THROWBACK THURSDAY: Monster Mag #2

Don't say I'm not a man of my word. Although it seems like only hours from when I 'promised' I'd scan the second issue of my childhood DIY comic from 1976, there was actually a three year gap between the two tasks!

Anyway, here it is... in all its badly drawn and misspelt glory.

Unfortunately, since I scanned the first issue back in 2020, the Sellotape that held the fragile pages of issue two together had lost its "stick" and as I picked it up and moved it to the scanner the pages came away in my hands.

Now, I hope I've scanned them all in the right order. The child-logic of my writing made the narrative a bit hard to follow, but I think I've got it.

Again, it's all about the chaotic adventures of my character, The Ray-Kid, teaming up with random Marvel characters such as Nick Fury, Dr Strange and Iron Man, while fighting The Hulk, a villain called Magno The Great (I suspect I was unsure about how to spell Magneto), and an assortment of horror film monsters, such as The Blob, Frankenstein's Monster, and The Mummy.

For some reason, the Marvel heroes, and I think Ray-Kid, are a team called The Inflans!

No, no clue, sorry...

For a more in-depth background on my self-published comic you need to jump back to the original post here.

I was certainly no budding Jack Kirby (although I was, unknowingly, influenced by his work in the British reprint titles of the time).

It's easy to see why, later on, one of my art teachers at Skinners' would describe me as "the most artistically inept pupil he'd ever taught", but I like to think the two issues of Monster Mag have an innocent charm about them.

Sadly (or maybe not) this was the last issue of this comic ever produced, even though it ends with the proclamation that the next would feature a "great comp", by which I guess I meant "competition", although I have no idea what the prize could possibly have been!

And everything ends with the most gripping of cliffhangers: "Will The Hulk Drop The Tank? Find Out Next Week..."

Now here are (finally, and hopefully in the right order) the two stories contained within Monster Mag #2 (cover date, sometime in early 1976) - When The Blob Hits, He Hits Hard and The Beginning of The End.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Monster Mag #1

I've finally got round to scanning in the first of my treasured self-made Monster Mag comics, written and drawn by yours truly when I was only nine.

Self-published, with a print run of one, I thought I had lost these treasures from 1976, so when I found them last year after we had moved I couldn't believe my good fortune.

Fragile homemade artefacts, held together with sellotape older than Rachel (honestly, she wasn't even born when I drew these comics), I carefully scanned issue one this week and cast a critical eye over my work.

I was clearly influenced by the oddly-shaped, art-distorting, black-and-white British reprint titles, such as The Titans, which explains the horizontal page orientation of Monster Mag, and quite possibly the prevalence of Marvel characters within its pages (Thor, Hulk, Doctor Strange, Nick Fury to name but a few).

These big hitters were mixed in with characters of my own creation, such as the delightfully cheesy Ray-Kid, who, without his protective helmet, found his entire head transformed into ball of energy.

The presence of several Universal monsters (the Wolf-man, Frankenstein's Monster, The Mummy, and the Invisible Man) also seems quite random, as I have no idea how I glommed on to them.

Perhaps I was watching those movies far earlier than I remember.

Given that I believe it was my gran who took me to see The Amazing Mr Blunden at the cinema around this time, and scarred me for life with a hypersenstive fear of dying in a house fire, it's quite possible that she was letting me watch Universal horror movies on her black-and-white TV as well (along with the Saturday afternoon wrestling that preceded Doctor Who).

I think it was also my gran who wrote the date (February 26, 1976) on a couple of the pages, because that's clearly not my handwriting, and I have a vague recollection that I drew these comics during a couple of my regular Saturday sleepovers at her house.

Please enjoy the dreadful drawing and appalling spelling of Monster Mag #1:

I, now, just have to scan in issue two...