SHOCK HORROR SUPERHERO DIES OF CANCER

It's a given in the comic book reading world that superheroes just go on and on and usually end up recycled, re-imaged, revamped or in Hollywood.

The artist and writer here, Jim Starlin, apparently got some form of agreement with the suits running Marvel Comics that dead really did mean dead this time round for Captain Marvel. To be honest the character never really did make the big time comic book or comic sales wise. Maybe words like metamorphosis in the title of some of his adventures might just have put some readers off. (It didn't in my case but you already new that didn't you!)

But cancer takes it's toll and Captain Marvel exits stage left, chased by a shrinking audience.

Going back to that Hollywood thing for a moment, if you look at the cover and Captain Marvel is surrounded by superheroes, with the exception of Thor, have had either a TV series or a movie or, in the case of the Hulk, both.

I feel they all walked over the good Captain's corpse to get there too.

If it's got staples it a comic book, if its got oils its a painting

I've wandered round the London's Tate, National and Portrait, admired the paintings these institutions house. But I guess this oil painting on canvas, by Frank Frazetta would never hang in any of those fine places.

It meets all the criteria though, oh except it's on a comic book. And there it's just for kids after all. But no, not really, take all the text away and what do you know, a master piece, worthy of acclaim and admiration. But it's all those things anyway with or without it debuting on a Warren Publication, covering the comic book stories on the inside pages.

Eerie was a mid 1960's comic book magazine, ceasing publication in 1983, with black and white art and short, non-superhero, stories. Predominately horror/fantasy with some science fiction; although these ratios would change as time went by. Frazetta would grace Eerie's covers in early days and those of its sister magazine, Creepy.

The cover deserves to be hung in a gallery, side by side, with all the other masters. Don't you think?

Now the drugs don't work they just make you feel worse

Although this cover has seen better days it still stands as a landmark in comic book publishing, a radical departure from the usual spandex and capes fisty-cuffs that have blighted the genre and allowed non comic readers to consign it to simply kids stuff.

That it came out of DC, a somewhat conservative publisher, at the time, is quite astonishing. Marvel where the perceived 'up-starts' and more likely to push the genre. But no, stuffy old DC let rip in 1971 with this tale of drug abuse and death set in the once comfortable world of superheroes. Credit goes to the books editor Julius Schwartz, writer Denny O'Neil and art team of Neal Adams and Dick Giordano for the realism and not shying away from the issues.

The times were certainly a changing, as the 70's progressed, for comic books to break cover from there boundaries as kids things into a bigger and wider world.

Just before I go though, there are only three comic books framed and hanging in our house at the moment and this is one of them. Social history doesn't get any more marked than this.

Satana - The Devil's Daughter

When comic book writers in the 70s said adult themes the majority really meant sexism. Hence this atypical cover from the mid 1970's. The artist, Bob Larkin, is a talented draftsman and delivers this 'money shot' with aplomb. It's an effective job, making sure teenage boys (like myself at the time) brought the comic this cover graced.

I've always liked the cover, call it a guilty pleasure.......and in these PC days you must. But I like the power it suggests, as well as the obvious fear in the rapidly melting male character that owning a penis might not be the be all and end all of sexual power.

It looks like he's for the chop! In which case, over to Freud!