in my book, After The Snooter, I drew this scene in which I discovered my first American comic book.


A fine chap named Tim Stark wrote his thesis on my stuff and pointed out something I never noticed while drawing the piece (though it looks so obvious I feel stupid saying so), namely that wee Eddie, probably eight years old, is having an artistic epiphany while in hospital wearing a bandage on his head after being hit by a car, and the big moment of his enlightenment is focused upon a comic book whose title is: OPERATION BRAIN BLAST. This wasn't literally the first American comic book I fastened my eyes upon, but out of the bunch of contenders this one had the right resonance, so presumably my brain was still making important decisions at some subconscious level, blasted or not. In the anecdote I had been given a kiddie's comic while the guy in the next bed was given this wondrously exotic and adult looking object (I've even managed to catch a snippet of the back cover ad, something about boys vis-a-vis men and physical fitness.)


So in the middle of the night I sneaked over to the other kid's bedside table and secretly read his comic. For a moment I thought of stealing it, but then in that special logic of childhood I figured that anything as wondrous as the drawings of Jack Kirby would be missed and the hospital would send somebody out after me to get them back.

Shortly after this I started collecting the black and white British reprints of the Marvel material. I used to colour them with wax crayons because I knew the originals were in colour as I'd seen one that day in the hospital, and I wouldn't stand for anything incomplete in my collection. Virtually all of the Marvel line was represented across five weekly titles. I recently came across a couple of loose pages I picked out of the pile as mementos before I threw it all in the trash.


These are dated '68. I'd have been 11/12 years old.


I coloured ALL of the stuff, all the Hulks and Avengers, the whole lot, but the thing you should notice about the pages I chose to keep is that they are examples of THOR that were inked by Vince Colletta. The British publisher was in the habit of removing the credits, but that never fooled wee Campbell; it just made him look harder. A while back I wrote a post here about how Colletta was my favourite comic book inker of the 1960s. For some unfathomable reason beyond all absurdity, it was and continues to be the most visited post I've written. I almost said popular there, but that would be the wrong word, for I was vilified in many places for uttering such an opinion. Even people you would think could not possibly give a hoot, I found them stopping me in the street, in San Diego during the convention, the only place everybody knows my name, sadly, and even somebody such as Gary Groth had to get his two cents in and call me an idiot. People generally can't stand by and allow you to have an opinion they don't share.

My old pal Lew Stringer writes about those old British reprints
and again
And never one to miss a detail, he shows here how the English publisher sometimes changed stuff

Wikipedia on the subject