Friday, December 16, 2016
The Grooviest Covers of All Time: Toys in Comicland
Dig it, Groove-ophiles! Back in the Groovy Age, if you couldn't find the toy you still had a very good shot of picking up the comicbook adaptation! Did any of the toys that inspired these comics wind up under your tree? Captain Action--the Batman costume, tons of Hot Wheels, and some of the Microbots were snatched out from under mine!
One of the Shogun Warriors". Mazinga to be precise. I still have it standing in the corner on the top of a cabinet where i keep my music records. If i think about it, it is one of my few remaing toys from my childhood. And i am turning 50 next year in April.
ReplyDeleteGreetings from Germany.
The only tie-in that I recall liking was from the tail end of the Groovy Age was Atari Force. Garcia-Lopez did some nice work there,especially on Erin "Dart" Bia O'Rourke-Singh,yahoo!
ReplyDelete"Micronauts" was the only toy-related comic I bought, and I loved it. On the other hand, I was never inspired to buy even one toy from the line, so does that make the comic a success or a failure?
ReplyDeleteNotice how many of these titles are Marvel. The much maligned Jim Shooter was doing his best to expand the audience for comics.
ReplyDeleteYep! Had the Hot Wheels! Also a rubber Batman that I gifted to my little brother for a birthday and promptly started playing with when he unwrapped it, lol! We still laugh about it 45 years later.
ReplyDeleteHad Captain Action, Action Boy, and Dr. Evil. Also some of the alternate costumes: Superman, Captain America, the Lone Ranger, and the Phantom. And I had the first two issues of DC's comic.
ReplyDeleteNever had Hot Wheels (either the toys or the comics), but that cover looks familiar. I must have seen a house ad for it.
IIRC, the Captain Action figure had different costumes (sold separately) of different heroes, including Batman, Aquaman, Superman, Sgt. Fury, Spider-Man, Flash Gordon, Steve Canyon, and the Lone Ranger. I wonder if it was hard for the toy company to make licensing deals with all of those different copyright owners? (DC, Marvel, King Features, etc.)
ReplyDeleteDC's comic book had to use a different premise, of course. (Although Superman made a brief appearance in #1.) CA was an archaeologist who discovered magic coins that gave him the powers of the gods and heroes of mythology. The coins had been left by aliens who had visited Earth in ancient times. Of course, they were thought of as gods, and our myths and legends were based on them.
The comic may have been influenced by Erich Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods, which popularized the "ancient astronauts" theory in the late 1960's. But then, the idea had been used in science fiction long before that.
Check out this post... http://diversionsofthegroovykind.blogspot.com/2008/11/famous-first-fridays-captain-action.html
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ReplyDeleteLove the covers. Wish the Big Jim comic by John Buscema and Dave Hunt was in there, too.
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