Favourite comics: Batman issue 255

By 1974 I was well and truly a Neal Adams zombie, just seeing his name in print on any comic at this time just thrilled me. So when I came across the 100 page Batman issue 255 with that small, but perfectly composed and illustrated Neal Adams (and Nick Cardy) cover illustration I just had to have it. I mean Adam’s , Batman and a werewolf what more could any 14 year old boy want…….ok perhaps having Madeline Smith on the cover might just have made it a tiny bit better.

I had to add this amazing cover recreation (send to me by Baggsey) showing the Adams / Cardy cover by catspawdynamics as a full sized cover version.

The lead story “Moon Of The Wolf” by Len Wein and Neal Adams is a classic Batman tale featuring a mad doctor (Professor Milo) who treats Anthony Lupus (the name alone being a clue to his secret) a former professional athlete who suffers from severe headaches. Milo gives Lupus a serum to help stop his constant headaches, but instead, it causes him to turn into a werewolf during full moon nights. As it turned out this was to be Neal Adams' last work on the Batman comic for some time but it is one of his very best and I can still recall my excitement at seeing Adams rendition of the transformation of Anthony Lupus into a werewolf and his attack on Batman as he was chained up in a shipyard by Professor Milo. I lost my original copy of Batman 255 after a family house move around 1978 and it wasn’t until around 1987 when I saw another copy. On seeing the cover my mind went back to the first time I saw the three page fight scene below which I recalled almost perfectly some 12 years after first reading the comic.

This Batman100 page issue also had several reprints from earlier decades in the characters history including art by Jim Mooney, Carmine Infantino, Sid Greene and Jerry Robinson. However, the lead story is by far the best tale in this comic, so much so that the “Moon Of The Wolf “ story was later made into an episode of the excellent Batman animated series.

Favourite Toys: Action Man, chicken feet and the Mr Benn antique shop time machine

It’s true that most of us all-too-often struggle with attachment. We cling to people, places, and things like comic books and toys from our past for all sorts of reasons. Moving home especially our first home can be a truly emotional experience as we are leaving behind the home where we developed our first friendships, where we first went to school or where we played with our favourite childhood toys.

My family first moved into what was to be my first real home (pictured above as it looks today looking very run down ) when I was around 3 years old in 1963. Dubbed the “electric flats” we moved into the top floor of a newly built two storey maisonettes just outside Glasgow as part of the redevelopment of the city. It would be fair to say that I was lucky (not all kids were) I had an idyllic childhood with loving parents, a kind/fun brother and great friends living in an all mod cons new house in a time when it was encouraged for kids to simply be kids. Yet despite having had a great life for the 5 years that we stayed in that house I had almost no memory of the day I left my first home. Well, that was until around May this year when visiting a local antique market, I came across the above Action Man Ski Patrol outfit that was on sale in a ridiculously overpriced stall in the market.

The mind is a strange thing in how it makes connections to the past, as immediately upon seeing that ski patrol outfit and those Action man stars I was transported back to the living room of my maisonette home on Christmas day circa 1965 playing with my Action Man (actually it was a GI Joe that I had) decked out in his ski patrol outfit as he undertook a dangerous mission on our lamb’s wool rug (used to simulate snow) in front of our toasty 2 bar electric wall mounted fire. That memory then triggered a series of other half-forgotten events from that time including the day my pal Ronnie received a Johnny Seven toy gun for his birthday (I’m still jealous some 55 years later) and the time his cousin broke his arm while playing “dead man falls” trying to re-enact the effects of being hit by a German grenade. Stranger still, I had a vivid flashback to when a group of my pals and myself were playing round the back of some local shops and we came across a bag of chicken parts from the butchers. The bag contained some chicken talons (I know disgusting), but you can imagine the fun a group of 6-year-old boys had with that and the torment we must have put the poor girls thorough.

So, what has all this all to do with the memory of me leaving my first home, well in the same display case that housed the Action Man outfit was a small blue plastic cap rocket. I used to have loads of these as a kid but on seeing the blue rocket I had an almost instantaneous nano second flashback to the day when my pal Ronnie had given me a similar rocket as a going away present just as we were leaving our old house in my dad’s Ford Anglia to move to our new home. I can still see my dad’s car in my mind’s eye with the family all crammed in and carrying some items we hadn’t managed to put into the removal van and the sight of our neighbours and my pals waving us goodbye as folk did back then. Like Mr. Benn I plan to visit that antique market again very soon to see what items may trigger some other long forgotten memories.