With the latest Bond film, Spectre, in theaters, and considering I’ve been writing about 50-year-old things this year, it’s a good time to take a look at 007’s battles with SPECTRE a half-century ago in a film billed as “The…
Help!, the Beatles’ second motion picture, arrived in American theaters fifty years ago this month. Like its predecessor A Hard Day’s Night, it was directed by Richard Lester and featured a number of new songs, a frantic pace and screwball…
Superman’s one-time supremacy on the newsstands meant that by 1965, girl reporter Lois Lane was well-established as the first (and I think, still only) character to headline a comic by virtue of being the girlfriend of a superhero. Given that…
Fifty years ago this month, the world met Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. Okay, so technically we’d already met Nick a couple years earlier as a tough-as-nails three-striper in “Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos,” but that book was set in…
It’s hard to believe I share a birth year with Emma Peel, but that’s probably because I made my 1965 debut as an infant, while Emma showed up fully grown. And rather nicely so, at that. For the uninitiated, Mrs Emma…
To my eye, there’s little if any difference between Marvel and DC Comics today, but in 1965 the difference was fairly pronounced. Two books on the stands in April of that year, DC’s Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen and Marvel’s Tales Of…
If you were a kid in the 70s’s, you might have seen a TV show called Space: 1999. If you weren’t, it’s likely you never heard of it. It was dark and gloomy and generally slow-moving, with two stars who managed…
Even though I wouldn’t lay eyes on it until it was reprinted in the early 70s, the bizarre tale of the Super-Moby Dick of Space fist hit newsstands in March of 1965. When I finally did get around to reading it, it left…
Fifty years ago this month, fans of Marvel Comics’ Daredevil (assuming there were any) found a surprise on the cover of issue #7: a whole new look for the world’s greatest blind superhero courtesy of artist Wally Wood. Daredevil had…
Well, I guess it happens to all of us sooner or later (if we’re lucky): this is the year I hit the big 5-0. No doubt the AARP literature is already on its way to my mailbox. Rather than count…
