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And now - what you've been waiting for - a gallery of covers from the Annuals for POW! and FANTASTIC, thereby completing the collection of some of the most highly sought-after yearly books from the '60s & '70s. As you can see, I've included the combined Wham! & Pow! tomes for 1973 & '74, but they're equally entitled to be here seeing as they're every bit as much Pow! Annuals as they are Wham! ones. (In name only of course, as neither of them reflected the contents of the weekly comics.)
So that's yer lot, as they say, as far as four of the five sometime POWER COMICS go. Sadly, there doesn't seem to have been a TERRIFIC Annual (unless you know different), presumably because it only lasted for 43 issues. Having said that, THUNDER only had 22 issues, yet it had three Annuals after its demise. Go figure!
I'll leave you now to get on with reliving yesteryear. Enjoy!
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| Someone seems to have forgotten why IRON MAN was also known as the 'Golden Avenger', though he did eventually acquire a crimson and silver suit for a while sometime in the mid- '80s |
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1969 Iron Man cover certainly raises the bar. Any ideas on who the artist might have been?
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year!
Ken.
Just for the record, I have a very clear memory of owning the 1970 Pow! annual and the 1969 and 1970 Fantastic annuals. I also remember having the 1970 Smash! annual which featured in your previous post, although none of the Wham! annuals rang a bell. It's possible I did have one or two of the others but I didn't keep them long enough for them to make a strong impression. The four that I mentioned I must have kept for years, although I'm fairly sure I don't have them any more.
ReplyDeleteKen, I don't know who painted it, but it's been copied (or most likely traced) from some internal panels in various Tales of Suspense issues. Most are originally Don Heck drawings, the bottom left one (from the reader's pov) is by Jack Kirby. The cover of the '68 book looks to have been traced from the splash page (by Jack Kirby) of Journey into Mystery. Again, no idea who the painter is.
ReplyDelete******
Do you wish you'd kept them now, Andrew, and why did you get rid of them after keeping them for so long? It's strange that out of the Wham!, Smash! and Pow! Annuals, only the latter contained any Marvel reprints, eh?
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Hope you both had a great Christmas.
Thanks Kid! I'm sure the presence of Marvel reprints explains why I held onto the annuals, and the reason for eventually getting rid of them was simply lack of space. The older I get, the more stuff I accumulate, and so some things just have to go! I'm less bothered about having got rid of things like annuals than some of the comics I've let go over the years. I sometimes think I ought to sit down and write a list of everything I wish I still had!
ReplyDeleteIn my case, I think I'd hold onto the older stuff and get rid of the newer stuff, but that's difficult, too. To jettison something that's 40-odd years old, or something that's only 30-odd years old? Aye, there's the rub! Just a shame we couldn't have cupboards built on the Tardis principle, eh?
ReplyDeleteI'm not old enough to remember these but when I was about 11 or 12 I was at the village carnival (it was a fete but they called it a carnival) and I found an old annual featuring the Hulk which was a bit confusing as it wasn't a recognisable Marvel annual like MWOM - I suppose it must have been one of these Pow, Smash, Fantastic annuals. As I recall the Hulk story was a very early one.
ReplyDeleteThe Hulk was never published in any of these Annuals, CJ, but if it was in colour, it's likely to have been a Word Distributors' Marvel Annual from the late '60s or very early '70s (before MWOM). If so, there's a picture of it on the blog somewhere.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, the Annual for MWOM was simply called Marvel Annual for the first few years. It wasn't named after the comic until around 1977 - so, depending on what year you're talking about, it might have been one of the early ones.
I did have the first UK Marvel annual, which only featured text stories, so my guess is an early ( MWO )M annual for the book Col saw.
DeleteI've shown them all before I think, JP, with the possible exception of Pow! #1. Once I've unpacked it, I'll scan it and show all five comics together in the one post.
ReplyDeleteCheers Kid, they all belong together.
DeleteOut of the above the only one I had was the Fantastic '68, regrettably sold in '80 with my Power comics ( sob ).
Remind me, which year Pow annual had all those UK heroes in it?
It was the 1971 Pow! Annual, JP - released near the end of 1970 (August or September).
ReplyDeleteThere was another WD Annual 'though, which featured Marvel reprints (mainly sourced from Marvel Tales.) It had the Hulk meets the Gladiator from Outer Space story in it.