MORRISON MONDAYS!
By BILL MORRISON
When I was around 11 years old, there was a head shop in my hometown of Lincoln Park, Michigan, named The Poster Pit. This hippie mecca had a large variety of posters for sale, from blowups of black-and-white movie stills of Dracula and Humphrey Bogart, to pictures of grandmas smoking weed and cats hanging in there (baby!), to peace and ecology symbols. But the best ones were in a small, dark room, lit by an ultra-violet light.
I don’t recall the occasion of my first visit to the store, but I do remember that I was instantly hooked on the glowing, fluorescent posters in that little room, and I began to decorate the walls of my bedroom with them. On my 12th birthday, I received my first black light, along with a fluorescent poster of the Roadrunner and a psychedelic lamp that projected swirling optical designs on my bedroom walls.
On one visit to the head shop I discovered something new and awesome! Amid the glowing graphics of Jimi Hendrix, Mr. Natural, and the Zigzag Man were several vibrant visuals that I couldn’t look away from. They were fluorescent images of Marvel superheroes!
I had always been a DC kid, mostly because A) I was crazy about Batman, and B) the bookstore where I got my comics carried pretty much everything but Marvel. I had seen Marvel characters on TV in the animated Saturday morning shows and the weekday afternoon syndicated Marvel Super Heroes cartoons by Grantray Lawrence Animation, but had never really read any of the comics. But one day I was given a short stack of Marvels from a friend of my sister and was just starting to get familiar with Spidey, Cap, Thor, Iron Man, etc., when I saw them in all their psychedelic glory on the walls of The Poster Pit!
The weekly allowance of a 12-year-old boy has to be split many ways, so between comics, model kits, trading cards, etc., there’s only so much left for wall décor (and only so much wall space) so I had a few of the Marvel posters by The Third Eye, but no hope of collecting all 24 of them. And as I became an adult, I sort of forgot about them.
However, in the early 1990s my passion for black-light posters was rekindled when I co-plotted (with Steve and Cindy Vance) and inked the third issue of Bongo’s Radioactive Man series, an homage to Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ Green Lantern/Green Arrow run. Two of my contributions to the plot were a new ally for the Atomic Avenger, the Black Partridge (a mashup of Black Canary and Shirley Jones’ character from The Partridge Family), and her alter ego’s place of business — here, we’re coming full circle — The Poster Pit!
That got me thinking about those Third Eye Marvel posters again, and I decided to put a want ad in the Comics Buyer’s Guide to see if I could add some more black-light beauties to the few I’d saved from my adolescence.
The ad paid off beyond my hopes when it was answered by a seller with a warehouse find of several original posters for $10 each! Needless to say, I jumped at that price and was able to come close to completing my collection with a single opening of my checkbook. I even bought multiples of some of the posters and gave them away as Christmas gifts! A few years later, Steve Vance was getting rid of some wall-hangings he’d saved from his teen years, and I inherited the two store display posters from him!
But a few were still missing from the collection, and as time passed and other collectors discovered them, they increased in value and became even harder to obtain. For a long time, I owned 23 of the regular posters, plus the two promo posters, and a complete set of the note cards, so I was missing only one poster. But very recently, I landed the black light white whale, the one poster that had eluded me for so many years, Gene Colan’s image of Mar-Vell from the cover of Captain Marvel #1.
So, now that I’ve collected them all, I sort of wish there’d been more. I miss the thrill of having that one missing item out there and wondering if and when I’ll ever find it. Maybe I should broaden my scope where Marvel is concerned and start collecting the 1960s toys and collectibles, and the Marvelmania items of the early ’70s!
Nah, I’m gonna stick. I’m good.
Still, Third Eye did make some cool Marvel black light puzzles… Hmmm…
While I decide what to do about this very First World problem, please enjoy my picks for the TOP 13 MARVEL THIRD EYE BLACK-LIGHT POSTERS, in no particular order:
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Let’s face it, they’re all great, so here are the posters that didn’t make the cut!
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Want more MORRISON MONDAYS? Come back next week! Want a commission? See below!
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MORE
— The Complete, Uncensored Truth Behind the Infamous DISNEY LITTLE MERMAID SCANDAL. Click here.
— THE RAMONES, FUTURAMA and a Classic Freaky 1950s Comic Book Ad. Click here.
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Eisner winner BILL MORRISON has been working in comics and publishing since 1993 when he co-founded Bongo Entertainment with Matt Groening, Cindy Vance and Steve Vance. At Bongo, and later as Executive Editor of Mad Magazine, he parodied the comics images he loved as a kid every chance he got. Not much has changed.
Bill is on Instagram (@atomicbattery) and Facebook (Bill Morrison/Atomic Battery Studios), and regularly takes commissions and sells published art through 4C Comics.
