The Beatles in the comics.

Growing up in the 60's meant that you saw the Beatles in many publications not the least of which were comic books. I'm not going to talk about comics that were one shot issues that were produced specifically to feature the Beatles. Naturally the DC and Marvel romance comics would have an issue where the Beatles were mentioned as a back drop to some soap opera plot. In fact one of the harder romance comics to find in upper grade condition is "Girls' Romances" #109 from 1965. Beatlemania was in full swing with the Fabs on the cover which is drawn by Gene Colan. Colan went on to much greater heights as a fan favorite drawing superheroes "Daredevil", "Iron Man", "Sub-Mariner", "Dracula", and"Batman", and he does a nice rendering here of the Beatles on the cover.

The Beatles also made appearances in the mainstream silver age superhero comics which were usually quite amusing. Displaying the hipness that would eventually make Stan Lee and Marvel the number one comics company, "Strange Tales" #130, feature the Beatles in a March 1965 issue. The cover shows the Thing and the Human Torch hilariously wearing Beatle wigs. The Thing and The Human Torch are taking their girl friends to see a Beatles concert but have to leave the girls to go and defeat a villain. Bummer man. Stan Lee was definitely one cool cat.

Beating Marvel to the punch though was DC which published "The Red-Headed Beatle of 1,000 B.C." in the Sept 1964 issue of Jimmy Olsen. Jimmy travels back in time and puts on a show for the ancient teenagers with a Beatle haircut and a bongo. Superman being no square himself notes that Jimmy is as popular Ringo.

Obviously, DC felt that Jimmy Olsen being a young cub reporter was able to relate to kids who read comics and were also big Beatle fans. The Beatles are referenced again in "Jimmy Olsen" #88. Superman is doing a twist like shimmy while warbling "YAH YAH YAH".

The most entertaining of all the Beatles references in Superhero comics was in "Batman" #222. This issue has a cover date of June 1970 and came out just as the group was breaking up. The story written by Frank Robbins is a take off on the "Paul is dead" hoax that was perpetrated by a Detroit disc jockey but managed to capture the world's attention. Unlike Paul McCartney who was cut off from the world on his farm in Scotland, which only helped fuel the rumor, and who was innocently unaware of the firestorm; the leader of this comic's fictional band (who were drawn to resemble the Beatles) actually and purposefully planted clues that he was dead and replaced by a doppleganger.