Odhams Power Comics

[MacNimon]

In May 1966, Odhams - publishers of the Eagle comic – started printing Hulk stories in their Smash! title beginning with issue 16. Strangely they began running the stories from the second story, totally ignoring the origin issue. Smash! Was an anthology title which featured a mix of humour and adventure stories; below you can see the Hulk’s first regular appearance in a UK weekly title…



And as seen below, Thor even made it into the pages of The Eagle, at one point taking over Dan Dare’s old cover slot…



Over that same late 60s-early 70s period, a number of annuals were also produced, many by World Distributers.



It's possible that Marvel only provided b&w images to UK publishers because a number of interesting colouring mistakes were to occur over those few years…such as the following and one of the annual covers above

[MacNimon]

A few more Smash & Wham covers here, along with the very first non-USA created original Marvel strip featuring the Hulk, and a couple of Spidey pages from the later TV21.






Odhams Power Comics now, as the range came to be known...“Wham!” was first published in 1964 and was followed by “Smash!” in 1966 and “Pow!” in 1967. The original idea for “Wham” was to be a more modern version of DC Thompson’s Dandy and Beano, but in many ways it followed the same format as the Boy’s Papers of the time such as Lion, Tiger, Buster etc with a mixture of humourous and adventure stories. Soon however, black and white reprints of Marvel material began to appear...first, Wham! featured the Fantastic Four, then the Hulk appeared in Smash, and Pow! featured Sgt Fury and Spiderman.



Due to the much larger page size the artwork was cut and pasted into a different layout from the originals...

[Silver Age Fan]

Colouring errors could often be part of the charm, in retrospect. I recall an issue featuring red Fantastic Four costumes!

I also remember a DC story (can't recall the title, sorry) which featured Superman in a pink costume and Green Lantern's uniform was red rather than green.

I think at the time, it was a fun way to pretend the heroes had other versions of their costumes.

[llllllll]

Love those early Batman strips, they look like they're a similar tone to the Sixties TV series (I guess the TV series was based on the contempory comics).

Interesting to see there's a strip called Danger Mouse, doesn't look like it's any relation to the Danger Mouse us 80s kids know and love.

[bigwords]

Jul 5, 2011 18:37:15 GMT Silver Age Fan said:

I also remember a DC story (can't recall the title, sorry) which featured Superman in a pink costume and Green Lantern's uniform was red rather than green.

Sadly, that doesn't narrow it down much.

For the better part of the Superman Batman annuals (most likely the entire run) the stories were a mix of tone and B&W, and they rarely got things to a degree where it was actually impressive.

Oct 13, 2011 8:45:38 GMT llllllll said:

Love those early Batman strips, they look like they're a similar tone to the Sixties TV series (I guess the TV series was based on the contempory comics).

The 1968 annual from Atlas actually used a photograph of Batman raising the bomb aloft (from the film), so they were well aware that readers would have exposure to the show.