The most forgettable comics I have ever owned. Part 2: Marvel Two-In-One #12.

Hold onto your spinner racks, comics lovers - because it's back; the sensational new feature where I attempt to talk about comics that I don't even remember ever having owned!

Of course, I do now know I once owned those comics, or I wouldn't be able to do this feature. I'd have to call it, "Comics I've Never Ever Owned And Know Nothing About," which'd be a totally different thing and an exercise in futility too developed for even this blog.

But, the point is that, up until I blundered across the covers to the comics in question, during my internet wanderings, I'd totally forgotten I ever had them.

And I have to hand it to Marvel Two-In-One because a sneak preview tells me that three issues of that title fit slap-bang into that category.

This is somewhat odd, as the Thing was arguably my favourite Marvel hero when I was a child.

In fact, so in favour of him was I that I even had a Thing badge, purchased by the magic of mail order from a back cover of Mighty World of Marvel.

First of that guilty trio of Two-In-One issues is #12, in which, I gather from the cover, the Thing and Iron Man team up to tackle Prester John.

The worrying thing is that not only did I have this comic but I'm pretty sure I must've read it again when it was reprinted in Marvel UK's Titans mag, meaning I had at least two copies of the tale in my collection and still forgot it'd ever existed.

Looking at that cover, I seem to recall that Prester John goes mad for some reason and has to be stopped before he can cause all sorts of trouble for mankind. I also seem to recall that, at the time, I wasn't happy about Marvel turning him evil, as I'd always seen him as a good egg and the voice of reason.

I have a feeling Vince Colletta may have been the inker. Other than that, I can say nothing of the contents.

I do feel that, for forgetting all about a tale featuring my favourite hero, I do though deserve a good slap.

But preferably not from Prester John, who I like to think is now fully restored to the niceness of which I'm accustomed.

Iron Man's greatest ever enemy - Poll Results!

It's time to plug your metal chest plate into the mains, hit the bottle and don a cravat because the results are in for our poll to find Iron Man's greatest ever foe.

Perhaps it comes as no shock that the winner - with a walloping 46% of the votes - was none other than the man with more rings than a nine-year-old sycamore; the Mandarin. The man they call Mandy picked up seven votes.

Second, with three votes, was a surprise to me. It's Man Bull, who, back in the days when I used to read Iron Man, was nowhere in sight. He was always too busy beating up Daredevil.

Third was that perennial wrong-doer Jack Daniels, with two votes.

Joint fourth were Titanium Man, Limited Battery Life and Dr Doom, with one vote each.

Sadly, Hypno-Robo-Neanderthal failed to register a single vote. He wuz robbed I tells ya. Robbed. And if he hadn't exploded, I've no doubt he'd say so too.

Gil Kane: Origins of Marvel Covers.

My post the other day about changes to the cover of The Avengers #59 when the tale was reprinted in Marvel UK's Avengers #86 reminded me of instances where, short of covers to reprint, Marvel UK saw fit to improvise.

A classic example's the cover of Spider-Man Comics Weekly #78 which rather ingeniously recycled the cover to Iron Man #45 for its tale of the Kingpin's raid on ESU during a student protest. So dense am I that when I first saw the Iron Man cover - because I'd seen the Spider-Man one first - I thought the Iron Man pic was some sort of homage to it.

And that brings me to another possible pair of examples.

The covers to Spider-Man Comics Weekly numbers 93 and 94 don't come from the original Amazing Spider-Man comics that contained those stories but, like the covers above, are clearly the handiwork of Gil Kane. As Kane was one of Marvel's top cover artists - and Marvel US rarely went to the trouble of paying its artistic big-hitters to do its UK covers - I'm assuming that, as with Spider-Man Comics Weekly #78, the images were recycled and amended from some other source. But from what mags did that Kane artwork originate? If you happen to know, I'd be delighted to hear from you.

Iron Man mystery. Name that Comic.

I have this strange thing that, for some reason, the comics I remember most clearly from my youth are the ones I got in 1974 and 1975. As I didn't start collecting comics till late 1973, the ones I got before then are coloured in varying shades of vague, while the ones I acquired after 1975 get progressively fuzzier in my memory the further away their purchase gets from that date. This is why I need your help.

In 1981 I had a copy of Iron Man. I can remember nothing whatsoever about it except that the final panels involved Tony Stark kissing what I assume to have been his girlfriend who was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt under a black waistcoat, and also a pair of the obligatorily spray-on jeans. She had her back to us as she kissed him. I've looked on the Grand Comics Database but don't recognise it from the covers on there.

So, if you have the slightest clue what issue this was, I'd be delighted to find out. Even though I got it in 1981, I can't guarantee it was published in that year, as these things could sometimes show up in the shops a couple of years after publication.

Super Spider-Man #171. The Death of Gwen Stacy & the Green Goblin.

Something very strange happened in the Autumn of 1975. A number of the comics I'd been getting week-in and week-out for several years disappeared without trace from my local newsagents. The Mighty World of Marvel, The Avengers and Spider-Man Comics Weekly all vanished at around the same time. If not for Planet of the Apes, what would I have had to keep me going? Fortunately, within a few months they were all back. But when Spider-Man Comics Weekly returned, it was in a whole new form.

It had been Titanised.

Like that other Marvel UK comic, Spider-Man's weekly mag was now printed sideways. This was good. Thanks to it allowing them to print two pages of artwork side-by side on every physical page, this meant you got twice as many pages for your money.

So what did you get?

You got trauma.

No sooner had the comic reappeared than this happened; Gwen Stacy died.

Now, I managed to miss the issue where she went but I sure as shooting heck had the next one, in which I discovered that in my absence Gwen had bought it. This was terrible. Gwen was blonde. She wore nice boots. She wore an Alice band. How could they kill such a creature? On top of that, by the end of this issue, the Green Goblin was gone too.

To say this was powerful stuff for a twelve year old would be no matter of hyperbole. Seeing Spider-Man clutching the corpse of his long-time girlfriend was quite the most moving thing I'd ever read in my life. This story and the ones that followed, as Peter Parker tried - and sometimes failed - to come to terms with the death of Gwen Stacy had a potency I'd never seen before in a comic and left an impression on me that remains to this day. I still regard the events of the next couple of years on that strip as the greatest era Spider-Man ever had. One that only dissipated when Ross Andru left the mag and Peter Parker graduated.

Two into one will go. The landscape format that showed us a whole new way of looking at comics.

Fortunately there was more. After that Spider-Man classic, the issue gave us a Gene Colan Dr Strange story. I don't remember if I could make sense of the tale at the time but, looking at it now, I don't have a clue what's going on. Dr Strange and Clea are in Dormammu's Dread Dimension but Strange has lost his powers and is having to rely on Clea to do "pagan" magic to achieve something or other. It's a bit of a surprise to discover Dr Strange's normal magic wasn't pagan. Now I'm left not at all sure what kind of magic it was. There's some sort of junkie in it, a man who seems to be Clea's father, Dormammu, Umar and various others and, frankly, I'm left bewildered by it all. It does though end with a giant Dormammu climbing up out of a huge crack in the Earth, ready to perform some evil deeds or other. So, if it leaves you bamboozled, at least it makes you want to read the following issue.

Next we get a centre-spread poster featuring Luke Cage and Mace. Like virtually all artwork produced specially for Marvel's UK comics, it has to be said it's not great.

Nor is the specially produced splash page for the George Tuska Iron Man tale that follows it. Shell-Head's up against The Controller who I think turned up in the pages of Jim Starlin's Captain Marvel. The presence of this tale baffles me. Up until now I was under the impression Marvel UK's Iron Man reprints ended when the comic switched to landscape format. Now I've discovered they didn't. This means I must've read years of Iron Man stories from that point on, with no recall of them at all. Essential Iron Man Vol 3 clearly beckons, as I try to find out what happened in all those tales I've forgotten.

Next it's a Thor adventure as he sets out to tackle Dr Doom after rescuing a protesting girl from a mini-riot. He soon finds out Doom's kidnapped her father in order to get him to build him some missile silos. In the flashback, the girl's clearly aged at least ten years since he was abducted, which implies he's taking an awful long time to build those silos and that Doom blatantly kidnapped the wrong silo scientist. In order to lure Doom out into the open, Don Blake plants a story in the papers that he's developed a cosmetic surgery technique that can cure any disfigurement. This seems rather thoughtless of him, as the hopes of disfigured people the world over will be built up and then cruelly dashed for no good reason. Aww but who cares? It's drawn by John Buscema, so every panel's a thing of simple beauty.

We finish off with a Thing/Black Widow team-up that I assume comes from the pages of Marvel Two-In-One. Much as I love the Thing - and the Black Widow - I'm not convinced Two-In-One was always the greatest comic Marvel produced, and this tale does little to change that. The story's pretty silly, with the Widow at one point whipping off her top to reveal she has the parts for a disruptor cannon attached to her back, hidden in a strip of fake skin. Let's own up, we've all done it. Meanwhile, the Thing spends half the story hauling in a three mile long stretch of cable to stop a bomb going off. As well as the somewhat lame story, the art looks terrible. Either Klaus Janson's inking doesn't suit Bob Brown's pencils or Janson's habitually lavish use of ink suffers unduly from being shrunk to half normal size.

So, was the landscape format a good thing?

Of course it was.

As said before, the great thing about it was you got twice as much story for your money. Where else would you get an entire 20 page Spider-Man story, plus seven to nine pages each of Dr Strange, Iron Man, Thor and the Thing, and a double-page pin-up, all for 9 pence? The downside isn't really the small size of the artwork. Apart from the Thing story, it really doesn't suffer. The main downside is the small size of the letters page which only has room for two letters. As it's clear from one of those letters that the comic's only recently switched to the new format, it would've been nice to see more room for fan reaction to the switch.

Tales of Suspense #39. Iron Man's origin.

There are many things in life I don't know. I don't know who put the bop in the bop shoo-wop doo-wop. I don't know who put the ram in the ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong and I don't even know why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near. But one thing I know even less than any other is just what a transistor is.

I do know one thing though.

They're the future.

They have to be. Look at them. You can do anything with 'em. According to Tales of Suspense #39, you can increase the power of a magnet a thousand-fold for even more fun with iron filings, you can make bazookas the size of flashlights (although some of us would prefer to have flashlights the size of bazookas) and build suits of armour that can fly. If I had any sense at all I'd be investing in a transistor factory right now.

That factory would of course belong to Tony Stark, the Western World's greatest manufacturer of transistor-made technology. Not that that does him any good when he goes to Vietnam to get his jollies by seeing how good his weapons are at killing people who don't matter. You know. Communists.

That's right, it's the early 1960s and, if he can't be fighting alien invaders, there's nothing a Marvel protagonist loves more than getting one over on a Red.

Before Stark can even find time to stop and question whether being an arms dealer's the most ethical way to make a fortune, he has bigger fish on his plate as he finds himself captured by the evil communist Wong-Chu. Not only that but the booby trap that led to Stark's capture's left him with shrapnel embedded in his body. Shrapnel that's making its way towards his heart as remorselessly as the Proclaimers were once making their way to our front door. Can he survive?

Of course he can. He's got transistors.

Looking to buy himself some time, Stark agrees to make a weapon for his captor. Well, he makes the weapon all right but has no intention of giving it to a communist. He makes a suit of transistor-powered armour, and Wong-Chu's in trouble.

I've said before that, along with the origin of Thor, Iron Man has my favourite debut of all Marvel's Silver Age heroes. I'm not sure what this says, as both tales were scripted by Larry Lieber and not Stan Lee. Could it be that Larry was the true comic book genius in that family?

So, what's the appeal of the birth of the super-hero who doesn't introduce himself as, "I: Ron Man"? Well, I suppose it's a three-pronged attack. There's the tragedy of a grim reality being inflicted on a man who'd previously led a charmed life. Then there's the same man getting his comeuppance in a war he's done more than anyone to help propagate. There's also the self-sacrifice of Chinese scientist Yinsen - giving his life that Iron Man might live. As well as adding an element of tragedy and nobility to the tale - he is, after all, it's only genuine good guy - Yinsen's also important in letting us know it's communists we're meant to hate and not just anyone from East of Doncaster. Above all, there's the sheer sense of focus to the tale. Because of its low page-count, there's no room for the sort of diversions that found their way into the origins of the Hulk or the Fantastic Four.

But writing's only half the tale when it comes to a comic book. Just how good a job does Jack Kirby do on this new character's origin?

He doesn't. For once, Jack must've taken five minutes off work, because the thing's drawn by Don Heck and, as we all know, Don Heck was an artist whose bad days could leave you feeling like shards of glass were being hammered into your eyes.

Fortunately, when it came to Iron Man, Don Heck didn't have bad days. For me, the strip's early days  featured the best work I ever saw from him, and that applies here where he tells the tale with a pleasing simplicity. He didn't have the abandoned dynamism of Jack Kirby or the stylishness of Steve Ditko but, at his best, he occupied a ground somewhere between the pair and, while occupying the ground between greats might never confer that status upon you, there are times at least when Heck proved there are worse territories to occupy. But then, Tony Stark could have told him that.