Juswuh

"Wank!" does actually sound like the noise a large metal disc would make when it hit something.

And if you thought the cover was bad, wait till you saw the insides.

Probably because it's a swipe from Kirby. See the splash page to FF #83.

That art looks very much like Steve Ditko??

So what if he did?

Ditko inked by anyone else isn't Ditko, to me anyway. He does so little art in the pencilling that either it comes out in the inker's style, or else the inker has to make an effort to finish it as fake-Ditko. (Better the first, I think. The second is totally pointless. When he gave up inking his own work-for-hire art he might as well have publicly announced that all that stuff was hack work.)

To be fair, it's not hard to find another copy of that book - is it? Doing that to a rare high grade book would be justification for manslaughter.

That cover's certainly better (earlier?) than what I've seen from Ramos before. Somewhere along the line he seems to have turned up the distortion into wilful, pointless ugliness.

Ditko. Everything that makes Spider-Man what he is was laid down in those stories. Ramos should not be in any poll that doesn't include the words "worst" or "ugliest".

That top logo is itself a change, an inept redrawing of the original FF logo - which like most of the Marvel SA logos has never been improved on by later versions.

I got that once for an auction of two large heavy hardcovers and felt I'd like to swipe the guy over the head with them.

Spidey Battles! - while the chorus line looks on!!!

Barry Smith's early stuff was a bit... uhh. He drew people as if their skulls were shaped like light bulbs. Going on topic: for sheer ugliness, nothing comes close to the Ramos covers. His art isn't just bad, it's physically disgusting.

For signing, I'd suggest Shield 4 or Strange Tales 167, both have got good bits of white space.

In the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davies, "Well he would say that, wouldn't he?"

I think a lot of "silent" comics feel ponderous, and pretentious. There's also an irony in certain books having their writers billed bigger than the artist and containing page after page with not a single word.

Musicians from more than one long-established band have said it isn't worth their time/money to put out a new album these days...

Not to mention the hacked-off expression on Robin's face - like, "Why am I working with these losers?"

Planet Of The Apes won the 1968 Oscar for best make-up. Arthur C. Clarke said he wondered if the judges thought 2001 used real apes.

Actually Kirby's original idea for the story was drastically altered by Stan Lee. Kirby intended the scientists of the "Beehive" to be good guys!

Got to own up I don't possess any OA myself! But it's a fascinating subject.

Afraid not. Several of the stamp images seem to me to be obviously copied from books published/dated 1965 - Marvel Girl, Loki with winged headband, Stan with hat, Shazana. And why do a stamp for a one-off Dr Strange villain and not Baron Mordo, who was by far his most-featured bad guy of the time? It suggests someone picking characters without really knowing anything about them, perhaps not even their names since several stamps are unlettered.

When there's a goal at Anfield you can hear it from here.

To me it looks as if someone in 1965 was given a handful of that month's Marvel comics and told to copy the faces - quite possibly someone who'd never seen any of the characters before. (Yeah, there was some crude artwork in early Marvel stories, but did anything as bad as that Dr Doom ever get into an actual book?) They also remind me of the ads for a Marvel board game which appeared in the comics a while later (early 1967?) which showed extremely amateurish pics of Giant-Man and the Wasp, among others.

Plenty of other artists, but not Ditko - he has actually turned down commissions, saying that he's only interested in producing work for publication.