DAREDEVIL, BENT METAL

This is what we love about Marvel in the seventies: Daredevil can meet Uri Geller and, after he insults him, they can team up to fight a villain called Mind Wave together. Simple.  

THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE KILLRAVEN

 

Unmann-Wittering used to read Killraven as a kid. He liked it, but never really understood the story, or the characters, or the dialogue, or what any of it meant. 

Nearly forty years later, confident that the intervening years had brought increased wisdom, perception and greater understanding, U-W had another try, with exactly the same results: total and utter incomprehension. 

Which is brilliant.

BECAUSE YOU DEMANDED IT

It’s no coincidence that an anagram of comics is ‘cosmic’. Actually, it is a coincidence, but factual accuracy isn’t important here. Marvel comics always wrung every possible nuance they could out of astral planes, other dimensions, bizarre dream worlds and parallel universes, especially when the psychedelic era dawned and people started contemplating the infinite and saying ‘wow’ a lot. Indeed, in the Marvel universe, the Age of Aquarius kept dawning up until around 1980, and that's pretty far out. 

Here, in a comic from 1977, Dracula meets Doctor Stephen Strange (along with The Silver Surfer, THE psychedelic hero of the era) in an explosion of mind expanding light, which, luckily, is arresting enough that the reader doesn’t immediately notice that, apart from slightly different costumes and a rather small horse, the adversaries look more or less identical. A moustache will do that for you.