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| Art by Neal Adams |
The past few days have been of the gloriously warm, sunny, summer kind that we imagine all our childhood summers to have been like, and as I stepped off the train from Glasgow early yesterday evening with The DEADLY HANDS Of KUNG FU #12 in my possession (bought from a back issue shop in the city), my mind drifted back to a similar gloriously warm, sunny, summer late afternoon of 36 years before, when - as a mere freckle-faced teenager - I'd first purchased my original copy of this black and white magazine.
I'd also obtained the very first MONSTER FUN Holiday Special on the same day. (IPC were quick off the mark with this one, as the weekly publication had only been out for a very short period - a matter of weeks, in fact.) I remember that it reprinted the initial SAM'S SPOOK strip by LEO BAXENDALE, which first appeared in SMASH! in Jan/Feb of 1971. It still sported the "starts today" blurb on the top left-hand side of the logo, no doubt the result of an editorial oversight as such blurbs were usually removed from out-of-sequence reprintings.
(NOTE: My memory of this was confirmed when, a week after typing the previous paragraph, I obtained a back issue of this comic also. I've inserted the cover and Sam strip above. Click to enlarge. Interestingly, the page had previously been resized into two for the Smash! Annual for 1975, issued towards the end of '74.)
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| Art by Rudy Nebres |
Back in 1975, a friend was with me when I bought these two publications, at some stage during a day out in Glasgow. On our return, I accompanied him (still clutching my precious comics) as he visited his sister's in-laws, who resided not too far from the house I'd lived in when Sam's Spook first made his debut, and from which my family had moved only three years before in 1972. (In fact, their house was the architectural double of my old one, so it was almost like revisiting my former home.) It's because of this that I associate both these comics with my previous neighbourhood just as much as with my then (and still) current one. Funny thing, memory, eh?
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| Art by George Perez, Rico Rival, and The Tribe |
I'd bought this ish mainly for The MAN With The GOLDEN GUN cover art and article, having seen (with the same friend) ROGER MOORE's second 007 movie not too long before. (It had its UK premiere on December 19th 1974, but my local cinema didn't screen it until sometime in '75.) Reading it again for the first time in nearly 40 years, I was surprised by how much of it I remembered - even down to actual paragraphs. The mag also had SHANG-CHI, MASTER Of KUNG FU and SONS Of The TIGER, with artwork by RUDY NEBRES and GEORGE PEREZ, plus a BOND pin-up by the great GRAY MORROW.
I often think back fondly to that particular summer day - and many another day from long ago also. (Perhaps I may even have warm recollections of yesterday in the years to come - I hope I've got at least another 50 ahead of me, optimistic as that may be.) Little did I then realize that my friendship with the pal I'd known since I was 7 would last barely another six years, but such is life - something to look forward to in blissful ignorance of what might happen, and to look back on in fond reminiscence (hopefully) of what did.
I hope all your summers turn out to be gloriously warm and sunny - even if only in memory.
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| Art by Gray Morrow |
4 comments:
I have very fond memories of the Don McGregor review in that issue in which he ripped The Man With The Golden Gun to shreds. It was the first Bond film I saw and was so bad that, along with seeing the even-worse Moonraker a few years later, ensured that I didn't watch another Bond film for many, many years.
I'm now a big fan of the series, though.
If anybody wants to read McGregor's review, it's available at http://the007dossier.com/007dossier/post/2012/10/05/The-Man-with-the-Golden-Gun-Shoots-Blanks
David Simpson
I have to confess that I enjoyed both the movies you mentioned when I first saw them, DS. I still quite enjoy them now, in fact.
Poignant as ever Kid. You have an amazing memory. So many details. Dates. names. places. I can hardly recall any details like that of my 59 years! Would you say you have a photographic memory if such a thing exists? Anyways, just wanted to say to the 2011 you thanks for Kung Fu memories and reminding me that I have the Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. Well, not me personally. I mean I have one if not two of these fabulous tomes in the loft. I was sent a Finnish version of TDHoKF as well last year by a friend. As Kwai Chang Caine would have said, I've started so I'll finnish!
I usually joke that I have a photographic mind - but it just hasn't 'developed' yet. No, not a photographic memory by any means, Woodsy, but for some strange reason, certain events impress themselves on me, though I've found myself, as I get older, struggling to recall little details that I once remembered so easily. (For example, precisely which newsagent's I got a particular comic from. Though I think that's maybe due to two or three shops being being laid out the same inside in relation to the spinner-racks.)
I think the key to having a good memory is that you have to exercise it from time-to-time; the more often you think back to specific events (starting not long after they happened), the better you'll remember them. Also, I've always lived in the past from a very young age, so perhaps that's why I recall a lot of stuff from my early days.
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