This was the first Marvel Annual I bought, Fantastic Four Annual #3, 1965. I had only been reading Marvel for a few months by this time, so seeing all these characters in one story was quite a revelation to young Hoy. It also was my first comic book wedding, quite a change from the Superman/Lois Lane stories I'd been reading up to this time.
Amazing Spider-Man Annual in 1965 also was an eye-opener for me. I hadn't been buying Strange Tales, so Doctor Strange was new to me, and I immediately became a fan. That parting line, "And may your amulet never tickle" had be rolling on the floor for some reason.
Thor got an annual in 1965, or rather, Journey Into Mystery did, but it was really Thor. Hercules entered the Marvel Universe in a great nothing-but-battle story, and there were four early reprints I didn't like as much.
Sgt. Fury got his first annual in 1965. I had been buying a few of the regular series off and on, so I knew the characters. This was the first time I'd found out that the U.S. had fought a war in Korea. The reprints drawn by Jack Kirby were great.
Marvel's fourth annual for 1965 was Marvel Tales, which pretty much wrapped up the origins of the original Marvel characters, with the exception of the still-new Daredevil. This may have been the first time I had ever seen Ant-Man (who became my favorite) and Iron Man's original armor.
A year later, in 1966, Marvel was still surprising me. I'd read some of the original Human Torch reprints in Fantasy Masterpieces, but I never expected to see him in the "present" because Johnny Storm was around. I loved this story. Bonus: the Hulk vs. Thing battle that everyone remembers. I'd never seen it before.
Next was Amazing Spider-Man annual #3 in 1966, the first not by Ditko, but it did have the Avengers and a fight with the Hulk. The two Doc Ock reprints in the back were new to me, and I learned to love early-Ditko on the strip.
Thor got his first "official" annual with #2 in 1966, this time featuring the Destroyer. It was another fight fight fight issue, but I remember really liking it because the Destroyer seemed like a really tough foe. I liked the Enchantress and Executioner reprint, and "The Mad Merlin" was the first story I'd seen featuring a mutant outside of The X-Men.
Sgt. Fury got his second annual in 1966. It was a great story about the Howlers joining the battle of D-Day, and this was my first exposure to that important battle. I wonder if the title was really that popular to support an annual, or whether Stan wanted to give Dick Ayers more to draw.
Marvel Tales had become a regular reprint title in the previous year, so 1966 brought us the Marvel Super-Heroes one-shot. Daredevil had been around long enough to get his origin reprinted, and the annual-less Avengers got their second story reprinted, but it was the third feature that made this one outstanding. Following up on the original Torch's appearance in FF Annual #4, we got a great Torch/Sub-Mariner battle reprint. Wow. This was great stuff.
More later.
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Hoy, where are you getting all of these great images? It's a great walk down memory lane here!
Unfortunately, though i saw a few of these on the spinner rack at the time, I didn't buy ANY of them. It was the next year that I realized what Annuals were, and by then, it was too late for most of these, although they would show up on yard sales, and in dime boxes at local family grocery stores from time to time. And coverless too!
Thanks Hoy! Even at this point, it's easy to see the excitement that seeing those each summer could produce, especially for new readers coming along who weren't familiar with the existing history, even if there wasn't a huge amount.
Kirk, no doubt he gets them from the Grand Comic Book Database (GCD; www.comics.org). They have the largest stock of low-resolution comics images of anywhere. Most of the time we use those, even though we seldom credit them. They're a good size for posting here and usually uniform, so they're ideal.
It's fun just to call up a title and look at the cover gallery, which shows 50 comics per page. I use those frequently when I want to find a comic but have no idea of the number.
-- MSA
One thing that struck me when I saw that second Sgt. Fury Annual, besides the large block letters "D-DAY"...was the strange image of carrying a padded coffin... that doesn't occur in Sgt. Fury, but comes from Nick Fury, Agent of SHEILD!
Maybe this makes sense if you've been reading both series..or that you've read some hype for the new vision of Fury and SHEILD. But for the un-initiated, It made no sense. Why was this survivor of WWII and D-Day being carried in a coffin??!!
I;d love to use those graphics as inserts, but I'm only familiar with linking to the covers...How does one insert the image in the text? Thanks.
The coffin copy indicates it's the origin of SHIELD, so that should get readers interested. There could be readers who only want WWII stories, rather than Fury through the ages, but I doubt there were too many WWII fans who were upset to get a "superhero" story.
To post pix, you have to upload them to the site. So you go to the GCD, right-click to get Save Image, save it to your computer, and then click on the icon above the message box here when you reply to a message (second from the left) that says Image. You can then upload it and choose the size (usually 400 works well, but sometimes I use smaller sizes).
It's more trouble, but it's also way more impressive to inset photos rather than links, if only because not everyone will click on the link, and sometimes they don't work. So it encourages readership and responses.
The covers are low-res and don't take up much computer space, and you can always delete them again once they're uploaded if you want. But I find I often have another use for one, so I keep them around. In fact, I occasionally use them as my screen saver, and as they come up, I think, "oh yeah, I've got that one because we had THAT discussion."
Needless to say, a few covers show up so often that I think everyone has a copy of them, and probably has a macro to copy it onto the page without much effort. It certainly seems that way.
-- MSA
This is the first giant-sized comic book I ever bought, back in the glorious Bat-summer of 1966. It's still one of my all-time favorite comics... how can you beat a comic book that includes "The Joker Batman," "The Rainbow Batman," "Batman Jr and Robin Sr" and "The Robot Batman" plus a couple other cool stories, too? These 80-Pagers were the only place I ever found Batman stories as cool as the stuff they showed on TV; the Moldoff and Infantino stories in the regular comics were too ho-hum for me.
The first comic I can document that I read--because I still have it and everything before it looks unfamiliar and everything after it looks familiar--is Superman Annual #4 in Winter 1961.
That's a good indication of how much older I am than Dave. It brings a tear to my eye every time I think about how many good comics he missed for being so darn young.
That's also the reason that I've always been a big fan of Al Plastino's Superman, one of the few who ever bring him up. His Superman looks 'right,' along with Boring and (mostly) Swan's, because his was the first one I ever saw.
All those stories for just a quarter was a pretty good deal. Those were great packages and introduced a lot of kids to comics history, as did the later 100-Pagers.
BTW, Kirk, I misspoke--I usually find the 300 size on posting graphics works best. I like the size on my computer screen, whereas the 400 size is a little big, and I can't see it as easily on the screen, but that's just me. Dave's is at 400.
-- MSA
Thank you for the help, Mr. S.A. Unfortunately, my boss frowns upon our using our computers at work for personal fun, and so loading an image onto them is asking for trouble...however, a quick call-up of a website is never noticed, and a fast typing of a response or two is looked upon as a coffee break. But maybe I'll try it soon... we'll have to see.
I think I saw the story of the rainbow batman before, but I can't recall the plot twist that solves it. Do we need a spoiler alert so someone can tell?
I know some people access the site from work or from the library, so it's tougher. You can always download them to a flash drive and reupload them, or download them to a folder and then just delete it when they're on the site. But that does take a little longer to do than cutting and pasting a link. But it's also a lot cooler.
It's hard to spoil a story that flimsy; it was one of the weaker reasons Batman decided to dress up. I did a column on it some time back, and you can read about it here, along with some of his other fashion faux pas:
http://www.cbgxtra.com/columnists/craig-shutt-ask-mr-silver-age/the...
-- MSA
Ah yes, I thought it sounded familiar. I recall the reason now, as well...and it's just as well that I didn't want to blurt it out as a spoiler, too! I had read your earlier column after all.
I'm pretty sure that I must have seen that 80 page Giant Batman with the go=go checks across the top in the summer of 1966. That's about where I was starting to shop for comics and saw that FF #55 had just gone on sale...and was (gasp!) an on-going series that was currently being written and published! (Prior to that I thought all comics were forever in print, like in a library or the Nancy Drew series of books...always available from a bookseller somewhere. Imagine my surprise when I saw a NEW Silver Surfer story in #55 show up, when I owned #49-50 from a white elephant school carnival sale earlier in the summer!
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