Steve Does Comics

Marvel Value Stamp images from http://www.mvstamps.com

Like Dracula, Steve Does Comics leaps from its grave.

Like the Harker family, they try to stop it with a steak through the heart.

Frankly, I get the feeling they aren't the finest vampire hunters the world can supply.

But it's coming up to Christmas - and that can mean just one thing.

Christmas cards.

And that can mean just one thing.

Envelopes.

And that can mean just one thing.

Stamps.

And that can mean just one thing.

Marvel Value Stamps.

And that can mean just one thing.

I didn't have any.

In fact, that's not true. I actually had three.

Well, OK, that's not true either. I had loads because I had loads of Bronze Age comics but I only had three that I ever dared to physically cut out of the comics and do something with.

I'm pretty sure that was because I had more than one copy of the comics in question and was thus willing to take the scissors to them.

See the dread fate that awaits those who seek out Marvel Value Stamps!

The three I cut out featured the Black Panther, Killraven and Brother Voodoo and, in the absence of anywhere else to stick them, I glued them in my scrapbook, somewhere between those cards you used to get with PG Tips, and the copy I drew of this cover to Weird War Tales #24.

In fact I only copied the skeleton. I couldn't be bothered to draw the rest, so I instead drew him in the Time Tunnel

Why he was in there, I'm not totally sure but I like to feel it was a salutary reminder that death is everywhere, even in the Time Tunnel.

Happily, death isn't in The Star Maidens or I wouldn't be able to cope with life.

I was never actually sure just what one was supposed to do with Marvel Value Stamps. Was there a booklet you could buy to stick them in?

If so, I never heard anything about it. But I always suspected that the real reasons for the Marvel Value Stamps' existence was to make you buy two copies of every comic. One to keep, knowing it'd be worth a fortune some day, and one to cut to pieces. In this way would Marvel double their sales with little extra effort. What cunning devils they were.

Anyway, that's my heartwarming tale of Marvel Value Stamps. If you have any of your own, you know just where to post them.

Hooray! It's that magical time of year again, when the dead rise from their graves and pester the living!

And that can mean just one thing.

Skellingtons.

Thus it is that Steve Does Comics looks at what I reckon are the Top Ten skeletons ever to grace the cover of Weird War Tales. As always with Steve Does Comics, it's hard-hitting, it's controversial, it's a debate likely to tear the Internet itself asunder. But here we go...

Without doing any research whatsoever, I have a feeling this may be a unique issue of the comic that tries to ruin the good name of warfare, because all three of its tales feature someone who really existed.

The first person who really existed is someone called Adolf Hitler who puts in a blink-and-you'll-miss-him appearance in the tale of a Nazi major out to discover the ultimate torture, one that can break the spirit of any man. When that major's implicated in the plot to assassinate Hitler, he's subjected to his own methods, only to discover the ultimate torture is a thing called Hope. It looks like those Greeks knew of what they spoke when they claimed Hope was the only evil left behind in Pandora's Box.

Next up, Lawrence of Arabia has a very dull adventure that mostly involves him saying "Allah" a lot and referring to everyone in sight as "Brother" in between blowing things up. He keeps following around what looks like a fox but writer Robert Kanigher keeps insisting is a jackal. Being drawn by Alfredo Alcala, the story's inevitably a thing of visual beauty but it's somewhat uninvolving and the fact that Lawrence seems to be killing people for the sake of it makes it hard to feel any great empathy for him. There's also the question of the ethicality of creating fictional tales around real people.

Our final real person is King Edward the Third, who spends the first part of the closing tale having a barney with a bunch of Frenchman in Crécy.

I could stun you here with my knowledge of Edward the Third but frankly I don't have a clue who he was or what he did, so I'd best draw a veil over that whole subject and say the second half of the tale fast-forwards to the First World War where a bunch of under-fire Tommies are rescued from the Germans by the giant ghosts of Edward the Third's bowmen. As a story, this clearly owes something (everything) to Arthur Machen's myth of the Angels of Mons, instantly planting in the mind of any true comic fan the only question that matters; "Who'd win a fight between the Phantom Bowmen of Crécy and the Angels of Mons?"

Personally, when it comes to a punch-up, I'm on the side of the Angels - but then I always have been.

Overall, it's not a great issue, in fact I'd say it's noticeably sub-par. The first story's the only one that really works, the TE Lawrence tale fails completely and, Eddy the Third aside, the Bowmen tale has no actual named characters, meaning it feels more like an anecdote than a full-blown story.

As always, the letters page finds editor Joe Orlando pleading with readers to send him some letters so he'll actually have something to print. War may be hell but it seems it's nothing beside the nightmare that is editing Weird War Tales.

Cursed are those who live in interesting times, and few times are more "interesting" than wartime. That realisation gives us all the excuse we need to plunge once more into the mystery and the madness of Weird War Tales, the comic that set out to give wholesale slaughter a bad name.

Because we're luckier than most of the characters in this month's issue, we get, not the normal three stories, but four. In the first, Bill Finger and Gerry Talaoc tell of a sceptical soldier whose friend keeps telling him his destiny's controlled by the stars. And, wouldn't you know it, as he lies injured, hit by a German tank attack, the constellations come to life to scatter his persecutors like chaff.

Why the stars take it upon themselves to save him, given that he's never had a good word to say for them, is never explained. Like Stan Ridgway in the song Camouflage, we and he have to just put it down to the strangeness that can happen in warfare.

The next tale is a Day After Doomsday job that definitely makes no sense. A couple who live on a farm in what we're told is "rural Great Britain" drink from their well and almost immediately shrink down to the size of mice, to be eaten by their own chickens. From the talk during the tale of how the days are so hot lately - and of radiation having seeped into the well - we're clearly led to assume there's been a nuclear war but one they've somehow failed to notice or hear anything about. I don't know; rural Great Britain, eh?

Giant chickens aside, the tale's main claim to greatness is that it features the line, "Cheeze it, luv!" a phrase that, in over forty years of living in Britain, I've never heard once.

From a Great Britain that's unrecognisable to natives of that land, we move on to a story whose metaphorical landscape's instantly familiar to Weird War Tales readers, as a crusader makes a deal with what seems to be the devil. According to the terms of their pact, the crusader will live forever unless he asks to die, and inevitably then starts to suffer a string of mishaps that make him realise that, in striking the bargain, he wasn't as clever as he thought he was.

The fourth story sadly seems to have no purpose other than to fill two pages, as a bunch of soldiers land on an island guarded by robot soldiers and get them to wipe each other out. "Still no match for the human brain," remarks one soldier. "Not now," warns his colleague, "...but what about future wars?" It's a message I think we can all take to bed with us tonight and ponder deeply upon.

The story of the soldier saved by the stars is probably the best of the bunch but, for me, the real highlight of the issue isn't a story at all.

It's an ad.

I love the ads in old American comics - the stupider the better - and in this one we get a plug for Duke, the super action dog. In the space of just four panels, we get to see the plastic pooch slide down a rope, use a periscope and run around with a flashing light, not to mention using a winch that'll no doubt save some poor soul from doom.

I may be over-rating Duke but I get the feeling that none of the misfortunes that afflict our protagonists in this month's issue would've befallen them if they'd only had half the brains of that dog.

If names are for tombstones that could explain why the artists with the best names seemed to draw tales from beyond the grave.

It could also explain why DC's horror mags grabbed me more than Marvel's. Marvel's horror anthologies were always produced by people with names like Stan and Don and Jack.