Ken Aldred

Very frustrating and tedious. No wonder Lancashire Kitchens stopped posting. A sad loss of a highly-valued, talented and respected board member.

Sadly missed. For me, that short period was the Golden Age of the boards.

I wonder how common this was? Exactly the same for me, except that no convincing was necessary, as, after going to the market, my mother and gran would bribe me with some comics money to go away and leave them in peace while they went off to have a coffee.

It's okay. It happened years ago. I've worked through the trauma, especially the way those Marvel Comics were horribly violated. I can handle it now.

I prefer a nice-looking, detailed, finished commission on a blank cover to the alternative of defacing printed artwork on a cover, classic issue or not, with a basic-looking 'remark' sketch primitively scribbled on with a marker pen.

I can empathise with your plight here. My parents adopted a sheepdog when I was four years old and, at Christmas, two years in a row, the pup chewed on my Marvel Comics Annual presents (UK hardcover reprint collections) and, to add to the canine's cuteness factor, took an overnight dump on them as well. A magical, fondly-remembered time for me in comics.

I'd certainly like to see a collection of his best Warren magazine artwork. I really do hope the originals still exist and that such a project is actually feasible.

That would be quite something. Absolutely perfect for an Artist’s Edition.

Posted this over in General, but a Silver Age thread for this great artist deserves some of his excellent black-and-white Warren magazine work...

Surprised that no-one's posted examples of Ditko's excellent black-and-white artwork from the early Warren magazines...

I've said it before, but Ditko + Russell was a great combination for Rom.

I wonder if it'll be toned down, or if they'll keep in the violence and gore which becomes prevalent in the later issues? For me, more extreme than The Walking Dead. Nonetheless, a great comic book series.

You're lucky there. I only have the trade paperback version. It's great. I found it the very first time I went to Manchester to look for comic books as a kid, moving away from being restricted just to patchily-distributed pence copy Marvels and DCs to finding out where comic marts were being held and, consequently, to a greater availability of back issues and imports. A key point in my development as a collector, and a very fond memory, around the same time as I first saw Ellison's Outer Limits episodes on BBC2 here, as well. I also have DC's 'Demon With A Glass Hand' comics adaptation by Marshall Rogers, which is a great read too.

The effects in that Dr Strange film were just brilliant, weren’t they? I bet they couldn’t come up with something that inventive in those comic books.

The 40s New York street scenes in Marvel Studios' Captain America film were shot here in Manchester, England, where, strangely, some of the early 20th century architecture was a very good match.

I’ve just been reading the Steve Ditko Archives Vol 1 : Strange Suspense this week. Tremendous range; horror, crime, science-fiction, super-hero, excelling at capturing the ‘man in the street’ as you'd often notice in Spider-Man, whether it was Peter Parker with his high school friends, at The Bugle, or at home with Aunt May, contrasting with Kirby's more OTT style elsewhere. Great imagination as well, as I can see in the 50s collection mentioned above, in his Marvel pre-hero stories, and especially in Dr Strange’s other-dimensional surreality. A very sad loss of one of the greats.

I didn't realise that those were bears. I only ever had a cursory glance at the image from a distance, feeling no inclination to pinch magnify it for a closer inspection. Given their location, I'd always assumed that they were cows; a pair of milkers on his pecs rather than a couple of bears.

Back in the early 90s, I used to combine my order with that of a collector friend living near me, here in the UK. We'd bought everything we needed from the cheap Specials section, and found that there were too many out-of-stocks on the regular items we'd tried to get. After deducting some credit notes from our last Specials orders, and noticing that the grading on the older books from the main list was somewhat patchy, we were left with a few dollars that we'd never get around to using on the non-Specials listings, and it was time to bring it to a close, before the credit accumulated more significantly.

Yup. One of the three greatest horror comic artists of all time for me ; Ingels, Wrightson, Corben.

One of the best. The first Outer Limits episode I saw as a kid back in the late 70s, and the most significant episode in that series for me. Not a bad place to start.

1993 was the last time for me. Too many out-of-stock items and credit notes, and before the more detailed and easily accessible website information. Patchy grading even then on older books.

Forgot about The Black Order- having read Infinity last year, as well. The films use characters or concepts from the comics and present them quite often in a simplified, commercialised manner rather than being literal transfers. They do tend to be mashups from different periods, such as GOTG having Yondu from the SA , and also Knowhere, which appeared in Nova during the Annihilation saga. It's more about how the eBay listings are misleading or exploitative of ignorance about what's in their SA books.

The Infinity Stones are Bronze Age, Thanos has more or less always been portrayed as a sociopathic nihilist, but, the core of the film, as you've said, is primarily very early 90s, starting with Thanos Quest and Infinity Gauntlet.

Yup. Easy to see the pitfalls if you've actually been reading this stuff for decades and have knowledge about where and when the ideas used in the film actually originate.