I’m always encouraged when I hear about these discoveries: rare footage of the Beatles’ visit to the South West during a shoot for Magical Mystery Tour has been unearthed in the BBC library in Plymouth.

The present-day incarnation of (the 1960s) Marvel Comics is, I think beyond any argument, Stargate: SG1.

It’s reasonably evident that the primary characters contain remixed aspects of the main characters from the Fantastic Four:

O’Neill: Reed Richards (physically); Ben Grimm (personality)
Carter: Susan Richards (physically); Reed Richards (personality)
Teal’c: Ben Grimm (in physical presence); Norrin Radd? (personality)
Daniel Jackson: Not really a close match that comes to me; his character is more singular

In terms of continuity, recurring storylines, grandiosity, subtle threading, humour that reads as real, not hokey or forced… the show has Jack Kirby and Stan Lee written all over it. It nicely tackles the cosmic they way Kirby, Lee, Adams and later Starlin did. So I miss the books less every time I watch it, and the earlier series are eminently rewatchable in ways that Star Trek used to be before that show became an industry.

You might have since concluded that I’m an upper-tier Marvel Comics devotee, but I can’t really claim that since I never pursued reading all of the Silver Age books. The 1960s were key, but always expensive and out of reach. There was a lot of quality in the 1990s revival (in retrospect, curtain bows for Spider-Man and the X-Men), and they didn’t revive the Masterworks series until after I’d quit (and married, at which point the costs on my bank account, time and available storage made collecting impractical). After that, Marvel could no longer bear the ravages of time and insensitive, often clumsy writing (which artificially inflated the line in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s).

Certain fictional premises lend themselves to what they now call “reimagining”. I can buy Simon Templar in the 1960s and even the 1970s even though Leslie Charteris once objected that the Simon Templar he knew would have been an old man by then. Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, never belongs outside his correct time frame. Same with the Marvels—they are inextricable to the 1960s.

Only a month late, here are more of Tom Waits’ favourite recordings from the Observer Blog.

I finally had an opportunity to listen to Dan Castellaneta’s I Am Not Homer disc… I had not expected the lone piece of music, “So Dumb (Homer’s Lament)”, to be such a loving recreation of the original versions of “Heroes and Villains”.

My first thoughts on Shelby Lynne’s new disc Suit Yourself: about a minute into it I’d regretted that the Beatles had recorded the Get Back project the same way, in someone’s living room. There’s a lot of subtle chatter and atmosphere; the whole thing is seamless.