Last weekend we went to the Bristol Comic Expo, and aside hooking up with the Mam Tor crew I spent quite some time (much to the lamentation of my better half) roaming the convention, looking for old Marvel comics I used to read as a kid.
When I grew up, I got my superhero fix in the form of Dutch translated editions. These would usually run out of order (compared to the original series) and were a cut-and-paste job. The thing was, that an American comic back then ran 18 pages of story, with 12 or more pages of ads (you know, the classic Atlas Muscle Man and X-Ray specs)… The Dutch versions ran at 32 pages without ads, so to get around the “missing pages” they’d mash up two issues in one and cut out pages to make it fit their 32 pages.
Nowadays, whenever I have the time (and money) I try to hunt down my favourite ones, and get the original 70s, yellow paper prints and revel in discovering new pages of art, stories that make much more sense and the awesome cover designs (the Dutch editions had horrible typography, even as a 10 year old I noticed).
I loved the old Hulk and Marvel Two-In-One comics featuring The Thing, and some superhero-of-the-month. For some reason the colours were always brighter, the villains bigger and the stories more outrageous than their counterparts. And the covers were always a mash-up of character logos, cover blurbs and the classic corner box with the heads of the main protagonists - so you immediately knew who you were paying for… Sadly, today’s comics have done away with this. I think we’ve become to cynical to enjoy the sheer over the top drama of a good old-fashioned comic.
