WANTED: DEAD Or ALIVE - BATMAN! FAVOURITE COMICS Of The PAST - PART FOURTEEN...

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As I've said many times before, comics are the next best thing to diaries and photographs (in fact, sometimes they're better), because they somehow manage to evoke specific moments in our pasts in an almost tangible way.  Very often, I've been so buried in a back issue that I'm surprised when I look up from its pages to find I'm not still in the house (or the time) I lived in when I first read it.

Take BATMAN #201 for example.  This was yet another comic purchased from CORSON'S (which, at the time of typing, still exists*) back in the latter half of '72, not long after we'd moved into our new house.  I remember buying it early evening, and arriving home to discover that friends of my parents were visiting.  I sat at the dining table in the living-room, and set about re-creating the splash page on a piece of blank paper.  That table was given away some years later, but it still exists in the fabled land of memory whenever I recall that golden evening of so very long ago.  (*Update: Not any more, alas, 7 or 8 years later.)

That's the great thing about comics; they're a gateway into an earlier time and place - a means by which we can relive the past for however brief an instant, through the images on the page and even the smell that emanates from the paper - re-creating long-vanished moments from another era which we can experience again and again whenever the fancy takes us.

Somehow I doubt that perusing comics on the Internet or on an iPad is an experience that'll easily lend itself to the same kind (or degree) of nostalgic and sentimental wallowing in which an actual published paper periodical allows readers to indulge.  And to think they call it 'progress'.  I know what I call it, and I very much doubt I'm the only one.

However, let's suppress our sadness, and enjoy these pages from a period when the demise of printed comics was still a very long way off.  Hopefully, that fate isn't as imminent as it now appears to be.

STREWTH! Is He MAN Or LINK? Or... Is He BOTH? (PART EIGHT)

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It was with the eighth instalment in FANTASTIC #8 that The MISSING LINK changed direction and stepped up a gear.  With the 'hulking' Link now transformed into a human, the strip started to evolve into a bona fide superhero series, though it would take several more episodes before this became apparent.  If you weren't around in the '60s to savour this strip the first time out, ahead of you lies the thrill of joyous discovery, as this blog re-presents - in chronological order - all fifty-one episodes of this classic from yesteryear.  And, if you behave yourselves, I might throw in the full-colour tale from FANTASTIC ANNUAL 1969.  No, don't applaud - just put a cheque in the post!

For Part Nine, click here.  For Part Seven, click here.