BarbeKew

Barbeque in Kew, featuring (left to right) Lesley, Alex, Steve, Steve K, Fraser, John, Jon, Scottish Dave, Jayne and Keith.

Even my hair looks normal in front of Steve K's! (sorry Steve K) :)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

*****contains spoilers*****
It doesn't happen very often, but a major motion picture company has just made a film because a lot of people wanted to see it, instead of vice versa.

...and it only took them 19 years.

I have to admit, my knowledge of Indy isn't that great. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark once on TV many, many years ago, and I only read the comicbook of Temple of Doom, although I did read it more than once, so I must have enjoyed it. However my recall from those first two films is bad at best.

The third film however - The Last Crusade - I must have watched maybe fifty times. That was out in the summer of 1989, when I was an usher (sorry – Customer Service Assistant) at the Odeon in Richmond. It was my first job after college, and out of all the films that summer, including Batman, Lethal Weapon 2 and Licence To Kill, the one with Harrison Ford and Sean Connery arguing in the desert remains the one that defines that chapter of my professional life.

Tonight therefore, I mustered a group of my friends – John, Steve K, David, Fraser and Scottish Dave - to assemble at the very same cinema for the long-awaited next Indiana Jones movie. Special thanks must go to Scottish Dave, for flying-in all the way from Australia just to make this thing happen.


And it was a hard film to get into at first, without over-scrutinising things. Would 66-year-old Harrison Ford still be doing his own falls, climbs and jumps?

Initially, it didn't look promising. The first action sequence featured him scaling a mountain of wooden crates and racing along the top of them, seen both from behind and in the distance. Oh dear. If the entire film was going to be shot like this, then my disbelief could prove tough to suspend.

It must be said though, he is still doing his own stuff, and that sequence was the only one where I found myself wondering if it was really him.

The action sequences take a back seat in the first half of the film anyway, although this makes things run quite slowly for a while. The scene in which he's investigating a tomb with Mutt seems to go on for ages, because it's just the two of them talking. However once that ends and they get captured, there's absolutely no looking back.

The second half easily makes up for the first, and there's absolutely no sense that this film is in any way an attempt to emulate the earlier chapters in the series. This is the fourth of four Indy movies, and in no way a retrospective addition.

The revelation that Mutt is his son is a cliché that you can really see coming from the poster, but it's played entirely for laughs, making Mutt and Marion welcome characters, rather than the deadweight emotional intrusions they could so easily have become. And Shia LaBeouf is perfectly cast.

It's exciting, it's funny, and it delivered just what I was hoping for. When the closing credits began, it actually got a ripple of applause in the theatre, which in my experience is incredibly rare for any film.

It could have all gone wrong so easily. Just imagine if they'd treated this revival the same way so many new versions of old franchises are – the new Indy played by a woman from a leading sitcom, the soundtrack by any current singer at all, and endless CGI bullet-time. And all with a press-kit pouring scorn on the original camp series, and declaring that today's "more sophisticated" audiences paradoxically need everything to be younger.

And yet, by having the integrity to stick to the original ingredients, Spielberg cooks a film that gets applause. In England.

While the closing credits were rolling, I craned my head round and looked around the auditorium that I had spent so much time in nearly 19 years ago. Everything looked identical – the seats, the house-lighting, even the same music was playing through the atmosphere. Yes, I had definitely succeeded in briefly nipping back to 1989 again.

Harrison, Steven and George – thanks. Once again, movies were just as great as they used to be.

That Old Man Goble, He Just Keeps Bowling A Long

Whilst telling on election day, I was invited to an open day of the local lawn bowls club.

On the day, I discovered that I had shown up a week too early.

A week later, I arrived just as they were finishing-up.

So they were kind enough to invite me for a free afternoon today...

I did play bowls a couple of times around Auckland with the Salvation Army, however that was indoors, playing on carpets. Today we were roughing it out in the spitting rain.


One thing that I have learnt about myself is that I enjoy trying out new things. It broadens my experience of life, and keeps me awake. Today I honestly enjoyed bowling the woods, learning how to stand and aim, forgiving myself for taking too much green, and smiling as one of my shots rocketed past the jack and into the ditch.

Afterwards, in the best traditions of Worzel Gummidge, there was a cup o'tea and a slice o'cake to be had, and I had to find a pleasant way of thanking them without signing-up for a regular invovlement.

I just have too many other new things to try.

Doctor Who: Human Nature / The Family Of Blood

***** contains spoilers *****
I don't go in much for romantic films.

Which is unfortunate given how there is hardly a single TV series now that doesn't feature love in some form. Turn the TV on now. Go on. Try to find a show that you can watch for just ten minutes before it becomes about relationships.

I guess I particularly resent the way in which that leaves me with no shows that I can escape into. Even so-called 'science-fiction' programmes - my favourite genre - now have to keep stopping for relationship issues.

My favourite TV show is Doctor Who, which for the original 26-year run never featured the Doctor falling for anybody even once. And, in over 600 episodes, that never once noticed.

In the first two-and-a-half years of the new run though, he's fallen in love twice, been propositioned, been the subject of infatuation, retconned a friendship from the original series, spouted innuendo, had his body taken over by a woman, and even got to kiss another man. To say nothing of all his flirty companions and guest-characters.

Is there a science-fiction show being made today that I can watch which is just about 'science-fiction'? No? No.

Human Nature / The Family Of Blood starts off well. The Doctor and Martha are being chased into the TARDIS by aliens, presumably off in space somewhere. (!) Dematerialising, they realise that they're being followed. However the aliens in question have very short lifespans, and will die of old age within just a few months. So the Doctor and Martha decide to hide-out somewhere until their hunters simply die of natural causes.

Guess which planet they pick?

To avoid being detected, the TARDIS painfully transforms the Doctor's body into that of a human, and temporarily rewrites his memories and knowledge for the duration, to deter the aliens from detecting either his body or his mind. He's name is now John Smith, and he's a teacher on Earth in the year 1913, with Martha as his maid. (unidentified by the aliens, her faculties and DNA remain intact)

That's a great science-fictioney start.

And while he's there, working as a teacher, he falls in love with Matron.

Eeuurrgghhhh...

The truly shocking thing about this development, is that I really enjoyed this story. The Doctor's a nice guy. Joan is a nice girl. They don't spoil that.

(not until someone unwisely retcons this story, anyway)

As the aliens close-in, and a small-scale war breaks out in the village, John Smith's slow realisation that his identity is only a fabrication is an absolute tradgedy. And since he is the Doctor, in all but memory and knowledge, he's every bit as determined not to give in.

But to defeat the aliens and save everyone's lives, he knows he needs the Doctor's memories and knowledge. He has to change back, and give up his entire future life with Joan, in order to defeat the aliens and stop the killing.

He has to lose.

It's a fascinating window into the Doctor's inner loneliness. There are hints of this in other episodes, but as John Smith it's all out there in full view, as Smith doesn't have the Doctor's emotional wall.

Of course, by the end, he does the right thing and gives up what he wants to save everyone. He does the right thing, no matter what the cost. Of course he does - that's who the Doctor is.

The other angle on all this is Martha's. She's been interested in the Doctor from day one, but has always known that he didn't return the feeling. So far in the series, this has just proved to be a really annoying distraction, but in the choices that she's forced to confront here, she obviously reaches some sort of peace with this too.

Praise must also go to the excellent cast. Everyone turns in a good performance here, but particular note must go to Jessica Hynes as Joan, Pip Torrens as Headmaster Rocastle and Harry Lloyd as Baines, who exudes depth in both of his identities.

There are many good scenes in here, but not without a few jarring plot-thuds too, particularly Martha's abandonment of the watch containing all the Doctor's memories, and, would you believe...


... the inclusion of two sets of zombies!

In fact, given that both the aliens and the Doctor change their physical bodies in this, you have to wonder if there was an earlier draft in which he'd stolen his body-change machine from them. That would be consistent with the fact they were chasing him...

However on the whole the material was so well thought-about that I was enthralled.

Perhaps I bought-into this one because it was more about loss than love.

Cube

Most of what I had heard about this film is not true.

It's not all set in one room.

It wasn't made recently.

It's not quite as clever as its reputation.

What I will endorse it for though, is for being fun, and gripping.

A handful of people are trapped in a series of cubic rooms. They don't know each other, have no idea how they came to be there, or even why they have each been snatched from their everyday lives.

Each room has six exits – one in the centre of each wall. Each exit leads to a similar room. They don't know how many rooms there are, in any direction. (they theorise that there is a cube of cubes) They have nothing with which to measure time. Not even a pen.

It's a great device for stripping away specifics and examining purely a group of characters, and how they relate to each other. Unfortunately, most of the characters are not that interesting, while those pesky specifics that I mentioned are muddled and contradictory.

One room features blades several metres long emerging from the walls, although the walls are too thin to have contained them.

At one point they are about to drop-down into a room that they believe forms part of the bigger cube's wall, although this would mean that they were already in a room forming part of the same wall. But that's okay, because once they've dropped-down into it they actually head through another door in one of that room's walls to another room, the opposite wall of which is the one forming part of the bigger cube's wall. Sincerely – were they muddled, or am I?

We're told that there is no ventilation, yet there are ventilation slats in every doorway.

Calculating time, Quentin says that he has a 5 o'clock shadow, although he hasn't.

I'm terrible at maths, absolutely terrible, but even I know that even numbers and anything ending in a 5 (except 5) cannot be prime. Maths genius Leaven doesn't actually get this wrong, but it sure takes her a while to work it out.

That's right – one of their number is a maths genius. Well, actually two. And another of them, apparently by coincidence, helped to design the labyrinth that they are all trapped in. The word lucky doesn't even begin to cover the series of flukes that they enjoy.

All right, I probably sound like I'm whinging, but this is a film that invites the viewer to use their brain, so I think my asking questions is justified.

This is a film that poses many questions, but offers only guesses as answers. I have nothing against an ambiguous ending, but anyone can write a film that asks lots of questions without answering any of them. Anyone.

Where the film truly soars though, is in its central concept. While it's never revealed quite what the cube's purpose is, the theory Worth offers is mind-blowingly acceptable.

This certainly held my attention tight throughout, and I enjoyed it so much that I suspect it's a film I may one day watch again.

(available here)

Souvenir of Singapore

It's a souvenir VHS for tourists to Singapore from about 15 years ago.

Starting at the only part of the island that I've actually been to, (the airport) this delightful hour takes-in tons of the surrounding tourist-attractions, and really painted a good picture of Singapore as a great colourful holiday destination. And, unlike almost everything made today, it was on untreated 4:3 fullscreen videotape, so we got to see it all clearly! :)

The soundtrack featured an echoey lady talking as though she had actually been on holiday here, and that she herself had shot all this footage. She was very likable and convincing, although the end-credits seemed to be picking a fight with that idea.

Maybe I'll go back there again one day, and this time do a little more than just ride on the monorail...

Kontroll

***CONTAINS SPOILERS***

Kontroll is a Hungarian comedy-drama-fantasy-slasher-thriller-whodunnit about life and death on the Budapest subway system.

And I mean it when I say "life and death."

On the life side, the main character – the hapless Bulcsú – seems determined never to leave. He sleeps on platforms down there, works on trains down there, and goes on dates down there, in preference to even venturing up the escalator to one of the stations' coffee-shops. He has, quite literally, gone underground from someone, or something.

As for who or what he is so petrified of above… could it be the owl who seems to keep following him around?

On the death side, there is quite a lot of blood. Partly because Bulcsú never cleans himself up after his encounters. Towards the end of the film, he is covered in so much of the stuff, and yet still dilligently continues to carry out his job as a ticket-inspector. None of his reserved passengers even bat an eyelid.

And that waking-dream atmosphere is partly what makes this surreal film so compelling, along with the fascinating visuals, and echoey soundtrack. This Metro is an unpleasant, yet enchanting, place.

And the comedy? Well, everyone is played with such conviction that the deft humour flows quite naturally, and it's very easy indeed to recognise the hardened cynical culture has silently developed in the darkness below - and all around - us.

Got Sixtoona'd By Herschel At Uno...

... and lost with this hand, but only because I had 15 unlucky cards, and one really unlucky card.

Today's celebrity Bible-Reader is... Number 6

"Whose side are you on—ours or our enemies'?"

- Joshua 5:13b (Message)

Doctor Who: The Infinite Quest

"I'm Martha, on an intergalactic race with the Doctor to stop the scourge of the universe Baltazar getting his hands on this lethal weapon. It won't be easy stopping him. Join me for the whole adventure from start to finish."


This is a Doctor Who cartoon story, in which the Doctor and Martha go on a quest to recover the four data chips that can lead the possessor to the Infinite - an ancient spaceship that can grant a person's greatest desire. (not sure what happened to all the other people who'd previously found it throughout history – you'd have thought some of them might be quite noticable by now)

It was originally broadcast in 13 three-minute episodes, although the last of these was apparently only included in the omnibus version, which is what I watched this morning.

It's very much a production of half-measures. Animation offers the opportunity to do lots of visual things that would have been much more expensive in the live-action show, yet with the whole universe to choose from, the story's all around Earth again. There are some nice visuals though, notably a giant talking frog, which might have been a challenge to take seriously in the live action series.

The other disappointing aspect is the audio. Several actors, including the two leads, are quite unrehearsed. I'd suggest that maybe they weren't used to working in audio, but I heard David Tennant in Sympathy For The Devil recently, when he was his usual firing-on-all-cannons self.

The best thing about this adventure though is its simplicity. Aimed squarely at kids, there are no pretentious sub-texts (that I noticed) or heavy-handed discontinuity. The simple fact that it got made opens up the opportunity for more kid-orientated Who, although hopefully with a bit more imagination.

Marvel Comics and The Electric Company Present – Spidey Super Stories #2

The inside front-cover is a one-page black-and-white strip entitled the SECRETS of SPIDER-MAN'S COSTUME!

The first strip is part 1 of In the Hands of the Hunter! by Jean Thomas with art by Winslow Mortimer, Don Heck and Mike Esposito.

Spidey has to take a break from filming The Electric Company to go home and get some more web-fluid. Unfortunately, there he's attacked and captured by Kraven the Hunter.

When Jennifer of the Jungle arrives at Parker's flat (I guess she must know his secret identity) the only witness is Paul the gorilla, who's been hiding in Spider-Man's wardrobe the whole time.


He mimes what he saw, before he and Jennifer head-off to follow Kraven to his hideout in the jungle park at the city zoo.

Then there's A Spidey Bonus Page! entitled Let's Pay A Visit To Peter Parker's Place. This is a splash page showing where Peter hides all his Spider-gear to avoid Aunt May finding it.

Part 2 of the main strip then sees Spidey, Jennifer and Paul defeating Kraven the Hunter, and returning to the TV studios.

Next up is another TV script adaptation (originally by John Boni) entitled Spidey vs. Mister Measles. Mr Measles, if I'm not labouring the point, wants to give everyone in the world chickenpox. No, wait, I'm wrong, measles. His reasoning is that the whole world will then have to go home to bed "in the dark, where they can't read!" Paradoxically he also challenges the reader "Have you had your measles shot?"



Joyous.

Spider-Man defeats Mr Measles, but only by making the ultimate sacrifice.

Still, he's recovered by The Long Arms Of The Law-Breaker, which is a pretty good rematch against Doctor Octopus. The five-page Part 1 – Doc Ock Gets Out! features the six-armed vilain escaping from prison, recounting his origin and then breaking into a museum.

Then there's a break for another Let's See Some More Of... Peter Parker's Place! splash-page, this time concentrating on Peter's web-fluid, here called web mix.

Part 2 – STOP the DOC sees Doc Ock robbing the museum and framing Spider-Man, doing a fine job of showing a battle from several different perspectives.



The inside back-cover is the black-and-white one page Reader vs. Speeder!, followed by a full-colour back-to-school poster-ad for The Electric Company featuring Spidey and the Short Circus.


(review of issue #1 here)

Marvel Comics and The Electric Company Present – Spidey Super Stories #1

Published in 1974, this tie-in to Spidey's appearances in the kids' TV show The Electirc Company is very much an introduction to Spider-Man for new readers.

The inside front-cover has a mute monochrome one-page strip entitled the WONDERFUL WORLD of WEBBING......OR, HOW SPIDEY SLINGS AND SWINGS! It's all about, nah I'll tell you later.

The main colour strip is Spider-Man is Born! by Jean Thomas and Bill Effros, with art from Winslow Mortimer and Mike Esposito. This is basically a retelling of how Peter Parker became Spider-Man, but simplified for a young audience. Uncle Ben's murder is not included.

As I read this tonight, of course I nerdily wanted to believe that this account was still canon with the original. Maybe these brief lines of dialogue potentially fit in-between scenes in the original origin strip of Amazing Fantasy #15, however I don't have a copy of that to hand to check if Parker was wearing the same clothes or not.


And you have to admire a strip that teaches young kids words like radioactive!

Spidey Signs Up! is another origin story of sorts, explaining how Spider-Man came to join the cast of The Electric Company.


Next up is the start of Spider-Man's many team-ups with Easy Reader. And you'd need to be into reading to make it through a title like SPIDEY in A VERY SHORT COMIC BOOK AS SEEN ON THE ELECTRIC COMPANY! SPIDEY meets the SPOILER. The Spoiler, as his name suggests, was driven by spoiling things, occassionally by talking to the reader.


This was an adaptation of one of the TV spots.

Next up is Help! I'm Spider-Man!, based on a story by Byron Preiss, and featuring Duane from the Short Circus getting to be Spider-Man for a day. Unfortunately, Electro and the Vulture show up too.


The inside back-cover is another black-and-white one pager - The Secrets of Spider-Man's Mask. That's about... well, maybe I'll tell you that later too.

And the back-cover is an ad for the ongoing series.

(review of issue #2 here)

Your Friendly British-Neighbourhood Spider-Man Weekly

Want to know why he's always called your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man?

It's because Spidey is so cross-cultural. Wherever you live, Peter Parker's daily struggles with school-bullies, his aunt May, rent and crazed super-powerful tyrants with big wings are so relevant to humanity everywhere that they require no adjustment whatsoever to retell in a foreign culture. (well, apart from maybe respelling 'neighborhood' with a 'u' in the middle)


In the US, in 1962, Stan "The Man" Lee™ created the amazing Spider-Man™. The rest of Spidey's story is publishing history. Well, in the US, anyway.


In Britain, in 1973, Marvel UK launched Marvel Presents the New Spider-Man Comics Weekly to reprint Spidey's adventures for the benefit of any British kids who weren't already picking up the American imports. A year later, sales were still good.


After all, how could such a business plan possibly go wrong? Spider-Man was hugely popular, appealed to kids and adults of all ages, and, thanks to the recent TV cartoon, even had his own catchy theme-song. And all they needed to do was something as easy as reprint strips that were already finished, and already in English. Not even the most out-of-touch editor could possibly mess this product up.

And, y'know, for eleven years, no-one really did.


That's pretty staple for Spidey, isn't it? His angry boss, his silent long-suffering pain, his wisecracking internal monologue, all served-up with Stan Lee's enthusiastic narration and the likes of John Romita's action-packed artwork. (not that in evidence above, I accept) That's the sort of thing we would sacrifice our pocket-money for.

Granted, the prohibitive cost of colour ink in the UK in those days meant that it was all in black-and-white initially, (with the odd page of colour creeping-in over the decade) but the payoff was that our A4 pages printed everything much bigger than in the US. Everything was sound.

Well, for the first three years, anyway, until the first of many joyous dice-rolls at improving the format…



So in 1976, the mag briefly became Super Spider-Man With The Super-Heroes, as the problem of fitting the American pages onto the British A4 pages was solved for a short while by ingeniously printing the whole mag landscape:


With everything that much smaller, this had the great benefit of packing-in twice the amount of comic-strip.

I guess that reducing the size of the strips to fit the landscape format wasn't too popular though, as even after it was abandoned in 1977, Marvel UK sold-off box-loads of back-issues, by simply binding them together into collections to sell off cheaply.


And cheap would definitely be the word. Aside from flicking through an issue before buying, there was just no way of knowing which random issues of which Marvel titles one could find in these. If you got into an ongoing story, chances were that you would never find out what happened next. Still, it's a culture-shock to flick through these cropped collections today and find the covers, adverts and letters pages still intact.

Anyway, the new format was abandoned just shortly after the proud new name was abandoned too.


And right there I reckon is the secret of this weekly's 12-year longevity – the merger. No matter how many other Marvel UK titles got cancelled and incorporated into this one, Spider-Man absorbed them all. I think there's a metaphor here about spiders eating their enemies, but I'll move on.

As if to prove the point, mere weeks later, yet another merger took place…


The Anglicisation of Spidey was now in full swing. As the monthly American strips were being broken up into shorter instalments for the back-up-strip burdened British weekly, this necessitated the creation of some form of recap to add-onto the start of any episodes beginning mid-issue. This wasn't limited just to Marvel's Super Spider-Man title, other contemporary series such as Star Wars Weekly were doing the same thing.

And it wasn't as simple as it looked, because in this next clip:

a) in the first frame they mis-spelt their own title-character's name, and

b) in the the last frame they had to make sure that the villain began the same sentence that he would finish at the start of the next page!



And did ya notice how in that final panel they even subtly respelt a word the British way?

However when Captain Britain also failed to survive the merger, (always a bad sign to be the second name in the new title, even in your own country) the comic seemed to have a fair degree of trouble figuring out what its new long-term title was going to be. For example, it could have been any of these variants...
















Until, finally, inspiration struck:


Ooh, that last cover's a bit for the older kids, isn't it? I dunno, apart from horror, what else could they put on the cover that might get teenage boys to buy it?




Yeah, anyway, those readers who could reach the comics on the slightly higher shelves found that the soaring cover-price (over twice what it had started at a decade earlier) now allowed for a couple of color, I'm sorry, colour pages inside. A logical enough progression, you might think. But Marvel UK were even keener than that to give their readers value-for-money. They couldn't afford to print the whole comic in colour, but they could afford to, every week, print six pages in… red. Just the red, mind.


(yes, even the Hulk would become red sometimes)

However all this long-term hard work to reach the more mature teenage boy – which I'd like to naively believe was why we now had more intellectual text-only recaps - was not to last. As in the case of the live action TV series that had taken-over the comic a year earlier, another Spider-Franchise was about to hit Britain's TV screens and once more change everything.


In 1983 the cartoon series Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends was about to air, in which Peter Parker and his Aunt May also lived with Iceman and Fire-Star's secret identities, thanks to a spare room that could transform into a computerised hide-out.

Sooo…


And, inevitably, printing an adaptation of the TV cartoon's opening episode resulted in a slightly chintzier tone…




Anyway, this was a bit like jumping out of a plane without a parachute, as the original American comic Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends had only run for one issue, leaving no other such Spider-Friends tales for the UK title to reprint. So Iceman and Fire-Star consequently had to disappear from the UK comic-strip after a mere three short episodes, to be replaced with the regular Marvel universe again. (To this day, the one-shot Spider-Friends adaptation is not generally considered to be canon.)

Still, for about six months the British comic did retain the cartoon's title anyway, despite two-thirds of the Amazing Friends not actually appearing inside. Iceman And Fire-Star's faces remained on the cover for a full two months, until they were quietly replaced with… well, just about anyone, as it turned out…










(I think they meant to cut-out the letter 'r' from 'Friends' on that last one)

Until, finally, the simplicity of their earlier lesson was re-learnt:


Reverting to the title Spider-Man in 1984, the comic was bold enough to reprint the arguably more-canon-than-Amazing-Friends US issue pencilled by Marvel parodist Fred Hembeck, complete with eyes stuck together and everything…


But the real breakthrough came later that year, when Marvel UK got into producing their own original Spider-Man comic-strip. That's right – in the UK, in-between reprints from the US, we got our very own extra British Spidey-episodes, scripted by Mike Collins, pencilled by Barry Kitson, inked by Mark Farmer and published by Marvel UK itself!





It was a bold new beginning for Marvel UK's Spider-Man. He had a whole new cast of colleagues to work with at the Daily Herald newspaper in London, and the comic's editor was plainly inviting feedback on whether these were good ideas.

This was Spider-Man Weekly's (or whatever you call it) finest hour. Yet that very definition meant that we would never get it this good again.


With three monthly US titles all already producing far too much story to fit into a weekly reprint (unless you sat down and gave it some thought), issue #620 began the title's quick decline towards cancellation.


I only mark it as starting at that issue because that was the first one that I bought when it was current. (I got back-issues later) As I was collecting the US versions at the same time, that's the point from which I was aware of how incomprehensible the ongoing story was getting, particularly since not much attention seemed to be going into picking which stories to reprint. From so much apparent care, it all began descending into carelessness.



And then, it very very suddenly happened.

In issue #631, Spider-Man's new alien black-costume was introduced.

Nothing wrong with that (albeit about a year after it had arrived in the US – there was talk of us never getting it), however the amount of rewriting that had gone on for the UK audience was staggering. Panels were reworded, two pages had been inserted from Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #1 complete with episode title…


… two more pages of British material had been commisioned for the middle, and much of the rest of the story had been cut out. By "much of the rest of the story" I really mean the next twelve months.

As if to explain, the back-cover of the second half featured a full-page "goodbye" from the apparently outgoing production team, together with an announcement of another great "new look"…


As mentioned above, the following week (in #633) a story from a year later was printed, featuring Spider-Man in a woolen duplicate of the new alien costume, complete with an offhand line about what had so awesomely become of the original they had introduced a mere fortnight earlier.




Whoa, back-up a sec. What did he say in the second balloon of that last panel? The "top designer"? Somehow, those two words don't look like they fit with the rest, do they? I had also bought this strip in the original American printing...


As you can also see, even all the page-numbers seemed to have been deemed above the heads of British readers. In fact, I think this was the most shamelessly tweaked UK reprint of a US strip I've ever seen. When you factor-in the removed page-numbers, Anglicised words and alternate back-issue references, I counted a whopping 35 changes to this one strip alone. Perhaps, in aiming for a younger audience, they should have picked a story that didn't feature a birth.


Anyway, the following week, issue #634, was the watershed.


Marvel US had recently launched their new Star Comics range aimed at juniors, and for some reason that I never understood, Marvel UK were printing them in all their teenage titles as back-up strips. (Transformers was getting suffocated in the same way by Planet Terry, although the lead strip survived in tone, cut down to a tiny-page count)

But that's not all - as you may have noticed above, together with the Fraggles, Willy the Wizard (called Wally the Wizard in the US version), Captain Wally (an unrelated British strip) and Snailman (with the Dukes of Hazzard joining later), for some reason Iceman and Fire-Star were back!

It turned out that the Spider-Friends had made it into another comic strip in the US after all... in an advertising supplement in the Denver Post newspaper in 1983. This was aimed at the general public, rather than regular Spider-Man readers, and as such the stories’ simplicity took the age-range down another swoop.

In fact, the next four issues (just the two with the Spider-Friends again) would all be taken from stories designed specifically for freebie US local advertising supplements, complete with nonsensical placement advertising for overseas businesses.


Boy those sponsors in Dallas sure got their money’s worth.

Issue #639 of The Spider-Man Comic bravely took the title's new intended age-range even lower though. Just look at this cover:


The dark sinister backdrop gives the impression that this issue will see a return to the more young adult storylines, right? Wrong.







Boy, he was sure spoiling this comic.

It took me 23 years - until tonight - to figure out where this strip had come from.

Back in the 1970s, Spider-Man had appeared as a mute character in the US educational TV sketch-show The Electric Company, which had been made by the Children's Television Workshop - the same people who still make Sesame Street.

In aiming for a younger readership, Marvel UK were actually reprinting strips from Spidey Super Stories - a comicbook that had been aimed at The Electric Company's young TV audience, and consequently featured Spidey with many of the show's cast-members and characters. One such character was called Easy Reader. He loved to read. And sing. In fact, he would even sing his own theme-song.


And did I mention that in the TV show he was played by Morgan Freeman? Yes, that Morgan Freeman!


Of course, older kids were expected to now switch to buying Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars instead, which featured 'our' Spidey as a regular, albeit lesser, character.

I guess it hadn't occurred to anyone at Marvel UK that some of us might have bought both titles, had the webslinger's usual adventures continued in this series as normal. Me, even though I already had most of the US originals, I would have been happy rebuying them all again in British reprints, if only they had been presented in a proper fashion. That's how easy it was for Marvel UK to get my money.

Yet what happened instead, was that even a mug like me stopped buying the comic long before the title's cancellation six months later at issue #666. By then it was entitled just Spidey Comic, and the final issue didn't even feature Spider-Man on the cover, except in the corner box. I guess I should blame Spidey himself. By the end of the run, he was, apparently, its editor.



So about a month later, initially still edited by Spider-Man himself, Spider-Man And Zoids was launched from issue #1, which fairly reverted to the classic way of doing things, and lasted only a year. Starting again from 'Vol.2 No.1', rather than #667, it hardly carried the authority of the original. I bought them, but for some reason I didn't read them. Easy Reader had clearly put me off reading.

So, given that I never read volume 2, after 666 issues of Stan Lee™ Presents The New Super Spectacular Spidey-Man With The Super-Heroes And The Titans Incorporating... Marvel Team-Up TV Comic Plus The Uncanny X-Men, The Incredible Hulk And Spider-Woman Guest-Starring The Beast Now Featuring J Jonah Jameson And His Amazing Friends Weekly volume 1, how exactly did things end for our friendly neighbourhood (in the UK) webslinger?

I mean how do you conclude an ongoing 666-part series after twelve years? Did Spidey have a rematch with the very first villain he'd fought way back in issue #1? Did he sit atop a building reminiscing about all the great times he'd shared with us in those pages? Did he decide to finally call it a day and give up crime-fighting after all these years?

Or did he just dance off happily into the sunset?

Yes.


With thanks to Herschel.

(Marvel's images in this post are copyright Marvel, and were used according to 'fair use' laws)