"Back in the day", as they say, I attended elementary school at South 78th St. School in Milwaukee. I was there for my 2nd-4th grade years. But it was during my final year there that the gems below landed in my hot little hands, courtesy of the folks who published Smash magazine. As I recall, each month there would be a 3-page spread spotlighting some denizens of the Marvel Universe. To rabid young Doug, this was gold. And, in several cases it was my introduction to the seminal years of Marvel Comics.
To the best that my wife and I can recollect from our childhoods, Smash and it's competition mag Dynamite (we'll check that out in a later installment) were available as part of a monthly book order from Scholastic and maybe another company whose name neither of us can remember. For ridiculously low prices, such as $1 or even less for a paperback book (Sharks: Attacks on Man scared the heck out of me in the summer of Jaws...), students could place orders and have a veritable care package dispensed within a couple of weeks. It was like Christmas, but throughout the school year.
So once I found out that Smash contained these comic book features I was hooked -- or, as hooked as I could be when Mom approved the orders. At some point, maybe during a family move or some such thing, I cut the comics-related pages from the magazine and discarded the rest. Consequently, I have very little to offer in regard to the other contents of a given issue, or even which issues contained the material depicted below. In fact, searching the Internet for information on Smash yields little. However, you can make the jump to Al Bigley's blog, where he has published posts similar to today's. Later, much later, as I was creating data pages for my comic collection (indexed, updated prices, separated by dividers, stored in a 2" binder) I decided to 3-hole punch the pages I'd saved from Smash and Dynamite and insert them within the corresponding sections of my notebook.
An annual rite of summer in our home is the garage sale. Just days after finishing the spring semester I was down in the comic room cleaning out the closet. Those of you who've been with us for some time know that I've sold off all of my comics and quite a few other items. When I opened the box that contained my collection binder I was of course swept with a wave of sentimentality. But I was also very pleasantly surprised to again see the pages we've been discussing. So although the binder went in the trash and its pages in the recycling bin, these gems were preserved for your perusal and amusement. Today I'm featuring the origin of Doc Ock and a Dr. Doom/Thing tussle. I'll leave it to you to provide the source information. Be prepared to be overwhelmed with some serious Silver and Bronze Age artistic majesty from the likes of Ditko, Romita, Andru, Kirby, Sinnott, and Buscema. What a visual tour de force!