on TV. Imagine if United Artists back in the 60s had made a series of individual westerns starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson respectively, before bringing them all together in one movie called The Magnificent Seven Assemble. How cool would that have been?

What if you could travel back in time, say 20 years or more, and tell a comic fan - maybe your younger geek self - that there would come a time when there would be a movie of the Avengers and it wouldn’t suck? And they wouldn’t be fighting crooks in bad suits or ninjas with sticks, but proper supervillains and aliens and Loki and everything. And the Hulk wouldn't be throwing stuntmen into sugar glass one at a time but Punching Spaceships In The Face. And that there were plans afoot to do the Inhumans and Captain Marvel and even Iron Fist, for the love of Stan. Your younger self would think you mad.

It's funny. I sometimes feel a bit weird about comic movies being so successful, like now that everyone’s in on it, it’s not our secret guilty pleasure any more. If I can have a conversation at work with a 30-year old woman about the Kree tinkering with human DNA, then comics have most definitely gone mainstream. Which is cool, even though I do sometimes feel like Piggy in Lord of the Flies, shouting at everyone that I was here first, I was here when he found the conch (or in this case, Namor’s fabled Horn of Proteus).

Of course, like any neurotic True Believer, I worry about sequelitis and shark-jumping, with clunkers like the Fantastic Four films (Doom playing Marco Polo - ugh), Spider-Man 3 (emo-Pete’s dancing - wince), Wolverine: Origins (what they did to Deadpool - yecchh) and the duller episodes of Agents of SHIELD still fresh in comic-fans’ minds. But this is a great time to be a Marvel comics fan, when the term ‘superhero movie’ has become a genre in its own right, and shows like Daredevil and AKA Jessica Jones coming our way on TV.

I can only hope that the shark is still a way off, that there are more great movies to come (Alan Moore's Captain Britain, anyone?), and I wonder where the genre is going next. My eight-year old self and I can’t wait to see.