Giant Super Hero Holiday Grab Bag

Grabby Christmas

Giant Super Hero Holiday Grab Bag
by various writers and artists
Marvel Comics 1974-1976

Imagine, if you will, a young boy aged six years old, out in London with his parents at the tail end of 1974. There I was, in either Berwick Street in Soho or just down the road and around the corner in St. Ann’s Court (just off Wardour Street, depending on when the place I'm talking about moved) in what was my all time favourite shop, Dark They Were And Golden Eyed. This was the forerunner of such future shops as the short lived Eye In The Pyramid and, of course, Forbidden Planet (pretty much the only one of these types of stores which made it out of the late 70s/early 80s and which is still with us today, although there are some modern variants like Mega City Comics and Orbital, of course).

So, anyway, there I was in my favourite science fiction, fantasy, horror and comic shop gazing up at a huge (well, to me it seemed huge) tabloid sized, cardboard covered Treasury Edition called Giant Super Hero Holiday Grab Bag. There was a load of Christmas Holly with red berries on the cover forming a wreath and, bursting through all that rich greenery were Spider-Man, Thor, The Hulk, Captain America, The Thing and The Human Torch. And then, on the back, there was a reverse of the cover with the same scene but with a view of them from behind, doing the bursting. It was gorgeous and I was actually very surprised when my dad took the thing down from the shelf and said we could take it back home with us. Surprised because, honestly, it was an exorbitant amount of money for the time... a real luxury item. Yep! It was 50p (I believe the US price was about $1.50, which says something about the state of the pound against the dollar these days, I think). How could a comic be priced over what was five times the amount of a regular comic back then? Honestly, fifty pence?

Anyway, we took it home and it got a lot of love and, I still have this and both the other two ‘sequels’ to this tome to this day... and it’s those which are the subject of today's review, an excuse for me to read and hang out with the fond memories. I think it was the first Treasury Edition I’d ever seen. Both DC and Marvel did these tabloid sized Treasury Editions (as they were loosely known at the time) and, although there were a few which pre-dated this one by a matter of months, I believe this was the first year that the two big companies started releasing them. Not a huge amount of them have survived these days because they didn’t travel through the mail too well and their relatively cumbersome size meant they tended to get folded and bent quite a bit. Not mine though. I managed to keep most I had and, although some were given away, I managed to buy many of them back and a few others in the interceding years. Actually, there are two I used to have which I still wish I could get back but, for some reason, those ones seem to go for very big money. As it is they usually go for a fair whack if you’re lucky enough to see them about in the wild. I have maybe 30 to 40 of these things and I still think they’re great buys, with their oversized artwork reprinted at something almost as large as the original artwork might have been before reproduction and with a full colour, no adverts experience of around 80 to 90 pages in total. These were a great deal.

It’s actually now that I read them again that I realise that, although the covers really 'brought the Christmas', the stories inside (which were mostly reprints in the case of these particular editions), were mostly not seasonal tales.

Here is what lurked between the covers...

Giant Superhero Holiday Grab Bag
Marvel Treasury Special - 1974
First up we have what was pretty much the only Christmas tale in this one (honestly, these things feel much more Christmassy than they actually are) with a tale teaming up everybody’s favourite web slinger Spider-Man with the Silver Age version of The Human Torch, Johnny Storm of The Fantastic Four. This is Have Yourself A Sandman Little Christmas by Roy Thomas And Ross Andru and it’s a truly brilliant little tale which humanises the super villain and in which, for a little while, the two lead heroes turn a blind eye for a minute and let him keep his annual ritual of visiting his sick mother in bed on Christmas Eve. It’s a heart warming story and nobody is really worried that The Sandman gets away at the end.

The next, very non-Christmassy story is In Mortal Combat With... Sub Mariner by Stan Lee and Wally Wood. This is a tale of Namor seeking a lawyer to challenge mankind’s rights to be the ruling surface dwellers and, yeah, no prizes as to which legal team he goes for. It’s not long before Daredevil and Sub Mariner are locked in deadly combat in the streets of New York.

And then there’s... And To All A Good Night by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan. Along with the opening tale, this is the other strong story in this collection and, although it has a Christmassy title, it could frankly be set on almost any night of the year. This one shows Black Widow’s chauffer rescuing a suicidal young man from taking a plunge into the river, so he takes the kid back to Natasha to help him. Alas, when the hoodlums who are the cause of the boy’s troubles attack them all in Natasha’s building, the teenager goes to save her and ends up plunging to his death from the rooftop anyway... much to the upset of the teary eyed Black Widow. This one is pretty grim and depressing and really shows that Marvel could take themselves seriously with different kinds of stories when they wanted to.

The last two tales in this first Grab Bag tome, Battle Of The Century - The Hulk VS The Thing and The Avengers Take Over is a two part tale by the classic writing and art team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. It does what it says on the tin and shows the first real meeting between The Fantastic Four and the fairly newly formed The Avengers, as they learn how to work together in the second part to end The Hulk’s current rampage. It’s made more than clear in this story that The Hulk’s alter ego is very much Bob Banner... that would change over time.

And that was that for this first volume. Dynamic and, much simpler but much more engaging somehow, artwork than a lot of comics today and certainly a lot of fun. However, this must have been a very successful experiment on the part of Marvel because, a year later there was...

Giant Superhero Holiday Grab Bag
Marvel Treasury Edition Number 8 - 1975
This one goes with the same format with only two actual Christmas tales but there’s also a New Year’s Eve story in here too... of sorts.

Twas The Night Before Christmas by Gary Friedrich And Frank Springer is a nice opening story about Nick Fury, Agent Of S.H.I.E.L.D going up into space to defuse a world threatening bomb on Christmas Eve. But it’s a trap and Fury is face to face with a Ku Klux Klan style super villain called The Hatemonger, who straps him to a capsule with the bomb and sends him back to Earth. If it wasn’t for a serendipitous intervention from an unknown entity (it’s strongly implied it’s Santa and his sled) then things might have turned out badly. Nice idea and love that there’s a Sean Connery reference in this, paying homage to the original idea of resurrecting the star of Sgt. Fury And His Howling Commandoes as a secret agent in the Cold War.

After this, there’s a reprint of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s classic Spidey Goes Mad story, where Mysterio posing as a psycho-analyst almost makes Spider-Man think he’s going off his rocker with his illusions... if it wasn’t for J. Jonah Jameson accidentally foiling his plans, much to the editor of the Daily Bugle’s dismay. Next up is the second Christmas story, Jingle Bombs by Steve Engleheart, George Tusca and Billy Graham. This one tells of a super villain visiting Luke Cage, Hero For Hire on Christmas Eve and attacking him as people from the past, present and future (in a nod to Charles Dickens) before finding him worthy enough to tie up in his lair so they can die together when he lets off an atomic bomb. This isn’t a great story but it has a certain atmosphere to it that makes up for the clumsy plot.

Then we have Roy Thomas and Herb Trimpe’s Heaven Is A Very Small Place, which is... literally The Hulk in the desert reacting to a mirage of a friendly town before it fades out again. It’s... not got a lot of substance to it but at least it’s fairly short.

The final tale in this edition is Eternity! Eternity! by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan and is about Doctor Strange (back in the phase when he used to wear that blue face covering) and is about Nightmare and Eternity trying to destroy mankind on New Year’s Eve. It seems to be the first installment of a two parter because, just as the big fight is about to start, the editors obviously decided they didn’t want to go over the page count and instead have Doctor Strange reminding the readers that everything came out alright in the end.

So, yeah... that one was a bit of a cop out but it must have sold well because it once more paved the way for...

Giant Superhero Holiday Grab Bag
Marvel Treasury Edition Number 13 - 1976
Okay, so Marvel obviously never used to do that many Christmas stories (and I can sort of see why in terms of the long game and the age of the characters) because they manage to have their cake and eat it here. By that I mean, none of the reprints are Christmas themed in this edition but, to ease this and attempt to give the whole thing a seasonal feel, there’s a framing story of a bunch of completely new pages, called ‘Tis The Season, by Roger Stern and George Tuaka, which takes place during and after a Fantastic Four VS The Avengers charity snowball fight event... where various of these and other superheroes interact with the characters and each encounter has one or more of the characters reminiscing about a previous adventure... with a few pages of this popping up between each story and the bookends.
 
The regular stories start with ...As Those Who Will Not See! by Gerry Conway and Gill Kane, when Spider-Man turns up and we get a tale featuring him plus The Thing  and his blind girlfriend Alicia Masters teaming up to follow a thread created by Alicia’s step-dad, The Puppetmaster. It tries to be an emotional story of a father gone bad but, in the end, it’s not really a great story. The next in the volume reprints the story of The Vision becoming a member of The Avengers with the classic Even An Android Can Cry by Roy Thomas and John Buscema.

He Who Strikes The Silver Surfer by Stan Lee and Marie Severin is next but, nothing much happens as two titans, Hulk and Silver Surfer, lock horns and trade fists. Marvel seemed to be good at having ‘nothing much happening’ while two characters are pounding on each other for the required number of pages. Something to note here though is that Robert Banner has now become Bruce Banner (later this was glossed over with the explanation that he’s Robert Bruce Banner, if memory serves).

The last story, Once Upon A Time - - The Ox! by Gerry Conway and Gene Colan is Daredevil VS The Ox who, if memory serves, was originally one of The Enforcers in The Amazing Spider-Man but now seems to be a dormant personality in another character. It doesn’t make much sense and is not a fun story, as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s me done with these for the forseeable future. They’re not what I remember them to be but it was nice to revisit these things and I’m surprised that Marvel haven’t gathered some of their more Christmas themed stories from the last sixty plus years of comics and released them under a money grabbing trade paperback reprint but, you know, that’s just what I’d do (and I’d certainly grab a copy for myself). The Treasury format is one of my fondest memories of comic book buying in the 1970s and, despite the weak content in some of these tomes, they will always hold a special place in my heart. Definitely worth tracking down if comic books are your thing.

Amazing Fantastic Incredible

Ex Sales Sayer

Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir
by Stan Lee and Peter David and Colleen Doran
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4711-5259-7

Well this was a nice surprise present for Christmas... mainly because it wasn’t even a blip on my radar. I didn’t know it existed but I would have jumped on it myself, straight away, if I’d have known about it.  Subtitled ‘A Marvelous Memoir’, Amazing Fantastic Incredible tells the story of one of the giants of modern culture, the man behind so many of the fantastic characters that people have loved since their inception in the early 1960s... Stan Lee. And what’s so wonderful about this autobiography is that it’s done, as it really should always have destined to be, I think... in comic book form. A hardback graphic novel, if you want to get technical about it, although I would have loved it if this had been serialised monthly with cheaper looking covers.

Wait, did I say autobiography? Well it’s co-written, by the looks of it, by the famous Peter David and illustrated quite wonderfully by Colleen Doran. So the question really arises as to what this book actually is because... well it’s kind of shimmering incandescently in a state between autobiography and biography... I think. For the sake of my own sanity and as something to refer to it as for the purpose of this review... I’m going to remind myself that a lot of autobiographies were actually ghostwritten by or with other people and don’t technically count as an autobiographies at all. At least this book is giving all the credit where it’s due and, since Stan so obviously has a strong stamp on what his life story contains and how it plays out here... yeah, I’m going to go with autobiography. ‘nuff said.

So I have to start off here by saying that it’s a wonderful book. There are some things I would have liked to have seen a little more of and I’ll get to those in a minute but one of the main plus points here is that it’s a vastly entertaining read and, luckily, it’s really well written. Stan Lee’s personality and jokey trademark sense of aggrandizement shine through the pages right from the outset as it tells the tale of young Stan Leiber and his home life, growing up poor, and how he joined the company which, decades later, would become Marvel Comics. Also, how he took some time away in the middle of his job there to serve, in a capacity he probably didn’t expect, in the Second World War and of the various challenges of creating and editing some of the characters he’s come up with over the years.

And it’s really warm, fuzzy and lovely... some of it actually brought a tear to my eye... oh, lay off, I’m getting older and the tear ducts open up at the drop of a hat, these days, okay? Also, though, he did manage to surprise me a few times.

The structure is not completely linear, instead he opts to do what many good tale tellers do by highlighting things which lead in to one another and go together which could be many years apart. Obviously this helps to focus on the points being made... rather than completely doggedly following a straight route through the timeline. Lee also accentuates this necessity himself in the context of that structure and it gets him to places where he’s eventually talking to his younger self about his future. It’s pretty good in the way it does this...

... but that’s not what I meant by it managing to surprise me.

What I meant is that there are a few times in here where Stan The Man’s humour got the better of me by setting up a ‘story beat’ to follow a pattern of ‘monologuing’ he might have been using earlier in the strip and then, as you turn the page, pulling the rug out from under you... making you smile and also keeping you interested because you know you can’t always predict when his humour is going to kick in. Like the time he tells of his quick divorce and marriage (into one office for his future wife’s divorce and then into the next office to immediately get married) which had a nice little set up in the style of writing that when you turn the page... oh heck. I’m really not going to spoil it for you here.

Now this book is probably going to come under fire from some quarters, I’m guessing. I was expecting Stan to gloss over certain things and, I suppose, to an extent he does. He does, however give full page (and sometimes more) shout-outs to some of his co-creators over the years, the most famous (and possibly most troublesome in terms of whose side of the story you believe) being Steve Ditko and Jack ‘King’ Kirby. Now, as it happens, I don’t think Lee is trying to make light of any of the serious issues which became problems at certain stages in the history of the company... such as when Steve Ditko parts ways by becoming a ghostly, vanishing figure from his desk. The story about the big argument surrounding the identity of The Green Goblin is a well known one and I’ve certainly heard Stan tell it himself in various interviews... so I don’t think he’s particularly trying to hide anything here... he just doesn’t mention it again because it’s such a well known one, I suspect.

We’ll probably never get to hear about the full stories behind some of these problem issues where people became kind of casualties but one throwaway comment he makes about artists retaining their work and why he wasn’t able to do that did remind me of one thing... Stan Lee is not Marvel Comics. Sure, he is synonymous with them and he’s their mascot but... he is not always guilty for some of the mistakes made in the past. When you become a figurehead, though, sometimes you find yourself caught in the crossfire whether you like it or not. I’ve got no idea myself so I’m just going to shut up about these issues now... other than to say it certainly felt like Stan has done a good job here in giving people their due and there must have been some moments in this memoir (or autobiography as I like to call it), not just dealing with the day in and day out of Marvel, that must have been very painful for him to write and include. However, if you’re going to do a project like this, I think you have to realise there’s stuff you can’t leave out and, thankfully for us, Stan certainly seems to realise this too.

The artwork by Colleen Doran is amazing and when Stan talks about some of the comic books successes, we are presented with reproductions of the covers in question with Stan’s monologue continuing the story in little strategically placed boxes over them. It’s a nice touch, as are the pages which give you a fly on the wall perspective of the recording of the first Merry Marvel Marching Society record. Its great stuff actually and although I never had much of this kind of stuff at the time, it took me straight back to being a kid in the 1970s again because... well, Marvel were never shy on their self promotion were they? We all knew about this fan club stuff, even over here in the UK.

One thing I really would have liked to have seen, since Stan mentions his rivals DC a fair few times, is the inclusion of what was, when I was a kid, one of the most stupendous publications around. The first teaming up of Marvel and DC heroes in the Giant Sized Treasury Edition of Spider-Man VS Superman is not mentioned here... and it’s a shame because I used to love laying that big tome out on the floor as a kid and pouring over the words and pictures as Lois Lane and Mary Jane Watson got themselves into trouble.

The other thing I would have liked more of is actually dates put to incidents. You kind of have to guess a lot about when things were happening and reference your own knowledge of when certain incidents might have slotted into history... so there’s a possibility some readers may have trouble keeping up in certain areas, I think. Especially when, as I said, the narrative structure tends to hop around a bit in terms of the time frame. It doesn’t make the narrative any less compelling, though, so it’s not something that should stop anyone from picking it up.

These minor quibbles aside, I have to say that Amazing Fantastic Incredible is one of the more entertaining books I’ve read in a while and is... exactly what the title says it is. It's also a lovely homage.. or self homage... to one of comic book fandom’s greatly loved figureheads which even takes us right up to date with his cameo appearance in Avengers: Age Of Ultron earlier in the year. A nice thing to own and done in a medium which really captures the spirit of the man... or at the very least the spirit of his public persona. Greatly enjoyed and recommended by this reader, at any rate. What more is there to say?

Excelsior.