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| Image copyright MARVEL COMICS |
STAN LEE's poor memory is well-known. One of the reasons he gave his characters alliterative names was to make them easier to remember, but even then, he sometimes slipped up. We all know about BOB BANNER instead of BRUCE (FF #25), and we also probably all know about PETER PALMER instead of PARKER (ASM #1), but I thought it would be interesting to show the latter error from a British printing in the POW! Annual for 1968. Just look at that awful colouring - a white THING, for crying out loud.
Strangely, the name had been corrected to Parker when the tale was printed earlier in Pow! #2 in January 1967, so why it got overlooked in the Annual (released August/September '67) is a bit of a mystery. Well, no it isn't - it's because of poor proof-reading on the part of the editor, but I was trying not to say so. (Failed.)
Sometimes I think I would've preferred Peter's surname being Palmer, so it's nice to see 'what might have been', captured in the pages of a British publication from the 1960s. Unless one happened to own ASM #1 (which I do), this little slice of history would probably have been unknown to U.K. readers until many years after-the-fact. Anyway, you may have heard of this slip-up before, but now you can actually see it for yourself.