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| The 1st issue of Smash! (February 1966) |
It lasted a total of 257 issues - and there would've been more if not for a printing strike lasting several weeks in 1970. It outlived companion titles like WHAM! (187 issues), POW! (86), FANTASTIC (89) and TERRIFIC (43), essentially becoming a "best of" repository for all of them - but only for about 6 months or thereabouts. Then it was out with the old and in with the new, and what would've been #163 became the first issue of the 'NEW' SMASH!, devoid of MARVEL reprints and more like traditional British boys comics like VALIANT and LION. (It's the 42nd anniversary of that relaunch on the 8th of this month, unless I'm very much mistaken.)
SMASH! was a superb comic, and the one in which I was first introduced to the FANTASTIC FOUR. When ODHAMS PRESS initially presented the awesome origin of the FF, they did so in WHAM! and SMASH! simultaneously - curiously (and erroneously) claiming exclusivity for each title at the conclusion of the first episode of the four-part tale. Would you like to read the next instalment of the quartet's dynamic debut adventure? You could only do so in the next issue of WHAM! - according to WHAM!, that is. If, however, you were reading SMASH!, it was claiming sole publishing rights for the next part of the story. Was this an intentional two-pronged promotion of the FF to double their readership potential, or a sudden emergency measure necessitated by the non-arrival of a regular strip for SMASH!? I guess only ALF, BART and COS know for certain - I sure don't.
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| Art by Jack Kirby & Vince Colletta |
When I later discovered that REED, BEN, SUSAN and JOHNNY were regularly appearing in WHAM! ("The COMIC With The FANTASTIC FOUR!"), I started buying that title too in order to feed my romantic infatuation with The INVISIBLE GIRL, though I continued to purchase SMASH! as well. Then POW! (after WHAM! was merged with it) and also FANTASTIC and TERRIFIC. It's somewhat ironic that SMASH!, having been the first 'POWER' periodical I read - and the one in which I first discovered Marvel's most famous family - was also the last title standing, as well as the comic in which the FF made their home for the last few months of their Odhams Press existence.
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| The 1st revamped issue (March 1969) |
As mentioned, the title was relaunched - in March 1969 - in a completely different format, featuring some stories originally intended for a comic called BLACKJACK, which, for reasons unknown (to me anyway) , was sadly never published. (CURSITOR DOOM, and - eventually - The PILLATER PERIL being but a couple of examples.) It lasted for 95 issues before being merged with VALIANT on 27th March, 1971 (issue dated 3rd April).
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| The Codemaster cards & envelope |
All things come to an end, alas - but SMASH! didn't quite die with the last issue of its regular weekly comic. Click here for the rest of the story.
Wasn't SMASH! great? Apart from everything else, the first Jack Kirby art I ever saw that literally HAUNTED me, waking me up in the night to look at it again was the large shot of The Hulk raging in an underground atominc bunker, pounding fruitlessly on the walls! I dipped in to many comics over the years (back when there were many comics to dip into) and though I enjoyed them all, only SMASH! and TV21 had me hooked. I tried to like the "IPC" SMASH!, I really did, and Bax's Swots & Blots did reach a lunatic peak early on, and Janus Stark was a great strip in anybody's book, but... I felt like IPC were trying to get me to like Valiant, and I never could or would.
ReplyDeleteAs you say, NP, SMASH! was a great comic and we could do with one like it now. In fact, ALL the POWER COMICS were great, although POW! wasn't quite as great as the others. This was because of the clumsy resizing of STEVE DITKO'S SPIDER-MAN artwork by someone who didn't quite know how to draw, but that's another subject.
ReplyDeleteThere was something about the colour covers of SMASH! (and WHAM!) that just reached out and grabbed the reader. I can't look at a copy of the comic without being transported to an earlier, better, era. I've actually got the first two bound ODHAMS PRESS file copies of SMASH!, plus the 1967 one for WHAM!.
Sorry as I was to see the Power Comics disappear, I must confess that I liked JANUS STARK and CURSITOR DOOM in the new SMASH!. I'll see if I can dig out that HULK page you're talking about and post it on my blog.