#2: Super Spider-Man and the Titans, Issue 203 (1976)
When I mentioned last time (for object #1, the Corgi James Bond Lotus Esprit) that my parents were ‘enablers’ of my nerdy life, I’d almost forgotten an even earlier moment.
Set the wayback machine to the mid-1970s. Living in my favourite home in my small coastal town with my parents, I was about 7 years old and one Saturday morning my went with my dad to the local newsagents (one that is still there today!). I have a strange memory that the shopkeeper was someone called Mr. Jenner, and it was at this newsagents that my dad had a couple of standing orders. One for a morning paper - the typical tabloid that was full of cheap headlines, and one for an evening regional newspaper.
While there, I think dad was there to pay the monthly bill for the papers, and he said to me that I was allowed one weekly comic. We’d put it on the order, and it’d get delivered on Saturday with the morning paper. I had a look at the comics on offer, most of them were war titles or traditional British action comics. But one really stood out. It was the wrong way up, but had a bright cover with Spider-Man on the front. I’d heard about Spider-Man from when my grandfather had visited (with his wife - who preferred to go by ‘Aunt’ and their son who told me about Spider-Man - he was only a couple of years older than me).
So Spider-Man was the obvious choice.
In the UK, this comic was “Super Spider-Man and the Titans”. A cool landscape format comic that reproduced the US comics in black and white, two pages of the original comic per page. It meant that when you opened the comic, you got four pages in a spread, and they could reprint loads of storylines in each issue.
It wasn’t just Spider-Man in each issue. It included Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and Doctor Strange. I loved every darn issue of it. It was amazing. When Marvel decided to print their Essentials range - huge phonebook collections of the old comics in black and white - I had to get the Spider-Man ones, as they were how I remember them. And the black and white artwork was awesome.
It was where my love of Marvel started. It was just as things were getting really serious, and when they (spoilers) killed Gwen Stacey, I was shocked!
I even got to see the Spider-Man cartoon when we went to stay with my granddad in East London (the TV regions ‘up north’ didn’t show it). Just the one episode though, while I was visiting, I remember it had Rhino in it.
My love of this comic continued until, in a truly fickle way that kids are, something new came along. My dad stuck to his ‘one comic per week’ rule, and TV was becoming more interesting to me and I changed to reading Look-In - that strange British hybrid of comic and TV guide. But I soon learned that something bigger and better was out there. I was a week late, but starting with issue 2, I switched over to the powerhouse that was 2000AD… but that’s another story.
