Saturday, April 22, 2017

Neal Adams, Batman and the Beatles - a Tip Top opportunity!

As a self-avowed - some may say unreconstructed - Beatles-nut, one of my enduring disappointments with my beloved K.G. Murray comics is that they didn't manage to publish this cover on an issue of Tip Top Comic Monthly:


Batman #222 featured the Batman and Robin story "Dead...till Proven Alive!" which referenced the Paul is Dead urban myth of the late 60's. Not only that but the cover was drawn by Neal Adams at the peak of his Batman stint. In other words, a perfect storm of personal obsessions. A K.G. Murray edition would have capped the quadrella!

Of course, the story did appear locally, albeit hidden in the back of Mighty Comic #89.

And there was some minor compensation - the cover was cropped and adapted in the service of an inhouse advertisement for Batman comics in the Planet Comics era:


Hmmm... moreso a tease and a reminder of a lost opportunity rather than compensation...

3 comments:

Mark Cannon said...

Yes, I remember reading it in that issue of Mighty Comic back in 1972- and being quite pleased with myself that I got all the Beatles / "Paul is Dead" references! Hey, I w as a smug... young music nerd...

Perhaps that's why KGM didn't cover feature the story - maybe they thought it was a little too subtle in those early post-Beatle times?

Mark Cannon said...

A further thought: isn't it odd that instead of using any of the multitude of available action shots of Batman & Robin, KGM composed a house advertisement featuring the Dynamic Duo looking like a couple of stunned mullets? Ah, K G Murray - sometimes you had a logic known only to yourselves!

spiros xenos said...

Ain't that the truth! And it's not even the 'weirdest' Batman one!

I promise to post on some more of these in-house advertisements - their sources especially. I know some years ago we identified quite a few of them, but I didn't keep notes, so I've asked James to send me a link to some he has on file, trusting he has most of them identified.