WITH the release of The Avengers, news.com.au brings you 99 superhero facts that will give you strength to take on the nerdiest comic book fan.

One, however, is an outright fib. Try to guess which one. The answer appears at the end of the piece.

1. Michael Jackson once came close to owning Marvel. According to Marvel supremo Stan Lee's former business partner, Peter Paul - who was jailed in 2005 for stock fraud - Jackson agreed to buy Marvel on Lee's behalf. Paul had met Lee in 1989 and had brought him on board the American Spirit Foundation, a charitable organisation he ran with the actor James Stewart. Spotting the worth of Marvel's superhero properties, Paul hatched a plan to bring in investors to buy Marvel and install Lee as company's head. In 1991-92, he put together a Japanese/American investment group and approached Marvel's owner, Ron Perelman, with an offer to buy the company for about $28 million. Perelman decided instead to take Marvel public. Paul tried again several years later, this time lining up Jackson as an investor. Jim Salicrup, a former Marvel editor who was present at the meetings Jackson had with Lee and Paul, remembers Jackson saying to Lee: "If I buy Marvel, you'll help me run it, won't you?" Paul said that Marvel's owner at the time, Ike Perlmutter, was unwilling to take less than $1 billion for the company and Jackson eventually lost interest.

Lee has a different take on Jackson's interest in Marvel. "I had been to his place in Neverland ... and he wanted to do Spider-man," he told MTV News last July. "I'm not sure whether he just wanted to produce it or wanted to play the role, you know? Our conversation never got that far along." Lee said that the singer had hoped to buy the rights to Spider-man. "He thought I'd be the one who could get him the rights and I told him I couldn't, he would have to go to the Marvel company."

2. Barack Obama has appeared on the cover of Amazing Spider-man, George W. Bush turned up to congratulate Captain America in The Ultimates and Jimmy Carter appealed to the Avengers for help in Uncanny X-Men after a super-villain destroyed a swanky part of down-town New York, but the most controversial presidential appearance was one made by Richard Nixon. In Captain America No. 175, published a month before Nixon resigned the presidency, the Cap uncovers the identity of a high-ranking government official who has been directing an evil plot to enslave America. On being exposed, the villain kills himself in front of the Cap. We never see his face, nor is he explicitly named but it is clear that the villain is Nixon.

The comic's writer, Steve Englehart, recalled: "America was moving from the Vietnam War toward the specific crimes of Watergate. I was writing a man who believed in America's highest ideals at a time when America's President was a crook. I could not ignore that. And so, in the Marvel Universe, which so closely resembled our own, Cap followed a criminal conspiracy into the White House and saw the President commit suicide."

3. Iron Man was a thinly disguised version of billionaire industrialist and all-round wacko recluse Howard Hughes. Stan Lee, who created the hero with artist Don Heck in 1963, said: "Howard Hughes was one of the most colourful men of our time. He was an inventor, an adventurer, a ladies' man and finally a nutcase. Without being crazy, (Iron Man) was Howard Hughes." He revealed that he created the character on a dare. "It was the height of the Cold War. The readers, if there was one thing they hated, it was war, it was the military ... So I got a hero who represented that to the 100th degree. He was a weapons manufacturer, he was providing weapons for the army, he was rich, he was an industrialist. I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, and shove him down the readers' throats and make them like him ... And he became very popular."

4. Nicolas Cage is named after superhero Luke Cage. The Oscar-winner and self-confessed comic geek is Francis Ford Coppola's nephew and was born Nicolas Coppola, but because he didn't want to trade on his uncle's success when auditioning for acting jobs, he changed his last name to his favourite comic character. Calling his son, Kal-lel, Superman's Krypton name, was maybe a step too far. It is rumoured that his ex-wife, Lisa Marie Presley, made him sell his comic book collection. If she did, it may be why the marriage lasted a mere 108 days.

5. Cage has appeared in three comic book adaptations so far, Ghost Rider, Ghost Rider 2 and Kick-Ass, but the tally could have been higher. He was to play the title role in Tim Burton's planned revamp of Superman in the 90s, and even got to the costume fitting stage before the film was canned because of mounting costs. He was Sam Raimi's choice to play the Green Goblin in Spider-man before Raimi met Willem Dafoe.

6. Kick-Ass writer Mark Millar once hoodwinked the media into believing that Orson Welles had planned to make a Batman film in 1946. In a column he wrote for the website Comic Book Resources in September 2003, Millar said that The Citizen Kane director had written a "heart-racing" 36-page treatment for the film and had even got as far as the production stage before he pulled the plug on the project. He egged the pudding still more by revealing details of the film's cast. Welles, said Millar, citing archival material uncovered by his film historian friend, had signed James Cagney for the part of the Riddler, Basil Rathbone as the Joker and Marlene Dietrich as Catwoman, but had clashed with the studios over who should play Batman: Welles had wanted to play the part himself, said Millar, but the studios wanted Gregory Peck, which led to Welles walking away from the project. Millar asked his artist friend Bryan Hitch to do some rough sketches of Welles's Batman to give his hoax added credibility. The result movie and comics websites lapped it up, as did newspapers around the world.

7. Superman co-creator Joe Shuster had a secret identity as a fetish artist. Shuster and his Superman partner Jerry Seigel saw none of the riches Superman was making for DC Comics, or National as it was known during the 30s and 40s. In fact both were sacked after they tried to get a share of the money. To pay the bills, Shuster took a job illustrating a pulp magazine called Night of Horrors, which featured sado-masochistic scenes of women whipping men and men liking it. What's surprising is the fact that most of the men and women look like Shuster's Superman and Lois Lane.

8. Ditko had originally intended Spider-man's costume to be purple and orange, not red and blue. Check out the spandex in American Apparel to realise how awful this idea could have been.

9. The Joker almost didn't last his first comic book appearance. Batman creator Bob Kane wanted to kill off Batman's nemesis because he didn't want to repeat himself. Most of the villains Batman encountered in his early years ended up dying in unhappy accidents (Batman's code forbade him doing the actual deed) and the Joker's fate was to be no different. In Kane's original ending to Batman No.1 the Joker died after accidentally stabbing himself, but luckily for DC and all those who made millions off The Dark Knight, the book's editor, Whitney Ellsworth, saw merit in the character and had Kane add a panel bringing the Joker back to life.

10. The Pet Shop Boys singer Neil Tennant once worked for Marvel. Between 1975 and 1977, Tennant was an editor at Marvel's UK division, a job that required him to anglicise American spellings and indicate when the more scantily dressed superheroines needed to be redrawn decently.

11. In Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., S.H.I.E.L.D. stands for Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-Enforcement Division. In the Iron Man movie the awkward acronym is changed to the similarly preposterous Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.

12. Marvel's owner thought that Spider-man was a rotten idea for a superhero. Stan Lee, Spider-man's co-creator, was told by his boss that the character would fail because readers hated spiders. Minds were changed when the sales figures came in.

13. Cops would have a hard time tracking criminals if it wasn't for Spider-man. The electronic monitors that criminals wear round their ankles when under home arrest were inspired by a Spider-man comic strip from the '70s. In it a villain followed Spidey's movements via an electronic device Spidey was wearing on his wrist. According to a PhD paper by Jody Klein-Saffran, New Mexico district court judge Jack Love read the strip and thought the idea could work in the real world. He developed the idea with a computer salesman and in 1983 the first ankle bracelets were introduced in New Mexico. The devices were picked up by justice departments around the US two years later.

14. Wonder Woman was created by the inventor of the polygraph test, William Marston. Marston recognised the great educational potential of comic books but, struck by the amount of testosterone swilling around the pages of adventure serials, wanted to create a new kind of superhero, one who could triumph not with fists or firepower, but love. His wife, Elizabeth, persuaded him to make his hero a woman, and thus Wonder Woman was born. The character made her debut in All Star Comics #8 (December 1941) and was soon a hit. Although she was supposed to be empowering, she did spend a fair amount of her time, rather kinkily, tied to chairs.

15. Watchmen writer Alan Moore had his name taken off the credits of the graphic novel's film adaptation because of bad Hollywood experiences. Moore has had several of his comics turned into movies - From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta - but they've all left him bitterly disappointed. The last straw was the box office bomb League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, starring Sean Connery. Moore's story was mangled by producers and then his reputation was tarnished when two screenwriters, Martin Poll and Larry Cohen, filed a lawsuit against the film's makers, 20th Century Fox, claiming that they plagiarised their script, Cast of Characters, and commissioned Moore to create the comic book as smokescreen for poaching the idea. The allegations shocked Moore and Moore had to end up giving a ten-hour deposition, which left him very bitter as did Fox's decision to settle the case. He felt that this was almost an admission of his guilt. The end result was that he completely severed his connections with Hollywood, to the extent that he refused to take any money for the 2005 movie of his graphic novel V for Vendetta or Watchmen.

16. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen artist Kevin O'Neill once had his whole drawing style banned as offensive by the Comics Code Authority. He told the London Times: "Alan Moore had this story called Tigers, which was about the temptation of Abin Sur, [the man] who gave Hal Jordan the Green Lantern his powers. It was a great story, I sent the artwork in and a week later I got a call from the editor saying, 'You've got a big problem with the Comics Code.' My first thought was, 'Does that still exist?' I mean this was like the '80s and this thing came from the 1950s' horror comic crisis. It was a little measly stamp in the corner of a comic that shrank every few years. No one took any notice of the damn thing - I'm sure retailers didn't. It was ridiculous. So I said, 'Do you want me to change something?' and he said, 'No, they called us up and said they can't pass this artwork.' He asked them, 'Well, what could we change to make it better?' and they said, 'Nothing, it's the whole style.'

17. The Hulk that appeared in the classic TV series starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno was almost red in colour. In an interview with film website IGN, the show's executive producer, Kenneth Johnson, said: "I asked Stan Lee, 'Man, what's the logic of green? Is he the envious Hulk? Is he green with envy or jealousy?' The colour of rage is red, which I was pushing for because it's a real human colour - you know, when people get flushed with anger." Lee told him that the Hulk had in fact started out grey but due to problems with colour separation, the colour printed differently each time it was used. "Our printer came to us and said we can do a pretty consistent green, so we decided to go with green," Lee said. Thus the Hulk was coloured green from issue two of the Incredible Hulk onwards, although without any explanation. On hearing this, Johnson remembers telling Lee: "That's not really very organic! But that was a battle I could not win. I couldn't make the Hulk red because he was just too iconic already in the comic books."

18. One change Johnson did get to make was to the name of the Hulk's alter ego, Bruce Banner. He switched it to David Banner because of his antipathy towards alliterative names, not because, as some fans had claimed, he thought the name Bruce sounded too gay. "I don't recall feeling that way at the time, because Bruce Wayne was a pretty straight guy. But it was more the alliteration that bothered me, the Lois Lane, Clark Kent, that sort of thing. I was trying to get as far away from the comic book origins as I possibly could. Virtually the only things I kept from the comic book were gamma rays, the green Hulk and the metamorphosis. When you put somebody into a story whose name is Bruce Banner, it immediately starts to sound comic-booky, and I was very anxious to attract an adult audience because I knew that we could not have a hit show if we just had kids watching us."

19. This was not the first time Banner's name was changed. For a short period Lee himself referred to Bruce Banner as Bob Banner. At the time Lee was juggling dozens of titles and often had difficulty keeping track of all the characters he was writing. He said that alliterative names made them easier to remember. However, he did slip up from time to time, most noticeably in Fantastic Four No. 25, where he introduced the Hulk as Bob. Marvel's ever-vigilant fans did not shy away from pointing out his mistake and in the letters page three issues later, Lee responded in true showman style: "There's only one thing to do - we're not going to take the cowardly way out. From now on his name is Robert Bruce Banner - so we can't go wrong no matter WHAT we call him!"

20. The line most associated with the Hulk TV series, "Don't make me angry, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry", appears in both the 2003 and 2008 Hulk films, although in the latter it is played for laughs. When Edward Norton, as Bruce Banner, is surrounded by a group of Brazilian thugs, he tries to warn them off with some very ropey Portuguese: "Don't make me hungry, you wouldn't like me when I'm hungry."

21. Marvel went bankrupt in 1996. The financier Ron Perelman bought Marvel for $82.5 million in 1989, putting up $10.5 million of his own money and borrowing the rest. After taking the company public he went on a buying spree, hovering up trading card companies and taking a controlling interest in a toy company. It was a bad move - the trading card and collectible market tanked - and Marvel became swollen with debt. In 1996 Marvel missed an interest payment, putting it technically in default. Perelman offered to rescue Marvel by injecting $350 million but only if Marvel created more shares and give them to him. Carl Icahn, a bondholder and corporate raider, bought Marvel's bonds and vowed to block Perelman. Marvel then filed for Chapter 11 protection in the bankruptcy court.

22. Disney bought Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in 2009. Fans expressed concern that Spider-man would soon be fighting crime wearing Mickey Mouse ears.

23. The idea for Spider-man's black costume came from a comics fan. In 1982 Marvel asked its readers for ideas for new Spider-man stories. Randy Schueller, a 22-year-old reader from Chicago, spent two weeks writing a story in which Spider-man ditches his red and blue threads for a sleek black costume. "It occurred to me that Spider-man is this character that creeps around in the shadows looking for bad guys, so why is he wearing this bright red and blue costume?" Schueller told the New York Post in 2007.

"It seemed like he should have more of a stealth mode." A few months after sending his idea to Marvel, he got a letter from Jim Shooter, Marvel's Editor-In-Chief, offering to buy it for $220. The film Spider-man 3, which conspicuously features the black costume, made almost a billion dollars at the box office.

24. X-Men No 1, published in 1991, is the world's biggest-selling comic book. It sold close to 8 million copies.

25. In 1941 Stan Lee became Editor-in-Chief of Marvel, or Timely as it was known then, aged 18. He stayed in the role until 1972. Timely's first Editor-in-Chief was Joe Simon.

26. The '70s Fantastic Four cartoon series was missing the Human Torch, not because NBC executives feared he would inspire children to douse themselves in petrol, strike a match and shout "flame on", but because the rights to the character belonged to Universal Studios. Universal would not allow NBC to use the Torch, so he was replaced by a cute talking robot named H.E.R.B.I.E.

27. The word "sex" was hidden on almost every page of an X-Men comic. In New X-Men No. 118 It surreptitiously appears in hair strands, bottles of whisky, a hedge, a puddle, tree branches, protest signs and, thanks to some conveniently placed garden tools, a lawn. The book's artist, Ethan Van Sciver, has said that he scattered the word throughout the book because Marvel was annoying him at the time and he thought that it would be fun to inject a little mischief into his work. Weirdly, this was the sort of activity that the psychologist Fredric Wertham railed hysterically against in the '50s. He thought that comics were corrupting America's youth, with their overt and covert depictions of sex and drugs, and his book on the subject, Seduction of the Innocent, led to Senate hearings and a strict moral code being imposed on the comic industry.

28. Batman has fought crime with some of literature's greatest heroes, from Superman and Spider-man to Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan, but he's also shared his Batmobile with the dregs. His worst team-up has to be with Scooby-Doo, in the mentally scarring 1972 cartoon Scooby-Doo Meets Batman - Holy Zoinks Batman!

29. Batman and Robin is generally considered the worst superhero movie, and while it is eyeball-gougingly bad - it is hard to believe that Arnie's killer puns as the villain Mr Freeze were written by an Oscar-winning writer - there are worse superhero movies out there: The Punisher, starring Dolph Lundgren, Barb Wire, starring Pamela Anderson, Captain America, starring nobody you've ever heard of.

30. Superman was once criticised by the War Department for not showing nuclear weapons the proper respect. During the Second World War American authorities became alarmed by a 1940s Superman story in which the Man of Steel battled an evil professor who possessed an early particle accelerator. They fired off a letter the District Engineer at the United States Engineer Office in Tennessee complaining that having such a device in a comic book would lessen the public's fear of nuclear weapons.

31. Marvel once owned the rights to the word zombie. As improbable as it sounds, Marvel attempted to trademark the word zombie in comic book titles after publishing Tale of the Zombie in 1973. By the time the trademark was approved two years later, the series was coming to an end. Marvel lost the trademark in 1996 but it wasn't long before it was once again trademarking the armies of the undead, registering the words Marvel Zombies to protect its comic series of the same name. With DC, Marvel also trademarked "Super Hero".

32. Stan Lee sued Marvel. Lee filed a $10 million lawsuit against his employer in 2002, saying it had cheated him out of millions of dollars. He claimed that Marvel had signed a deal giving him 10 per cent of any profits made from films and TV shows that used his characters. Marvel settled the suit. Last year the children of the late Jack Kirby, who created the Fantastic Four and scores of other superhero titles with Lee, began a legal fight with Marvel and Disney to recapture the copyright to Kirby's creations. The heirs of Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster are engaged in similar fight with Warner Bros.

33. DC once asked its readers how interested they were in black people. A customer survey printed at the back of Justice League of America No. 83 (September 1970) asked readers all sorts of bland marketing questions, but tucked away rather innocently in a section titled How Interested Are You In . . . between space flights and pollution is a box for black people. It is not known how many Batman and Superman fans ticked yes.

34. The mayor of New York personally promised to protect the creators of Captain America from Nazis. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby received death threats after Captain America Comics appeared. The first issue showed Cap punching Hitler on the kisser, the second had him smacking the Fuhrer with his trusty shield. The books were a hit, but not with America's isolationists and Nazi sympathisers, and America was not yet at war with Germany. Simon, who like Kirby was Jewish, says in his autobiography, The Comic Book Makers: "Hitler was a marvellous foil; a ranting maniac ... [but] no matter how hard we tried to make him a threatening force, Adolf invariably wound up as a buffoon - a clown. Evidently, this infuriated a lot of Nazi sympathisers. There was a substantial population of anti-war activists in the country. 'American Firsters' and other non-interventionist groups were well-organised. Then there was the German American Bund. They were all over the place, heavily financed and effective in spewing their propaganda of hate; a fifth column of Americans following the Third Reich party line. We were inundated with a torrent of raging hate mail and vicious, obscene telephone calls. The theme was 'death to the Jews'.

"At first we were inclined to laugh off their threats but people in the office reported seeing menacing-looking groups of strange men in front of the building and some of the employees were fearful of leaving the office for lunch. We reported the threats to the police department and the result was a police guard on regular shifts patrolling the halls and office. No sooner than the men in blue arrived than the woman at the telephone switchboard signalled me excitedly. 'There's a man on the phone says he's Mayor La Guardia. He wants to speak to the editor of Captain America Comics.' I was incredulous as I picked up the phone but there was no mistaking the shrill voice. 'You boys over there are doing a good job,' the voice squeaked, 'The City of New York will see that no harm will come to you.' I thanked him."

35. The Nazi High Command hated Superman, so much so it took the trouble to write an almost ludicrous rebuttal of one of the hero's adventures. In February 1940, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster wrote a patriotic Superman story for Look magazine titled How Would Superman End the War? In it Superman disables the Nazi war machine, arrests a gobsmacked Hitler and Stalin and hands them over to the League of Nations for some good old-fashioned Western justice. According to historian Randall Bytwerk, the Nazis took issue with the story two months later in the official newspaper of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps. Here a few highlights of the article, as translated by Bytwerk:

"Jerry Siegel, an intellectually and physically circumcised chap who has his headquarters in New York, is the inventor of a colourful figure with an impressive appearance, a powerful body, and a red swim suit who enjoys the ability to fly through the ether.

"The inventive Israelite named this pleasant guy with an overdeveloped body and underdeveloped mind Superman. He advertised widely Superman's sense of justice, well-suited for imitation by the American youth. As you can see, there is nothing the Sadducees won't do for money!

"... A triumphant final frame [of the story] shows Superman dropping in at the headquarters of the chatterboxes at the League of Nations in Geneva. Although the rules of the establishment probably prohibit people in bathing suits from participating in their deliberations, Superman ignores them as well as the other laws of physics, logic, and life in general.

"Jerry Siegellack stinks. Woe to the American youth, who must live in such a poisoned atmosphere and don't even notice the poison they swallow daily."

36. DC deliberately deleted the words "Jews" and "Jewish" from a Superman comic set during the Holocaust. In 1998 DC decided to have Superman travel back in time to confront the horrors of the Holocaust, but despite the fact the character was created by two Jewish Americans, writers had to refer to Jews as the "target population of the Nazis' hate" or "murdered residents". After a flood of complaints DC apologised, saying they had banned the words because they didn't want kids using them as terms of abuse. Joey Cavalieri, the book's editor, said at the time: "Since this could be the first time (a reader) encounters the Jews in print, I would be heartbroken if this (story) went badly."

37. Artist Dave Cockrum's resignation letter to Marvel surreptitiously appeared in Iron Man No. 127. In the issue, Tony Stark's butler, Jarvis, resigns after a drunk and out of control Stark verbally abuses him. The letter reads:

Anthony Stark,

I am leaving because this is no longer the team-spirited "one big happy family" I once loved working for. Over the past year or so I have watched Avengers' morale disintegrate to the point that, rather than being a team or a family, it is now a large collection of unhappy individuals simmering in their own personal stew of repressed anger, resentment and frustration. I have seen a lot of my friends silently enduring unfair, malicious or vindictive treatment.

My personal grievances are relatively slight by comparison to some, but I don't intend to silently endure. I've watched the Avengers be disbanded, uprooted and shuffled around. I've become firmly convinced that this was done with the idea of "showing the hired help who's Boss".

I don't intend to wait around to see what's next.

Three issues later Iron Man's writer, David Michelinie, explained to readers that this was the not the letter Jarvis had intended to write and that due to a production error the wrong text was published. The letter that appeared was none other than Cockrum's own resignation letter, only someone had swapped "Marvel" for "Avengers".

38. Marvel dreamed up Optimus Prime and Megatron. In the early Eighties toy manufacturer Hasbro asked Marvel for help with its new action figure line, Transformers. The robots that disguised themselves as cars and planes were Japanese in origin and needed new names and backgrounds - Marvel Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter and writers Denny O'Neil and Bob Budiansky were given the task. In an interview in 2004 Budiansky said: "Shooter and O'Neil came up with the backstory. Shooter brought me in when most of the initial names and at least some of the character profiles were rejected by Hasbro. For whatever reason, Denny declined to revise them. So, facing an imminent deadline, Shooter scoured the Marvel editorial offices looking for someone who could write at least basic English. The first few Marvel editors Shooter approached, all with more writing experience than me, wanted nothing to do with Transformers. I was probably Shooter's third or fourth choice. I turned around the revisions over a couple of days - right before Thanksgiving of 1983 - and Hasbro was very pleased with what I wrote. I renamed most of the characters - Optimus Prime was Denny's, Megatron was mine - and revised some character profiles."

39. The writer Tom Wolfe once appeared in the pages of the Incredible Hulk. The author of Bonfire of the Vanities was a great admirer of Marvel and had even made reference to its hero magician Dr Strange in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Three years later Marvel returned the favour by adapting his short story Those Radical Chic Evenings for the Hulk. In Radical Chic Wolfe tears into New York's white liberal elite for espousing radical causes they didn't actually believe in. In a Hulk issue titled They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?, the writer Roy Thomas took the premise and, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, ran with it. He has a rich couple from New York host a fund-raising party for the Hulk. In doing so they upset their feminist daughter, who had wanted them to host a party for women's rights. One of the Hulk's villains appears and gives the girl superpowers so she can beat up the Hulk in the name of feminism (the book's cover shows the girl holding a defeated Hulk above her head and shouting to the world: "Every male chauvinist pig will tremble when he sees the Hulk thrown to his death - by a woman!"). Wolfe himself appears at the fundraising party in his trademark white suit.

40. Tobey Maguire wasn't the first actor to play Spider-man on screen. Between 1977 and 1979 CBS aired a live-action Spider-man TV series with Nicholas Hammond in the title role.

41. Terminator director James Cameron tried to make a Spider-man film in the '90s but was frustrated by a complicated rights battle between studios over who owned the character. (You can see his storyboards for the film here and details of the film's story here.) However, his idea to have Spidey's webs shoot out of him organically was kept in the 2002 film made by Sam Raimi.

42. A Fantastic Four film exists that is so terrible it will never reach a screen. In 1992 the production company Constantin Film was in danger of losing the film rights to the Fantastic Four unless it started production on the movie by the end of the year. Lacking the $40 million it needed to make a full-budget film, it turned to low-budget movie supremo Roger Corman for help. He spent just $1.98 million to crank a quickie Fantastic Four movie. Constantin never intended to release the film but it never told the director or the actors this.

"Oh, that was a tragic event. I feel so sorry for the people involved," Stan Lee remembered years later. "The director really tried his best, and so did the actors. They all thought that this was their big chance. But the movie was never supposed to be seen. Most people thought, 'Jesus, what a terrible job that is! How corny! How cheap!' They didn't realize that it wasn't meant to be any better than that. Unfortunately, the people working on the project didn't know that, and they tried their best. Really, I feel so bad for all of them."

43. Billy Dee Williams and Marlon Wayans were both paid not to appear in Batman Forever. Dee Williams, famous for playing Lando in the Star Wars saga, had appeared in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film as District Attorney Harvey Dent, and had signed a contract to play Dent's evil alter-ego, Two-Face, in any sequel the villain appeared in. Wayans had been hired to appear as Robin in Batman Returns but Robin was axed when it became apparent that there were too many characters in the film. Like Dee Williams, he was set to appear in the third Batman film but when Burton quit the project and director Joel Schumacher was brought in, the roles were recast with two white men: Tommy Lee Jones as Two Face and Chris O'Donnell as Robin.

Wayans told the AV Club in 1998 about the farce: "I got paid for almost being Robin. Actually, I was Robin: They paid me, and then they decided they wanted somebody else. I was like, 'Hey, as long as the cheque clears, baby.' I was supposed to do the second one. I got my wardrobe fitted and everything, and what happened was that there were too many characters, and they felt Robin wouldn't be of service. So they put me in the third one, and when the third one came around, they got a new director on it (Joel Schumacher replaced Tim Burton), and their vision of the project changed. They decided they wanted somebody white to play Robin."

44. Other actors who have come close to hamming it up in the Batman universe include: Robin Williams as both the Riddler and the Joker, Annette Benning, Geena Davis and Brooke Shields as Catwoman, Bob Hoskins and Dustin Hoffman as the Penguin, Hulk Hogan, Sylvester Stallone, Anthony Hopkins and Patrick Stewart as Mr Freeze, Christian Bale as Robin and Alec Baldwin, Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, Bill Murray, Joshua Jackson, Billy Crudup, Cillian Murphy and Jake Gyllenhaal as Batman.

45. Sylvester Stallone's ex-wife Brigitte Nielsen was to appear in a movie version of She Hulk. Although the film never got off the ground, Marvel did get as far as taking pictures of Nielsen dressed as She Hulk. The disastrous results can be viewed here.

46. The strip Stan Lee is most proud of is the one he wrote for the Incredible Hulk/Spider-man toilet paper. Why? Because, if you didn't like it, you knew exactly what to do with it.

47. Daredevil artist Wally Wood once corrupted the morals of Mickey Mouse. Wood, who came up with Daredevil's signature red costume, also drew the Disneyland Memorial Orgy, which shows Disney favourites engaged in some very unDisney activities. Dumbo has never looked so shocked.

48. Stan Lee officiated at Spider-man's wedding. In 1987 Marvel decided to let Peter Parker get hitched to his model girlfriend, Mary Jane Watson. The event took place in Amazing Spider-man Annual No. 21 and, bizarrely, in real life at the Shea Stadium in New York with Lee presiding.

Although the marriage generated the publicity Marvel hoped it would, later writers and editors rued the event, believing a married Peter Parker limited them creatively. They eventually got round the marriage in 2007 by having the devil Mephisto erase it from everyone's memory - the ctrl alt delete approach to storytelling.

49. Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, found writing comics too difficult. Before he found fame as a novelist, Puzo eked a living writing for men's adventure magazines. Short of cash one month, he asked Stan Lee if he could try his hand writing a comic script. Lee readily agreed but Puzo couldn't deliver the goods. "He said it was too difficult," Lee recounts in his autobiography. Puzo told him: "I could write a novel in the time it would take me to figure this damn thing out." Puzo did eventually crack the superhero nut, writing the screenplays for the first two Superman movies.

50. Wolverine was created as a punching bag for the Hulk. He was introduced in issue 180 of the Incredible Hulk as a pint-sized Canadian superhero charged with bringing down the Hulk. The book's writer, Len Wein, created Wolverine with artist John Romita and although Wolvie is different from the lone brawler he is now, many of his trademark characteristics appear in the issue: the claws, the rough temperament, the yellow and blue costume and the strange mask with pointy ears. Although Wolvie was a secondary character, Wein thought he would be able to use him again in the revived X-Men book he was planning.

51. During the Fifties Captain America was a "Commie Smasher". The hero was retired in 1950 but he was brought back to purge America of Reds and traitors in the pages of Young Men Comics, just as the country was coming to terms with the horrors of McCarthyism. The Red-bashing adventures did not last long and when Marvel revived Captain America again in 1964, it forgot the embarrassing Fifties, and created a story that he had lain frozen in ice since the end of the Second World War.

52. Death in the Marvel Universe has to be by the rules. In the preface to the Marvel Universe Book of the Dead, editor Mark Grunewald touches on the phenomenon of dead heroes and villains miraculously coming back to life. "Characters such as Doctor Doom have made it their stock in trade to escape one seeming death after another," he writes. He handily draws up a rough guide to sorting out the fake deaths from the real ones. For a death to be real it has to take place in the comic panel, and not simply referred to in dialogue. The remains must be seen by two qualified witnesses and must be destroyed - burial is not enough in a universe where zombies and vampires exist. Of course all these rules have been wilfully ignored by writers at some time or another. The other abiding rule of the Marvel Universe was that Captain America's sidekick, Bucky, and Spider-man's uncle, Ben, had to stay dead. This rule has also been broken.

53. Marvel is home to the first openly gay superhero. Northstar, a French-Canadian mutant, came out in Alpha Flight No. 106 in 1992.

54. Spider-man got his very own car, the Spider-Mobile, as a result of merchandising deal between Marvel and Corona Motors. The ludicrous beach buggy, which was eventually modified to imitate Spidey's powers, made its debut in Amazing Spider-man No. 130 in 1974. Shamelessly, the issue features Corona Motors offering Spidey a lot of loot to endorse a new non-polluting car it has developed. A few issues later he ditched the buggy into the river.

55. British fantasy writer Neil Gaiman was once told there was no masturbation in the DC universe. Gaiman had tried to include the word in Sandman, the surreal comic series he had turned into a hit for DC during the '80s, but was told to pull it. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1991, Gaiman revealed: "It was explained to me that people do not masturbate in the DC Universe. Actually, that explains a lot. That's probably why the characters all dress in tight costumes and go around thumping the s*** out of each other."

56. Disco giants Casablanca Records helped to create the X-Men hero Dazzler. The record label, which produced hits for Cher, Donna Summer and the Village People, had approached Marvel with the idea of a Disco superhero that they could cross promote. According to Marvel editor Louise Simonson, Casablanca said, “Hey, you make a singer and we’ll create someone to take on the persona.” However, the collaboration proved fraught and ended with both parties walking away from the deal.

57. Jack Kirby, the artist who co-created the Fantastic Four with Stan Lee, was removed from the cover of the Fantastic Four’s 20th anniversary issue. The issue’s artist, John Byrne, had originally included both Kirby and Lee among the cast of characters squeezed onto the cover but at the behest of Marvel executives Kirby was erased from the final artwork. This may have had something to do with arguments Kirby was having with Marvel at the time over the ownership of his artwork.

58. The escape artist hero of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is based on the Marvel artist Jim Steranko. Steranko, who memorably drew Nick Fury during the Sixties, was himself an accomplished escape artist before he joined Marvel. Chabon says that he was wrestling with how to get his Jewish hero, Joe Kavalier, out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia when he started reading about Steranko’s feats during the Fifties and the solution came to him.

59. Spider-man’s co-creator Steve Ditko used his original artwork as cutting boards. The comic historian Greg Theakston told the comic industry magazine Wizard that when he last visited Ditko’s studios he saw a piece of illustration board leaning against a wall that had been slashed to pieces. “He’d been using it as a cutting board. I looked a little bit closer and I detected a comics code stamp on it.” Not only was Ditko not displaying, preserving or prizing his artwork, he was using it as a cutting board. Theakston said that he quickly offered to go down to the nearest art supply store and buy Ditko “the finest cutting board on the block” but Ditko refused. Ditko then pointed to a curtain next to Theakston’s chair and asked him to lift it up. Behind it was a large stack of original artwork from Marvel. Theakston asked if he could look at them but Ditko replied no. Theakston believes the reason for Ditko’s odd behaviour lay in his bitter dispute with Marvel over ownership of original artwork. Marvel believed that all artwork produced for its comics belonged to it but after years of fighting with artists and the bad publicity that this was causing it decided to give the artists back their original work - but as gift. Ditko did not agree with this mock generosity.

60. The question of who created Venom, one of Spider-man’s most iconic foes, has been fiercely contested over the years. David Michelinie has taken exception to claims that he co-created the villain with artist Todd McFarlane. McFarlane did the art for Michelinie’s Amazing Spider-man plots during the late Eighties, including Venom’s first appearance, issue 298. In 1993 Michelinie wrote a letter to Wizard in response to an article that referred to him as the co-creator of Venom. He said that he was Venom’s sole creator, although he accepted that without McFarlane Venom would not have been the success that he was.

However, not long after, McFarlane’s successor on Amazing Spider-man, Erik Larsen, disputed Michelinie’s version of events. He said that all Michelinie did was simply take the black alien costume that turned Spider-man bad and place it on a poorly conceived, one-dimensional character. It took an artist of McFarlane’s calibre, he said, to make Venom commercial. (Larsen himself added several characteristics to Venom, including the monstrous tongue and drool.)

In 2004 McFarlane said that although Michelinie came up with the idea of Venom and the character’s basic design he was the one who gave Venom his monster-like features: “I just wanted to make him kooky and creepy, and not just some guy in a black suit.”

61. She Hulk was Lee’s last major creation for Marvel. The female version of Marvel’s grumpy green giant first appeared in Savage She Hulk No 1 in February 1980. By that time Lee had retired as Marvel’s Editor-In-Chief and was the company’s frontman in Hollywood but he returned to the bullpen one last time and, with artist John Buscema, produced another winning hero. The origins of the character, however, had more to do with trademark issues than Lee’s need to get behind the typewriter. Because the Incredible Hulk TV series airing at the time was a hit, Marvel knew that it wouldn’t be long before the show’s executives started pitching a female Hulk. To make sure it owned the rights to any such character, Marvel had to act fast and publish a She Hulk comic straight away. As Buscema said: “They were protecting themselves.”

62. Captain America’s shield changed shape because of legal fears. When the sentinel of liberty first appeared in March 1941, in Captain America Comics No 1, his shield was not the familiar disc shape it is now but heraldic shield, of the sort knights would carry. However, this shield was similar to the one that appeared on the chest of a patriotic superhero produced by rival comic publisher MLJ. The Shield, by Harry Shorten and Irv Novick, had been entertaining readers for a year before Joe Simon and Jack Kirby came up with the idea of Captain America, so when MLJ’s bosses saw the new hero they made their objections known. Timely, as Marvel was known then, did not put up a fight and ordered Simon and Kirby to change the shield.

63. Daredevil/Matt Murdock once pretended to his own twin brother to get out of a tight spot. The introduction of Mike Murdock, a swinging hipster who was guaranteed never miss a party - or your money back!, injected an element of cornball comedy into the pages of Daredevil. When Matt’s legal partner and secretary, Foggy Nelson and Karen Page, accuse him of being Daredevil, Matt is forced to come up with a plausible excuse. He can’t so he makes up a story about a twin brother no one has ever heard of. Foggy and Karen then demand to see this mystery brother... Uh oh! Matt does a quick change several panels later and Mike Murdock makes his big debut at the office. “What’s Matt doing with those loud clothes - and sun-glasses?” gasps Karen. “Say! Wait a minute! Foggy! That ... that isn’t Matt Murdock!”

The lounge lizard replies: “You can say that again, doll! Ol’ Matt’s the one with the brains - but I’m the family pussycat! The name’s Mike, gang - and try not to applaud - I’m almost as shy as I am glamorous! Say! No wonder Matthew likes working here! Any more at home like you, baby?”

Mike hangs around for a few issues - wearing pork pie hats, laying cheesy lines on Karen and living it up in ways the square Matt Murdock couldn’t possibly imagine - but the strain of living two secret lives takes a toll on Matt and the character is quietly brushed aside.

64. One of the heroes in the Eighties cartoon series Spider-man and his Amazing Friends was created from scratch because of licensing issues. The original plan was for Spider-man to have Iceman and the Human Torch as teammates but because the Human Torch was still wrapped up with another studio, the producers created Firestar instead. Marvel soon made her a part of its comic universe and gave her a starring role in its New Warriors book.

65. Paul Simon wrote the lyrics and theme song to the Sixties Spider-man cartoon as a favour to head of the ABC network. Because he didn’t want to be associated with kiddie material, he asked that the music be credited to his old stage name, Jerry Landis.

66. Artist John Romita Jr based the Daredevil villain Typhoid Mary on his ex-wife.

67. One of the X-Men was killed off because Marvel’s Editor-In-Chief at the time didn’t think she should get away with eating a planet. Jean Grey was never supposed to die at the end of the Dark Phoenix Saga but when Jim Shooter saw that she had annihilated a planet he ordered the writer Chris Claremont to make changes.

68. Stan Lee came up with the idea of a superhero version of the Norse god Thor while wrestling with problem of how to create a character that was stronger than the Hulk. He decided that the only solution was to make his new hero a god so he went delving into Norse mythology to find a suitable candidate.

69. Marvel was the first comic company to give a black superhero his own comic book. Created by Archie Goodwin and John Romita, Luke Cage was a streetwise hero whose skin was as hard as steel. He made his first appearance in Luke Cage: Hero for Hire No 1 in June 1972 and was an attempt by Marvel to cash in on the popular Blaxpoitation genre.

70. He was not, however, Marvel’s first black superhero. That title belongs to the Black Panther, who first appeared in 1966 in Fantastic Four No 52. Although born in the same year, the Black Panther has no connection to the militant Black Panther Party. However, in what seems like a clumsy attempt to distance the character from the party, Marvel briefly changed his name to the Black Leopard in the early Seventies. The first African-American superhero was the Falcon, who first appeared in Captain America No 117 in 1969.

71. Steve Ditko was sharing a studio with the fetish artist Eric Stanton when he came up with the designs for Spider-man’s costume and webbing. Before fetish fans get excited and moralists over-flow with outrage, Stanton has said that his influence on Ditko’s designs was “almost nil”. Still, there’s something kinky about that mask.

72. Spider-man once went on a double date with Superman. Marvel and DC decided to put their flagship characters together for the first time in the 1976 special Superman v Amazing Spider-man. Although the two heroes joined forces to battle the combined villainy of their nemeses, they spent a fair amount of the comic knocking each other about. Both won a round each but this being comics, friendship was declared the eventual winner. The two defeated their foes and celebrated by going on a double date with Lois Lane and Mary-Jane. Superman and Spider-man crossed paths again in 1981, when Superman was clobbered by the Hulk, but the ultimate cross-universe slug-fest was the 1996 series DC v Marvel Comics, in which reader votes determined the outcome of the fights.

73. The final issue of Captain America Comics didn’t feature even feature Captain America. By 1950 the title was known as Captain America’s Weird Tales and bore little resemblance to the sentinel of liberty’s first adventures. The final issue, No 75, contained four horror stories: Hoof Prints of Doom, A Cigarette Stamped Death, The Thing in the Chest and The Bat!

74. The X-Men comic was originally going to be titled The Mutants but Marvel publisher Martin Goodman hated the name, telling Lee that readers would be clueless as to what a mutant was. Lee says that the new name came from the fact that the heroes had extra powers.

75. Stan Lee was prepared to cancel Daredevil if there was any hint the book caused offence to blind people.

76. Readers who alerted Marvel to mistakes in their comics were awarded a No-Prize. This would be empty envelope on which would be written: “Congratulations! This envelope contains a genuine Marvel Comics No-Prize, which you have just won!” The No-Prize has become a much sought-after item for fans.

77. Spider-man revealed his identity to the world in 2006. As part of the huge Marvel crossover series Civil War, in which secret identities are banned, Spidey is forced to unmask himself in front of TV cameras. Everything goes back to normal a year later after the devil magically erases everyone’s memories.

78. One of the first superhero graphic novels was The Silver Surfer (1978), by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

79. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby often appeared as themselves in the Fantastic Four. They first did so in issue No 10 in 1963, which established that they were producing the comic as a newsletter to recount the heroes’ “real” adventures. Artist and writer John Byrne revived the conceit 20 years later by inserting himself into his own story, The Trial of Galactus.

80. The Fantastic Four is never short of surreal moments. The second issue of the comic set the tone when the team hypnotises an invading army of shape-shifting aliens into beginning life anew as cows.

81. Neil Gaiman transported the Marvel Universe to the Elizabethan Age in his acclaimed series Marvel 1602. The Fantastic Four were re-imagined as a group of sea-faring explorers and the X-Men’s arch-enemy, Magneto, was depicted as a leading member of the Spanish Inquisition.

82. Luke Skywalker saved Spider-man. Marvel’s comic book adaptation of Star Wars in 1977 was a runaway success and the only highlight of a very dismal sales year for Marvel. Roy Thomas, who wrote the adaptation, has said that Marvel almost lost the chance to do the comic series because Stan Lee, Marvel’s then publisher, wasn’t interested in the idea of doing adaptations of other people’s work. “Stan whose memory about such matters is generally just this side of amnesiac, has since said since that he was sold on the idea the second time around because Alec Guinness was starring in it,” Thomas said. “Still, adapting a movie into a comic because Alec Guinness was in it would hardly have been a logical move. His name had no marquee value to Marvel’s readers.”

83. Stan Lee wanted to play Jonah J Jameson in Canon Films’ abortive Spider-man movie project in the late 1980s but did not get his wish. He has, however, appeared in almost all of Marvel’s movies since 2000.

84. Wolverine’s origin story was kept a mystery for 26 years. Most superhero comics deal with origin stories in the first few issues but Wolverine was different. His writers fed readers only snippets of his past - he fought in the Second World War, sinister government scientists erased his memories and covered his bones with an indestructible metal alloy, he may have been the first mutant, his real name is not Logan but James - but these only served to make him mysterious. Marvel eventually relented to fan pressure in 2001 and published Wolverine Origin. The series is set in late 19th century and tells the story of a servant girl who befriends a frail, pampered boy from a rich family. After a series of Bronte-like tragedies, the boy eventually turns into the rough, beer-swilling clawed killer fans know and love.

85. Stan Lee has trademarked his catchphrase “Excelsior!”

86. Making the "S" symbol on your chest means Superman in American Sign Language.

87. Back in the Forties and Fifties Australia's favourite comic strip was the Lone Avenger, a masked cowboy modelled on the Lone Ranger. But the hero's popularity and the health of the Australian comics industry took a tumble off a cliff after his creator, Len Lawson, kidnapped and sexually assaulted five models. Lawson was jailed for his crimes but his appeal to be allowed to continue drawing the Lone Avenger was denied. Soon after the media started to rail against the "depravity" of the comics industry, describing Lawson as "the artist of violent comics, which frequently depicted bosomy heroines".

After his release in 1961, Lawson killed a teenage model and then took a gun into a Sydney high school and held several students hostage. He demanded police send him Miss Australia. During the siege, a 15-year-old girl was shot and killed.

88. Chess Boxing was inspired by a comic book. Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh staged a match in 2003, the first time the sport had ever been played, as part of a performance artwork. He said he was inspired by a 1992 comic book by French artist Enki Bilal, in which the two disciplines were combined.

89. Flash Gordon's name was changed in Australia because of Aussie slang. When the character made the leap to Australia in the Forties, publishers were keen to avoid any negative connotations of the word "flash", which had come to mean "showy" and "dishonest" due to the phrase "flash as a rat with a gold tooth". Thus Speed Gordon was born. Strangely enough Speed Gordon soon became slang itself:

The urban dictionary defines it as thus:

To a person who has a lot of shoes, you would say "geez, you've got more shoes than Speed Gordon!" therefore, it is assumed that Speed Gordon has many pairs of shoes, but you - amazingly - have more.

When a person smells quite badly, one might say "Jeff smells worse than Speed Gordon!" again, it is assumed that Speed Gordon's odour is extremely offensive, but Jeff smells worse.

90. Batman nearly uttered the words "To be the bat, or not to be" in The Tragedy of Batman, Prince of Denmark. This was real pitch to DC Comics, by established Batman writers: A caped crusader version of Hamlet. The script by writer Steve Englehart got the go-ahead from publisher DC was the project was pulled at the last minute.

91. The number one women's tennis player in the 1930s later became an editor on Wonder Woman. Alice Marble, who won 18 Grand Slam championships during her career, took up comic book writing for a brief time after her retirement from amateur tennis. She created the "Wonder Women of History", which told the stories of prominent women of history in comic form.

After the US entered the Second world War, Marble became a real-life hero when she was engaged by the OSS to spy on the Nazis. Her mission was to renew contact with an ex-lover, a Swiss banker, and obtain Nazi financial data. The mission ended when a Nazi agent shot her in the back. She survived and recovered but her spy past only came to light after her death in 1990.

92. Marvel Studios has a small team whose sole job is to update the movie universe timeline. Studio head Kevin Feige said: "We have a couple of people in staff at Marvel who are there purely to work on the full timeline, and we use that information to keep everything straight in our heads."

93. Nick Fury was changed to look like Samuel L. Jackson years before his cameo appearance at the end of Iron Man. The classic Fury was a hero who looked like Charlton Heston but Marvel decided to give their heroes a modern twist in 2000, they looked to the coolest cat around on which to base the head of S.H.I.E.L.D. It was a stroke of luck that they got Jackson to play Fury on screen.

94. Fury was not the only actor Marvel based its new-look heroes on. In the Ultimates comic series, Iron Man looks like Johnny Depp, Captain America looks like Brad Pitt and Bruce Banner look like Steve Buscemi. There's even a meta moment in one of the comics when the characters talk about who they'd like to see play themselves in a film.

95. Before Christopher Nolan was hired to reboot Batman and give the hero a darker edge, Warner Bros approached Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky to get Batman back on track. Aronofsky and Batman comic writer Frank Miller turned in a gritty script inspired by The French Connection and Taxi Driver that had Bruce Wayne working in an auto-repair shop and Batman was like Travis Bickle. Aronofsky said the film's opening scene would have been Jim Gordon "sitting on a toilet with the gun barrel in his mouth and six bullets in his hand, thinking about blowing his head off — and that to me is the character". Not one for the kids.

96. Looking for another insane Hollywood take on a much-beloved superhero? Listen to Kevin Smith reminisce about his hellish days working on the shelved Superman Lives. Warning: Graphic language

97. Before he got a regular gig as Commander Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jonathan Frakes used to pay his bills by dressing up as Captain America for comic conventions.

98. Marvel villains Magneto, Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man teamed up with Paul McCartney for Venus and Mars, Wings' follow-up album to Band on the Run. The trio feature in the song Magneto and Titanium Man, in which they do over a bank along with some unknown woman. Like most Wings songs, it is pretty ropey. Check it out here:

99. Gary Larson was once sued for accidentally listing an Australian's number as the Devil's in the Far Side. Defamation expert Richard Potter told the ABC in 2001: "The Far Side case was a cartoon in which the Devil is depicted in Hell, and there's some graffiti on the wall saying 'Satan is a warm and tender guy. For a pleasant conversation, call Satan on 555-1332.'

In America, triple-five numbers are used for the very reason that they can't be mistaken by anyone else, because they don't exist, and so they're used by the media and films and all that sort of thing. But of course the number does exist in Australia, and some very strange and weird people rang the number just to find out who was on the other end, and the inevitable kind of insults followed. So the person whose phone number it was sued but in that case it was held it was so far-fetched you couldn't really say that the meanings contended for, like the plaintiff was akin to the Devil, was a friend of the Devil, you know that sort of meaning, could possibly follow."

* The theme to the Spider-man cartoon was in fact written by Bob Harris and the Academy Award-winning lyricist Paul Francis Webster. Unfortunately Webster didn’t win any awards for “Spider-man, Spider-man, does whatever a spider can”.

Sources: Marvel Database and Brian Cronin’s excellent Comic Book Urban Legends. Parts of the piece have been published before in The Times.

Originally published as Cap killed Nixon, Jacko tried to buy Spidey