SON OF ORIGINS...

Copyright MARVEL COMICS

In 1975, FIRESIDE (Simon & Schuster) released the second of their MARVEL ORIGINS volumes, entitled SON Of ORIGINS Of MARVEL COMICS.  Sporting a fantastic cover by JOHN ROMITA Sr., the book was a major disappointment compared to its predecessor from the year before.  STAN LEE's text was as witty and sparkling as ever, but the book was let down by some of the worst reproduction of classic comics that it was possible to see.

I can only assume that some strips were sourced from foreign reprints, then had the original English lettering from published comics dropped in.  Significant areas of the art were obscured by over-sized, irregular balloon shapes, suggesting they'd been enlarged at some stage to accommodate more verbose dialogue, which is usually a feature when English-language comics are translated into another idiom.  (In a few instances, some speech balloons were left totally blank.)

DAREDEVIL #1 (below) seems to have utilised the proofs for its U.K. reprinting in The MIGHTY WORLD Of MARVEL #s 20 & 21, with cropped panels and the overuse of Letratone in quite a few places.  Other issues affected were X-MEN #1, AVENGERS #1, and SILVER SURFER #1, which were utterly appalling in their reproduction, rendering the intended 'archival' aspect of the book redundant.

Thankfully, not all stories were ruined in this way: TALES Of SUSPENSE #s 39 & 97, DAREDEVIL #47, STRANGE TALES #135, and "The WONDER Of The WATCHER!" back-up tale from SILVER SURFER #1 were more or less perfect, though IRON MAN's origin was taken from the reprint in MARVEL TALES #1 and featured a different final caption running along the bottom of the last page.

John Romita's cover is the book's main redeeming feature, and is arguably even better than the previous volume's.  One thing I do know  is this - whenever I cast my gaze upon it, I'm instantly transported 37 years into the past - when teenage hope was still aborning and dreams were not yet the stuff of nightmare.