On this episode, we discuss Tales to Astonish #35-37, which includes the first appearance of Hank Pym, the Astonishing Antman!
We also give our eulogy for Stan Lee (RIP) and discuss important events of October 1962—including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the release of the first James Bond film, Dr. No. Our theme song for this episode is The Monster Mash, by Bobby Pickett, the #1 hit of October 1962.
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You’re throwing me back into my childhood. I saw Dr. No with my dad when it came to the US. And then I read the book. And then I summarized it at length in my diary. But James Bond didn’t come out of nowhere. When Kennedy was elected president, it was widely reported that he was a James Bond fan. (In related news, JFK was also fascinated by the CIA and gave them far too much leeway, but that’s another story.) And there was definitely a spy genre before then, because I read a ton of spy novels around 1960, just before I got onto science fiction. But those were mostly pretty realistic and grim and cynical in a kind of film noir-ish way. James Bond was much pulpier and closer to the comic books you’ve been covering, with plenty of room for mad scientists and other outrageous stuff. And the movies just ran with that stuff, plus lots of sex and violence played for laughs. It was all very Swinging Sixties in a way that fit the dominant mood of those years, c. 1962-66, between the decline of the beatniks and the rise of the hippies.