More linking to the great Steve Donoghue: 

Epic Wednesdays: The World's Greatest Comic Magazine!

I've not been linking to these videos previously (I've only recently relaxed my own self-imposed rules on linking), but over the last several weeks, Steve Donoghue's been doing a whole series of these videos in which he goes through the classics from Stan Lee's Golden era at Marvel:

His video on early Spider-man HERE

His video on the early X-Men HERE

His video on early Avengers HERE

His video on early Thor HERE

His video on early Hulk HERE

His video on early Daredevil HERE

What makes these videos so interesting is first of all the usual things that always makes Steve Donoghue interesting--he's read absolutely everything, he remembers absolutely everything he reads, and he has strong opinions on everything he reads.

But more so than that, Steve Donoghue is a comic book fan, but he's a comic book fan who has very little awe or reverence for the early Stan Lee the way most comic book fans do nowadays, so it's refreshing to hear his take.

Nowadays most of the discourse is between either people who hate comic books and find them juvenile, or people who love comic books and worship Stan Lee.  So Donoghue's take is interesting.

But more so than that, Steve Donoghue is old enough to have actually been a comic book fan when all these early issues were coming out in the 1960s.  So he can talk about his memories of them at the time, and put them in context.

When I was studying at the University of Melbourne, the university library had the Essential Marvel volumes (W) on its shelves, and I read through much of them in an effort to destress myself in the evenings.

The first issues of the Fantastic Four (which Steve talks about in today's video), I found pretty much unreadable.  Which surprised me, because the early Fantastic Four issues have such a big place in today's comic book mythology.  (Accordingly to the mythology, these are supposedly the issues in which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby single-handedly invented the angsty superhero genre, and kicked off Marvel's Golden Age.)

So, I found myself making excuses for the comic.  "Well, it was, after all, written in a different time.  In the early 1960s, comic books were still written for children.  The narrative expectations were a lot less.  I'm sure it was groundbreaking stuff for its time..." et cetera.

So its fun to hear Steve Donoghue, who actually read these comics when they came out in the 1960s, rip into them for all their flaws.