In
rereading mid-sixties Marvels, occasionally you might look over the
list of Merry Marvel Marching Society members in each issue to see if there are any names
you recognize with hindsight. For instance, I see Will Meugniot in
Strange Tales
143. And then I see a professional writer listed in
Strange Tales 148—under his fandom pseudonym (he used his real name on his books).
Ted Johnstone,
at the top of the rightmost column, is
actually
Man from U.N.C.L.E.
tie-in writer David McDaniel. So it's appropriate that his listing
appears in the book featuring Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
When
ST
148 (Sept/66) went to press McDaniel's first novel,
The
Dagger
Affair, had been on the stands
for about half a year and his second,
The
Vampire Affair, was just coming
out from Ace Books. It was in his novels, not on the TV show,
that the secret history of THRUSH was revealed and in fact its full
name: the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and
the Subjugation of Humanity.
(I didn't have to look that up any more than I would the
United Network Command for Law and Enforcement,
The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves, or Supreme
Headquarters, International Espionage Law-Enforcement Division, but I
can't get any further on SHIELD's gritty, with-it, "up-to-date" new
name [twenty years now?] than Strategic Homeland blah blah
blah blah.)
In the U.N.C.L.E. novel that McDaniel wrote to end the series but that
Ace
declined to publish in 1971,
The
Final Affair, one character, a
motorcycle gang member, is nicknamed The Thing and shouts "It's
clobberin' time!" And at one point Mr. Waverly refers to THRUSH as
"that Hydra-headed bird."
