![]() ![]() Superman in 1976 set the benchmark on how to do it right, and Superman II did it even righter, but 3 and 4 were awful and the failure of the Doc Savage film, the Shadow, the Phantom, the low-budget version of the Fantastic Four. ![]() There have been superhero movies before, of course. Which brings us back to just why it is I feel, despite the global recession and the fact that we only have Barmy Boris and Konniving Ken to choose between at the upcoming mayoral elections, the world has turned out right after all. So for me it was Marvel all the way, especially when it took another leaf out of DC’s books, which had teamed up Superman and WonderWoman with a bunch of other powered-up folks to form the Justice League of America, and Lee and Kirby rounded up some of their rougher and more interesting do-gooders and assembled the Avengers. Spiderman and co lived and swung in New York City, while Batman and Superman looked after Gotham City and Metropolis. And they were set in the real world, kind of. Then DC comics gave superheroes another chance with the re-introduction of the Flash, followed by Hawkman and the Green Lantern and a host of others.īut Marvel books were more fun - more knockabout, more hip, more knowing. But Captain America and the Human Torch and Captain Marvel and Uncle Sam and dozens of others had fallen by the wayside, many never to reappear. Not all of the superheroes who had been so popular during the War years had gone - Batman and Superman and WonderWoman, for example, all carried on with their adventures pretty much uninterrupted. I was born - gulp - in 1960, pretty much exactly the time that comic books were recovering from the drought that they suffered through in the Fifties. Comic books are cool, the geeks really are inheriting the earth, and the release of Avengers Assemble on April 26 is, for me, the cherry on the cake. My point is that what was once seen as a joke, something for those arrested in a state of permanent childhood, is not only acceptable and mainstream now but also hip. Well, Spielberg made a film out of those books! So who’s laughing now, sexy commuter-girls?Īctually, it’s probably still you, because it wasn’t as great as it might have been. ![]() I was single at the time, and not exactly a babe-magnet, but the memory of being openly pointed out and laughed at by a couple of foxy young lady-commuters has always stayed with me. When I had my first job in London I decided to re-read one of my fave series of all time - Hergé’s magnificent Tintin - on the Tube to and from work. Strange as it might seem today, back then it was an embarrassing thing to admit to even liking them, especially if you were, technically at least, grown up. Actually finding the comics was only a part of the problem. Today we have Forbidden Planet, GOSH and Mega City and probably several more specialist shops but for a while times were hard. You could get your hands on the hardback collections and higher-priced items for a fraction of the regular price, and then, like something out of Harry Potter, it turned from being a place of magic into a regular dreary old restaurant for muggles. The weekend they shut down was both deeply tragic and memorably exciting, as everything had to go. Lord of the Rings posters hung next to Robert Crumb’s sublimely rendered sexual fantasies while the racks that stretched from wall to wall were filled with the latest imports from America, all for about 30p each. Over two floors a gaggle of hippie sci-fi and fantasy fans had created a shrine to impossible fiction. Now that is what I call a great name for a shop, and the place itself lived up to the promise. In the Seventies there was only one shop I knew of where you could get a regular fix: the near-legendary Dark They Were and Golden Eyed in St Anne’s Court, Soho. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENTĮven in London, where we normally take stuff for granted, they weren’t that easy to find. ![]()
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