Dial B for Blog is doing a 16-day celebration of the Batman. One oddity of the success of the 1960s Batman series is that for awhile, the Dynamic Duo found themselves sharing cover space on teen mags with rock idols of the time like the Beatles and Herman's Hermits.
Mark Engblom reveals the story behind the Original Hulk. Kinda looks like an oversized Baron Zemo to me.
Avi Green has a must-read on heroes that become villains and why it's a terrible idea. I could not agree more with this:
That aside, what we have here is something I hadn't seen in discussion for awhile - the idea that heroes only become interesting when they're villains. This, in my mind, is cheap and degrading, but it also runs a considerable risk of making it hard for old and new audience members to apprieciate the older material when they're later being hit by the whole notion that these heroes of yore are suddenly becoming villains today.
That's not something that people had to deal with back in the Silver Age of comics; villains occasionally turned into heroes (Quicksilver, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye), but never the opposite. Well, almost never.
The Legion Omnicon catches a Silver Age reference to Spiderman in a Legion of Superheroes story. This kinda highlights a post I'm working on about the comic book wars of the 1960s.
