Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The Classics - Spider-Man Comics Weekly #80

Don't be alarmed if you don't recognize the title of this series or the cover.

This is a comic book I picked up during travels abroad. Back in the summer of 1974 I visited relatives in Great Britain with my family (my grandmother was born there).

I was hoping I could track down some comics, but had no luck finding issues of Judge Dredd or any other British comics - but I did find some Marvel imports, including this issue of Spider-Man Comics Weekly.

It included black-and-white reprints of Marvel comics starring Spider-Man, Iron Man and Thor. Since it was a weekly title, they cut each issue reprinted in half - so you got 11 pages of a classic Stan Lee - John Romita Spidey adventure, 6 pages of an early Stan Lee - Don Heck Iron Man story from Tales of Suspense, and 12 pages from the second Thor Annual.

They're solid examples of '60s Marvel, but they suffer from poor printing quality and some heavy-handed use of gray tone to try to "liven up" the artwork (and make up for the lack of color, I suppose).

Not a bad package, considering it was only 7p - though I have no idea, at this late date, how much that was in U.S. funds. About 20 cents, maybe?

Despite finding so few comics (this was before the days of comic shops, of course), it was a wonderful trip to a beautiful country. But Marvel's comics reprint effort at the time seemed half-hearted at best.

Grade: C+

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

And it looks like you got an original cover; one not seen on an American comic. That's a plus. (Anyway, it looks new to me!)

Sam Kujava

Chuck said...

Sam, I believe it is an original. Since they broke the issue in half, I suppose they could only use the actual cover for one comic, so they'd create a new one for the other half.