Smurfs figurines. I come across these damned things everywhere in my attic. The whole floor consists of Smurfs figurines. I had so many of them. Even now, after all these years, sometimes when I sneeze a Smurf comes out.
I used to believe that the Smurf on the left, the golden one, was worth a lot of money. It wasn’t.
These comics hadn’t seen a human face for nearly three decades when I upturned the box this afternoon. The instant I saw these covers again, I remembered them like yesterday (there, the first cliché is in the can). They look remarkably well, considering they’ve been taken to the beach, the swimming pool, to the coal cellar whenever I was locked up there by my parents for having “girly manners”, to family, and to everywhere really. I always took my stuff along with me like a hobo. Let’s pick one comic and see what we have, shall we.
It’s a Prince/Michael Jackson hybrid on a motorcycle, called “Ace”. This was the time of street gangs, graffiti, flashing blades, ghetto blasters. And it’s everywhere in these old Marvel comics, isn’t it. You can’t cross a street without running into some young thug with a headband and a knife.
This street fetish is one of the forgotten themes of the early 80s. The streets, back then, meant danger. It was evident in music videos (Billie Jean, Beat It), films, TV shows, comics, computer games… I developed severe Agoraphobia because of this. But I guess it reflected the times. This was when Times Square (NYC) was a sleazy place with cheap cinemas, crack dealers, prostitution, high crime. And it wasn’t just New York, it was like that in all the big Western cities (Amsterdam, where I live, London, Paris, et cetera). Then in the 90s, almost all of them were cleaned up and turned into homogenous shopping zones. But of course they weren’t really cleaned up: as it so often goes, the problems were simply shooed away to another area, outside of the city center.
This is typical Marvel Bronze Age, I think. A sudden, short burst of introspection in the middle of all the dynamic fight scenes. Several faces strung together against a sort of nebulous, otherworldly background. In this case it’s… Well, I recognize Hulk, Dr. Strange, and, top left, Valkyrie. The others I don’t remember. It has been a while.
Right, Hulk. Good old Hulk. Let’s talk a bit about Hulk next time.
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