A big change for Cap's Kooky Quartet

BACK IN 1965, as I was beginning my life-long association with Marvel Comics, my favourite title was The Avengers. Not the "classic" Avengers line-up of Thor, Iron Man, Ant-Man, Wasp and The Hulk, but the smaller, less-showy group, affectionately dubbed "Cap's Kooky Quartet" by the fans.

When Iron Man, Giant-Man and The Wasp decided they needed a break - after the epic war against Zemo and his "Masters of Evil" in Avengers 15 & 16 (Apr - May 1965) - the founding Avengers recruited ex-villains Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch as replacements then departed, leaving Captain America in charge, a role that was never sought but rather thrust upon him. 

It's all smiles in the final panel of Avengers 16, but challenging times would lie ahead for Captain America and the small band of former super-villains that now made up The Avengers.

This lineup lasted for just seven adventures over 12 issues, but the drama of Captain America trying to lead the small group of strong-minded newbies was often more compelling than their battles against a diverse assortment of super-menaces. From Avengers 17 to 22  (Jun - Nov 1965), covered last time, the inexperienced team faced an increasingly powerful array of foes. With Avengers 23, the Quartet's mettle would face its sternest test ...

Kang the Conqueror had first battled the Fantastic Four, back in FF19 (Oct 1963), in the guise of the bogus Pharaoh, Rama-Tut. Though at this point "Rama-Tut" admitted he was from the 25th Century, he didn't reveal his true identity. Even in his second substantial appearance in Fantastic Four Annual 2 (on sale, 2 Jul 1964), when he rescued Dr Doom from an eternity of floating helplessly in space, the pair speculated that they were related, or possibly the same individual.

Stan has always had trouble spelling "Pharaoh" - first on the cover of Tales of Suspense 44 (Jun 1963), then on the cover of FF19 (Oct 1963). That aside, "Rama-Tut", initially claiming to be from the year 3000, may or may not be a descendant of Dr Doom - which assumes that Doom will have offspring. I just can't picture the despotic ruler of Latveria changing nappies at any point. Click image to enlarge.

It wasn't until his appearance as Kang the Conquerer in Avengers 8 (Sep 1964 - on sale, 7 Jul 1964), that the true picture began to form. After his encounter with Doom in the 20th century, "Rama-Tut" tried to return to the year 3000, but overshot and crash-landed in the year 4000. He quickly took control of this savage, desolate future and became overlord of the warring tribes. Quickly tiring of ruling these war-ravaged lands, he resolved to travel back to the 20th century and conquer a cleaner, greener world.

Despite claiming to be from the year 3000 in Fantastic Four 19 and Avengers 8, in FF Annual 2 and in his later appearances, Kang would say he was from the 25th Century. The above scans are from a later collected Avengers trade, and the original mis-spelling of "Pharoah" has been corrected.

There's a couple of small problems with this scenario. The first and most glaring error is that it's highly unlikely that Kang's ancestor/alter-ego Dr Doom would sit idly by while Kang tried to subdue a contemporary Earth. After all, ruling the world is top of Doom's bucket list. The second is it's quite extraordinary that Kang would travel back to invade our era without at least an honour guard of his future barbarians. You'd have thought his ego would have demanded it.

It proved to be his undoing as, alone, he turned out to be no match for The Avengers and, his weapons ineffective and his battlesuit in tatters, he was forced to flee back to the future. A few months later he would concoct a cockamamy plan to defeat the team in Avengers 11 (Dec 1964) with a robot of Spider-Man. Stan missed a trick here by not emphasising that robots were also a specialty of Dr Doom, thus reinforcing the link between the two, but it's just a minor niggle. What Kang needed was a far more epic vengeance plan, worthy of the character's potential.

Avengers 23 & 24 marked the third appearance of future warlord Kang the Conquerer in the title. This one features battling barbarian hordes, an imperilled princess and the three remaining Avengers fighting for their lives in the future without their leader Captain America.

All of this brings us to the return of Kang in Avengers 23 & 24 (Dec 1965 & Jan 1966). Issue 23 opens with the three remaining Avengers bickering among themselves, but mostly blaming Hawkeye for driving Captain America away. We get a quick glimpse of Cap, in his Steve Rogers identity, getting himself a job as a training partner for a boxing champion in upstate New York. But while that's going on, Kang is laying his plans to strike once again at The Avengers. Believing the team are at their most vulnerable without the leadership of Captain America, Kang decides now is the time to strike and lays a trap to abduct Hawkeye, Quicksilver and Scarlett Witch. The plan does sound a slightly odd note in that Kang doesn't remark that these Avengers have done him no personal injury. It was Thor, Iron Man and Giant-Man - along with Cap - who thwarted his plans twice before.

From the opening scene of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch blaming Hawkeye for the sudden departure of Captain America, through the fragmented battles in Kang's future stronghold to the closing scenes of Kang's barbarian hordes gathering to invade the tiny kingdom ruled over by the Princess Ravonna, Avengers 23 gives us the most "widescreen" adventure in this run of issues.

Nonetheless, the three newest Avengers are trapped and dragged unconscious into Kang's future, where they're placed in giant specimen jars as bait to lure Captain America into a snare. Next we meet Princess Ravonna, whose kingdom is targeted for conquest by Kang. The despot has offered to reprieve her land if the Princess will only agree to marry him. Meanwhile, back in the 20th century, Cap hears that The Avengers are missing and races to help. Unaware that aid is on the way, the three captured Avengers escape their glass prisons through Wanda's hex power and give battle to Kang's soldiers. Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch are quickly recaptured. Only Quicksilver escapes to continue the fight. And it's then that Captain America reaches the Avengers Mansion and issues a challenge to Kang.

With Ravonna overhearing Cap's challenge, Kang has no choice but to accept and brings Cap into the future. Though he initially beats Cap and Pietro, Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch arrive and the Avengers Assemble to sort out Kang once and for all. But Kang outsmarts them and signals his armies to begin the invasion of Ravonna's kingdom, leaving the readers once again teetering on the precipice of a cliffhanger.

For me, what was most interesting part of this issue was the way Kang was depicted as desiring something other than all-out conquest. It would be hard to imagine Dr Doom showing mercy to a region he wanted to invade simply because he was sweet on the ruler. And though this part of the story would show Kang simply trying to conquer the Princess Ravonna in the same way he had conquered countless planets before, this softer side to his character would play out more fully in the second and concluding part of the tale.

Adventure turns to tragedy as Kang finds mercy for the first time through his genuine love for the Princess Ravonna. Yet even the combined powers of Kang and The Avengers cannot prevent Ravonna from becoming collateral damage.

Avengers 24 opens with a slightly odd situation. Inside Ravonna's kingdom: the Princess, her father and their loyal but heavily outnumbered troops; The Avengers; and Kang. Outside the kingdom, Kang's hordes, mounting an overwhelming attack against the stronghold's meagre defences. Yet, even though it looks like the Avengers might prevail by capturing Kang, he escapes them by unleashing a cloud of poison gas and fleeing in the confusion.

Now with no leverage against Kang's invading hordes, Ravonna's generals want to surrender. But Cap gives a stirring speech, shaming the generals into fighting to the last man. Though Ravonna's troops put up a valiant fight, the invaders are soon in control of the citadel anyway and even The Avengers cannot hope to stand for long before such hopeless odds. And so Cap, Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch are dragged, bound, before Kang. Only Quicksilver remains free. Still Kang is interested only in the Princess. Again he demands that Ravonna agree to be his wife, but is interrupted by one of his commanders, Baltag, who says that according to his own rules Kang must execute all defeated leaders. The other generals all agree, and suddenly Kang is facing dissension in the ranks. His only choice now, if he is to save Ravonna, is to ally himself with The Avengers against his own troops.

With such forces arraigned against them, Kang's former followers have little chance and the battle is soon won, with Kang pledging to release Ravonna and her kingdom. But the final twist is that Baltag, still at large, tries to shoot Kang but hits Ravonna, who has thrown herself forwards to shield Kang, just as The Avengers are returned to their own time.

I'd not read this story for a few years and was a little surprised at how complex the tale is. I had forgotten how Stan had humanised Kang by giving him a genuine love interest, which I thought was pretty unusual for the time. Also, Avengers 23 marked John Romita's first work for Marvel Comics since the 1950s. The exact circumstances of how Romita returned to Marvel are related in another blog entry. Working over Don Heck's pencils, Romita turns in workmanlike, if a little blocky, delineation on the first 20 pages of the story. Many faces in the story have little Heck left in them, compared to those inked by Dick Ayers in the following issue. It was the only Avengers Romita inked in this period as he was immediately taken off the assignment and put to work on Daredevil, covering the sudden, though not altogether unexpected, departure of Wally Wood.

The next issue would line up Dr Doom as an adversary for the Quartet, which seems an odd choice, seeing as we've just had two issues of a Doom-related villain.

UNDER DOOM'S DOME

I've never really liked Dr Doom as an antagonist for anyone other than the Fantastic Four. Amazing Spider-Man 5 (Oct 1963) had the first appearance of Doom outside of an FF title, and that was my least favourite of those early Spider-Man stories. 

The thing is, with Doom and the FF it's personal. His sole driving ambition is to prove he's better than Reed Richards - in fact, Stan tells us that on page 2 of Avengers 25. Beyond that, he's really not a bad fella. He rules Latveria as a benign dictator ... the citizens may not have much freedom but they are, for the most part, well taken care of. So pitting him against The Avengers isn't really an ideal fit.

Though Stan spends a page having Doom rehash his links with Kang in a slightly forced soliloquy, he doesn't suggest at any point that Doom is aware of The Avengers' recent battle with Kang, which is odd, as in the last panel of the previous issue, we see Doom overhearing Cap wondering whether they'll ever know the fate of Kang and Ravonna.

"Before I battle the Fantastic Four again, I must fill their hearts with fear," says Doctor Doom, as the tale opens. "And what better way to do so than by defeating another super-powered team, such as The Avengers, with the greatest of ease." That's all the rationale we get. When we cut to Avengers HQ, we're treated to another scene of Hawkeye giving Cap a hard time, which in turn makes Cap question what his purpose is beyond just being Captain America. A few days later, Wanda receives a letter from Latveria telling of a long-lost aunt. Of course, the readers are yelling, "No, don't go to Latveria!" But The Avengers seem blissfully unaware of just who runs that comic-opera european state.

Political incorrectness aside, Doom's kindness here will later be tested when he has the choice of saving the child's leg or keeping The Avengers prisoners.

Even as they arrive, The Avengers are arrested by Latverian police, accused of being spies. However, no jail can hold The Avengers and, even as they escape, their every move is being watched by Doom, who raises a dome over Latveria, trapping all inside.

On the streets, Doom's subjects quickly turn on The Avengers, so they're forced to track Doom to his castle. The confrontation is a bit by-the-numbers and all they manage to do is damage Doom's armour and escape into the countryside. Even as they do, a delegation of villagers shows up, with the child Doom was kind to earlier, asking that the dome be opened long enough for the child to leave for America where he is to receive specialist treatment that will allow him to walk again.

Hearing of the child's plight, The Avengers return to Doom's castle to force him to raise the dome. There's another couple of pages of battle and The Avengers destroy Doom's controls opening the dome so they can escape.

"Enter ... Dr Doom!" is probably the weakest of the Quartet tales, but luckily, Stan had some significant changes in mind, starting the very next issue ... with the return of The Wasp.

But before that I want to look at an aspect of Marvel's history that I don't think anyone else has mentioned ... 

THE MYSTERY OF THE PASTEL SPEECH BALLOONS

In many of the pre-hero Marvel comics, it was quite common for the colourist - mostly Stan Goldberg, I believe - to add a yellow tint to the caption boxes in the stories. This kind of made sense, because it created a visual separation between the narrative captions and the dialogue balloons, which remained untinted.

The yellow tint on the caption box was very common in pre-hero Marvels. This scan is from the Jack Kirby-drawn "Menace from Mars" story in Journey into Mystery 52 (May 1959).

Now and again, we'd see a speech balloon that had a colour tint on it, though this was used to indicate a different tone to the dialogue, for example a voice coming through a radio, or someone shouting. And very occasionally colour would be added to a speech balloon if it was sitting on a white background, so that it wouldn't get lost, floating in a sea of white. At least, that's my guess.

In these closing panels from the Kirby tale "The Day Before Doomsday" in Strange Tales 99 (Aug 1962), colourist  Stan Goldberg has added a yellow tint to the speech balloons in the first panel, presumably so they'll be more visible against the white background.

But sometime during the rise of the superhero stories at Marvel, the tints on the balloons got to be pretty much random. Try as I might, I cannot see a pattern to the layout of the balloons on some pages.

Two panels from "In the Clutches of the Puppet Master" from Strange Tales 116 (Jan 1964). The first panel has a pink tint on The Things's speech balloon, the second panel has yellow tints on both balloons - so it can't be to separate The Thing's dialogue from The Torch's.

It seemed that Stan Goldberg was just dropping tints on speech bubbles randomly. If it had been consistent, even within the same story, it might have been easier to fathom. But where radio balloons might be tinted pink in one story and not at all in another, sometimes the colouring on the balloons would vary even within the same page.

In this short sequence from Avengers 16 (May 1965), The Sub-Mariner's first speech bubble is untinted, but his second has been coloured yellow. The radio bubble coming from The Avengers' sub has a pink tint, but the radio balloon of Namor's reply has no tint. I do not know what the colourist was thinking of.

It's not in the least important in the grand scheme of things. In fact it's probably the most trivial of all the trivia I've covered in this blog. Mostly, I'm just curious to know if anyone else have ever noticed this and whether they've ever managed to see a pattern or a purpose to this most Marvel of practices, which died away during 1966 as mysteriously as it had arrived.

Was this a directive from Stan Lee, or was Stan Goldberg just trying to keep things interesting on the page? We'll probably never know ...

AND BACK TO THE AVENGERS

Avengers 26 & 27 (Mar - Apr 1966) would be the last of the Quartet story arcs. It featured Attuma - another old Fantastic Four foe - who was making another attempt to attack the surface world, this time with a tidal device that would submerge the continents above.

With the Attuma story-arc, Stan siezes the opportunity to re-introduce an old character - The Wasp - and have her act as the catalyst to bring The Avengers into the fight.

The tale begins with the now-familiar scene of Cap gathering the other Avengers in the Mansion, this time to demonstrate an important messaging device given to them by Tony Stark. As usual, Hawkeye is behaving like a six-year-old and this time it's Quicksilver who gets annoyed. A moment later, the pair are at each other's throats and Captain America intervenes as the peacemaker. Hawkeye still flounces out in a huff, though.

Elsewhere, aboard a damaged scientific research vessel, Henry (Giant-Man) Pym and Janet (The Wasp) van Dyne are trying to put out a fire caused by the sudden invasion of Prince Namor, The Sub-Mariner (Tales to Astonish 78, Apr 1966). Thinking Namor is on his way to attack New York, The Wasp has to fly there to warn The Avengers. But on the way, she's captured by Attuma. The big blue despot has no idea who Janet is, but decides to hold her anyway, in case she's a spy for the surface people.

Captured and presumed helpless by Attuma, the Wasp is treated to a complete run-down of exactly how the villain plans to conquer the surface world - which is probably more for the reader's benefit than Janet's.

Janet manages to free herself by shrinking to wasp-size and radios The Avengers for assistance. With Hawkeye still absent, Cap, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch race to Janet's aid. But as they approach Attuma's vessel, The Avengers' jet is grabbed from the air and brought on board the giant sub. The Avengers battle valiantly, but are eventually subdued by Attuma's forces. Then, in time-honoured super-villain tradition, Attuma insists on fighting the Avengers himself, to show his followers just how alpha mer-male he is.

This wasn't be the first time these Avengers had to face an opponent who's stronger than they are. Attuma wasn't quite an A-list villain, as he lacked the personality of, say, Doctor Doom, but he was pretty popular with Stan at this time.

Just as the battle is going against the Avengers, Wanda directs her hex at the very structure of the sub and the hull begins to break apart. The three Avengers are trapped behind a sealed bulkhead as it begins to fill with seawater. Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, Hawkeye arrives at the Mansion to find it deserted. Unable to remember how to operate the message machine, he tries to jog his memory with Tony Stark's "Subliminal Recall-Inducer". And as his sinks into unconsciousness, a sinister figure gains entry to The Avengers' HQ.

The way the Avengers storyline dovetails into the guest appearance of Hank and Jan in Tales to Astonish is pretty neat, and that kind of synchronisation would only be possible as long as Stan was writing all the titles. Tying it all together was the Sub-Mariner's nemesis, Attuma. Never quite gaining the stature of Namor himself, Attuma made many appearances in mid-1960s Marvel comics. Debuting in Fantastic Four 33 (Dec 1964), the Big Blue Meanie tried many times to take over Atlantis from the Sub-Mariner (whom he didn't consider aggressive enough) and to threaten the surface world with all-out war. Attuma would menace Giant Man in Tales to Astonish 64 (Feb 1965) and battle Iron Man in Tales of Suspense 66 (Jun 1965).

What is slightly more interesting abut this issue of The Avengers is that Stan would weave in a parallel story featuring Hawkeye and the Mysterious Villain we see in the last panel of Avengers 26.

In the space of a few pages, Hawkeye defeats "mystery villain" The Beetle, borrows an aircraft from the Fantastic Four and discovers Quicksilver floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. When the four are reunited, it's pretty much the end of the road for Attuma. The Beetle, though, proves to be a different level of threat altogether.

The Mysterious Villain turns out to be former Human Torch and Spider-Man B-list baddie, The Beetle. Probably one of Marvel strangest super-foes of the period, The Beetle was designed by Golden Age Human Torch creator Carl Burgos, which might account for the slightly clunky but oddly appealing appearance of the character. In Strange Tales 123 (Aug 1964) Abner Jenkins invented a battlesuit consisting of plate steel wings which enabled him to fly. Even as a 10 year old, I was pretty cynical about the aerodynamics involved in that concept. The Beetle would go on to fight Spider-Man in Amazing Spider-Man 21 (Feb 1965)) and, later, Daredevil in Daredevil 32 & 33 (Oct - Nov 1967).

After a three-page battle, Hawkeye subdues the Beetle and learns from the message left by the other Avengers last issue that they need his help against Attuma. And at Attuma's attack sub, things aren't going tremendously well for The Avengers. Things take a turn for the worse when Quicksilver is ejected from the sub by one of Attuma's foot soldiers. Rising to the surface, the unconscious Quicksilvers awakens to find Hawkeye standing over him. The two set out to find Attuma's sub and their fellow Avengers. Meanwhile, Captain America plays the old "Your doomsday machine is a fake, Attuma" card. Dopey Attuma falls for it and explains how his tide machine works, giving Hawkeye and Quicksilver enough time to crash their craft through the side of Attuma's sub ... and all heck breaks loose.

The story closes with Attuma's sub exploding after Cap sabotages the tidal machine and The Avengers return to their HQ to find The Beetle has apparently revived and escaped. All of which leads us into the story that will signal the end of an era for Cap's Kooky Quartet.

Avengers 28 (May 1966) was a landmark issue on many levels, but the biggest surprise was the return of a superhero who'd been in limbo for almost a year. The first three pages of the issue establish that The Wasp is missing and that scientist Henry Pym needs The Avengers' help to finding her, revealing that he is actually Giant-Man. Captain America and Hawkeye have another run-in, but this time Hawkeye is markedly less aggressive and accedes to Cap's authority, setting off to fetch Henry Pym with the most muted of grumblings. Then we cut to The Wasp, who it trapped at insect-size in a tiny glass bottle.

The opening of Avengers 28 unfolds at breakneck pace, as Stan gets the story under way with minimum of fuss. Though we still have Cap and Hawkeye bickering, it seems that the archer's attitude to the team leader is mellowing. Then on page 3 we're introduced to the true villain of the piece, The Collector.

Stan's footnote on page 2 explains that we witnessed The Wasp's escape in Avengers 26, but we actually didn't. We witnessed her radioing The Avengers from Attuma's super-sub and that was the last we saw of her. Stan covers that minor mistake with a thought balloon from The Wasp, recalling that she made it to Avengers HQ before losing consciousness. Her captor is The Collector (who would play a part in the much later 2014 Guardians of the Galaxy movie).

Something that puzzled me was The Avengers not knowing that Giant Man was scientist Henry Pym. From all those Tales to Astonish stories I read, it seemed to be no great secret that Hank was also a superhero. When the Giant-Man fan club visited Pym's lab and Janet Van Dyne was present, human-size and unmasked, it never occurred to me that Hank's identity was supposed to be hidden from the public. 

Even as Hank arrives at Avengers HQ, the voice of The Collector is heard coming over the radio, ordering the team to go to a certain location if they want to see The Wasp again. At first the team are reluctant to accept Hank as Giant Man until he can give a demonstration of his powers. The catch is that after years of excessive stress on his body, Hank can only grow to 25 feet, where he must remain for 15 minutes before it's safe to return to normal height.

In the back half of the story, there's a bit of scientific gobbledygook about Henry Pym not being able to stay at his single giant size - 25 feet - for more than 15 minutes. We don't learn the significance of that until the last page, when Hank gets stuck at 10 feet while shrinking and lapses into a coma.

Of course The Avengers, plus the newly renamed Goliath, blunder straight into a trap and are easily over-powered with anaesthetic gas, and awaken trussed up like Christmas turkeys. It's not hard for Goliath to free himself, using his growing powers, then in turn break the shackles holding his team-mates. The Collector scuttles away and The Avengers give chase, but run into The Beetle, instead. Hank is left behind and has his own (huge) hands full when he encounters The Collector. Using "magic beans" from his collection, The Collector summons two giants, who are giving Hank a hard time until Wanda intervenes. The giants despatched, Hank grabs The Collector and forces him to reveal The Wasp's whereabouts. The Collector threatens to shatter her glass prison unless the Avengers surrender. Though Quicksilver manages to snatch the glass phial from The Collector, the wily villain still manages to escape using a handy "temporal assimilator" to transport himself and The Beetle away and out of danger.

The closing scene has Hank try to shrink to normal size, but after staying too long at 25 feet, he collapses unconscious, stuck at 10 feet. And that cliffhanger is where Stan leaves the readers ...

I remember seeing this on the spinner rack when I had just turned 12. I had enjoyed Giant-Man was sorry to see him leave the team back in Avengers 16. So you can imagine how happy I was to see this cover. And if that's a Don Heck costume design for Goliath, it's one of his best. Great cover, great issue.

For my part, I was very excited to see Giant-Man return to The Avengers, despite the change in name and costume. Hank Pym was one of the first Marvel characters I had encountered a couple of years earlier and I always had a soft spot for Giant-Man. I think Stan must've liked the character too, certainly enough to bring him back into the Marvel mainstream after a relatively short absence.

For the preceding 11 issues of The Avengers, Stan had produced an interesting, quirky arc of stories that showed you didn't need the ability to knock down buildings with one hand to be an Avenger. It was a bold and clever move, because as much as kids enjoyed stories of super-powered heroes doing impossible things, it was also refreshing and engaging to see (almost) normal people taking on super-powerful baddies and winning, despite seemingly impossible odds. After all, isn't that what every hero - real or imaginary - is supposed to do?

It hadn't occurred to me at the time, I can now see that Stan was hoping to turn Hank Pym into the Ben Grimm of The Avengers. Where the dynamic had worked so well in the earliest Fantastic Four stories, Stan figured that he could use this book as a vehicle to explore some of those ideas further. But by issue 35, Stan was turning the title over to Roy Thomas and Goliath was given back his power to shrink to ant-size in a low-key scene on page 17 of that issue.

Luckily, by Avengers 35 (Dec 1966) Hank had been experimenting with a "Molecular Space Transformer", which has given him the ability to once again shrink to ant size. Incoming scripter Roy Thomas certainly understood the value of a deus ex machina.

Over the next year and a half of The Avengers, the line-up of Captain America, Hawkeye, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, Goliath and The Wasp would remain pretty stable - for 17 issues - with just Black Widow as a frequent guest star, until Hercules officially joined in issue 45.

I will take a look at that period of the team, but I'll leave that till another post and another time.

Next: We've got you covered

I said, Don't Mess with the logo!

BACK IN THE LAST CENTURY I earned my living in the magazine business ... and the prevailing wisdom at the time was that you didn't ever - under any circumstances - mess with the magazine's logo. In fact, any kind of change to the magazine's masthead was frowned upon, and even re-branding exercises were viewed with much suspicion. In the last entry in this blog, I looked at the many times that Marvel Comics changed their magazine's logos during the 1960s ... it all seemed so much easier then.

But even less acceptable was the idea that you could transform the comic's logo for just one issue for, oh I don't know ... Dramatic Effect. From a marketing perspective, that's an even bigger risk than changing the logo as part of the natural evolution of a magazine's masthead

Strangely, though this blog focusses on Marvel Comics, and I've always maintained Stan Lee was far more willing to experiment with different approaches to comics and storytelling than his rivals, it was DC Comics that seemed more willing to confound the marketers' expectations. Yes, DC's logos had evolved over the decades (admittedly, not much) since their wartime inceptions in the late 1930s and 1940s, but the character logos seemed sacrosanct, not budging one jot during the intervening quarter century. The exception seemed to be Batman.

The Detective Comics logo remained essentially unchanged from its first 1938 appearance right through to the earlier 1960s, when editor Julius Schwatrz was drafted in to give the allegedly ailing title a facelift, beginning with issue 327 (May 1964). (Click on image to enlarge)

"WHOLLY INADEQUATE CIRCULATION, BATMAN!"

Legend has it that Batman was on the edge of cancellation back in 1964. Details are hazy and it does seem very unlikely that DC would have considered shelving their second biggest character. Perhaps they were thinking about shutting down the Batman title and carrying on with Detective Comics? Anyhow, it's easy to believe the legend when you think of all those dopy "Batman in an alien zoo" type stories that Jack Schiff was pushing out during the early 1960s. The facts, however, don't bear that out.

Like Detective, the Batman logo had also stayed the same since its 1940s beginnings. Not even Schwartz's revamp extended to the logo - at least, not at first. Batman 164 (Jun 1964) was the first of the New-Look, but the old-school Batman logo remained for the next five issues until 169 (Feb 1965). With Batman 170 (Mar 1965), the Bat emblem was altered to a more dynamic version, though the calligraphy remained unchanged.

It's certainly likely that the sales on both books were on a downward trend, as DC wouldn't have sidelined long-serving editor Schiff unless the situation was worrying the DC brass. Given that Julie Schwartz had done such a bang-up job with revamping the Golden Age characters Flash and Green Lantern for modern audiences, it seemed a no-brainer to see what Schwartz could do with one of DC's biggest stars. And given the numbers on both titles, there's little doubt that Schwartz achieved what was required of him. But cancellation? I don't see any evidence for that ...

What is known is that DC wasn't that happy with Bob Kane's stranglehold over the title. They were keen to renegotiate the deal Kane had with the company, where Kane did nothing and his team of "ghosts" - Bill Finger, Sheldon Moldoff and Charles Paris - did all the work. Perhaps Schiff was having trouble getting Kane and Co away from the dreadfully old-fashioned and clumsy tales that were being spun in the main two Bat-titles. So perhaps the cancellation story was told to Kane to get him to release his grip and allow DC to move the character in a new direction. Certainly, Kane himself has repeated the cancellation story over the years, for example in Les Daniels' "Batman the Complete History". But if you look at the published sales figures for the two core Batman titles in the first half of the 1960s, the facts don't support Kane's tale.

Batman sales figures
	Detective	Batman
1962	265,000	410,000
1963/4	-	-
1965	304,414	453,745
1966	404,339	898,470

Yes, in 1962, the sales, especially on Detective Comics, were sagging. But still, at over quarter of a million, the title is a long way from being cancelled. There are no figures for 1963/4, but 1965 shows the effect of Schwartz's revised Batman - Detective up by 15% with Batman showing an 11% increase.

Regardless of the background, Julius Schwartz, along with artist Carmine Infantino, managed to revive the fortunes of Batman and though he was permitted to change the style of the Detective Comics logo, the Batman logo - at least at first - remained as it was when the title was first launched in 1940. The thinking behind this is now lost in the mists of history, but looking at the timing of it, I'd speculate that once the DC leadership saw that the new-look Batman was enjoying improved sales, Schwartz was given the green light to give the old Batman logo the makeover it needed.

By the time the Batman tv show had arrived in 1966, it seemed that no one was standing in the way of Schwartz and Infantino and they committed the cardinal sin of messing with the logo. The cover of Batman 194 (Aug 1967) pretty much omitted the masthead altogether and incorporated the word "Batman" - hewn from stone - into the cover art.

A lot of stone would get hewn over the next few years ...

The cover of Batman 194 dropped the traditional bat-shaped logo altogether, so artists Infantino and Murphy Anderson could incorporate the word "Batman" into the artwork. The effect is attention-grabbing, but I doubt that DC Publisher Jack Liebowitz would have allowed this bold experiment without the Batman tv show.

When I saw it in the 1960s - even though I was by then a confirmed Marvelite - I thought it was a pretty cool and striking cover ... and it's pretty much the earliest example I can think of where a comic logo has been altered, or dropped entirely, for dramatic effect. Yet, right on the heels of that, Schwartz did it again with Flash 174 (Nov 1967).

The cover of Flash 174, also by Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson, did away with the traditional logo for a single issue to present cover art that incorporated the hero's name as part of the image.

Whether either change affected sales, it's now impossible to say. I wouldn't seriously suggest that Batman or Flash fans had any trouble finding these issues on the newsstands. Nevertheless, this wouldn't happen again at DC for quite a number of years. Marvel Comics, on the other hand, started messing with their logos on a more-or-less regular basis.

NOW MARVEL'S DOING IT ...

The earliest instance I can recall of a Marvel Comic that departed from the regular logo style would have been on the front cover for Hulk King-Size Special 1 (on sale Jul 1968). That one really messed with the logo in epic style.

This striking cover art was drawn by Jim Steranko. The logo, such as it is, is part of the artwork. But the Hulk's face is not Steranko's. "My Hulk head, they said, was too brutal for the cover," Steranko later reported, "so they had Marie Severin replace it with one of her cute, teddy-bear heads."

Tyro artist and designer Jim Steranko had burst through the "glass ceiling" at Marvel comics as essentially the first new new artist Stan Lee hired during the 1960s. All his previous recruits had been either alumni of the old Atlas Comics or creators from other companies he thought might fit in at Marvel. Steranko was neither. Yes, he'd had a little experience at Harvey, working under veteran editor Joe Simon on Spyman 1 (Sep 1966), though it only lasted three issues before Steranko was out of work again. But not for long.

Steranko's next professional work saw publication in Strange Tales 151 (Dec 1966), just three months later. Working over a Lee/Kirby plot and Jack Kirby layouts, Steranko provided finished pencils and inks for his first episode of Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD. Three issues later, Steranko was doing all the art himself and plotting, with Roy Thomas adding the dialogue. With Strange Tales 155 (Apr 1967), SHIELD had become the Jim Steranko show, with only the lettering being provided by other hands.

JIm Steranko's run on SHIELD - 18 episodes of 12 pages each and four issues of 20 page stories when Nick Fury was spun off into his own comic in May 1968 - was a genuine game-changer. Suddenly, every aspiring artist wanted to draw like Steranko - Barry Smith, Jim Starlin, Paul Gulacy - all owe a larger or smaller debt to him. Neal Adams even included a Steranko tribute in his Deadman strip for Strange Adventures 216 (Jan 1969), where if you squint at the art from the bottom of the page, some pink flames coalesce into the message, "Hey! A Jim Steranko effect!"

It doesn't really work on a computer screen - but if this were a comic book (or you're reading this on a tablet), hold the book out in front of you and squint up the page to fore-shorten the image drastically and you'll be able to read the subliminal message.

Fearing he might miss his monthly deadline on the full-length SHIELD book, Stan Lee had Frank Springer produce a fill-in issue of SHIELD, issue 4 (Sep 1968). Steranko abandoned the strip that had made him famous and cast around for something else to do. He did the cover art for The Hulk King-Size Special 1 overnight when scheduled artist Dan Adkins was unable to take on the assignment. Then he jumped ship to X-Men, pencilling, inking and colouring the cover of issue 49 (Oct 1968), before pencilling the interior art for issues 50 and 51, both inked by John Tartaglione, and redesigning the cover logo. The Steranko X-Men logo would become the standard for the next 30 years.

By 1968, the X-Men logo was looking a little tired. Steranko's revised version is simple, clean and elegant. It was such a strong design that it continued to graced the masthead of the title until March 1998.

After X-Men, Steranko took over Captain America from the departing Jack Kirby, again redesigning the cover logo (covered in the previous entry in this blog), and providing some of the most iconic art of his career.

Right after Steranko's striking and iconic Hulk Annual cover, the regular Hulk comic also broke with tradition to change the logo for a single issue. As noted last time, the Hulk cover masthead was a little uninspired for the first few issues of the run. It took incoming artist Herb Trimpe, possibly taking inspiration from Steranko's Hulk cover which had gone on sale just a month earlier, to incorporate the logo into the artwork for the cover of Hulk 109 (Nov 1968).

The logo used on the first seven issues of The Hulk's own title in 1968 was a rather dull re-working of the one used on the Tales to Astonish masthead. Herb Trimpe's rock-hewn version was a good deal more eye-catching, but was toned down a bit on the logo of the following issue.

The final result was a weird hybrid of the logo that appeared on the very next issue, Hulk 110 (Dec 1968) and the later - and in my opinion less interesting - version that would grace the cover of Hulk 129 (Jul 1970).

There would be other instances of messing with the logo on Hulk down the decades. The rock-hewn masthead would return a few years later with Hulk 340 (Feb 1988), which allowed scope for the artists to once more make the logo part of the cover scene.

As with many new artists, Todd McFarlane evidently wanted to make his mark, as other star-in-waiting artists had, by messing with the logo. This one's okay, but nothing special. I never much cared for McFarlane's monstrous hulk, very much a product of its time. The same idea is explored to even lesser effect in Bill Jaaska's cover art for Hulk 378 (Feb 1991). And as for the cover for Hulk 400 ...

I don't think the cover for Hulk 400 (Dec 1992) really works, as it actually is quite hard to see what the cover logo says. Perhaps if the figure of The Hulk had been stronger they might have gotten away with it. What do you think?

The year following Steranko's ground-breaking Hulk Special 1 cover, DC Comics superstar artist Neal Adams was invited to draw for Marvel. When asked by Stan what title he'd like to work on, Adams recounted, "I asked, 'What‘s your worst selling title?' Stan said, 'The worst selling title is X-Men. We‘re going to cancel it in two issues. So I said, 'I tell you what. I‘d like to do X-Men.' He said, 'But I told you we‘re going to cancel it in two issues. Why do you want to do X-Men?' I said, 'Well, if I do X-Men and I work in the Marvel style, you‘re pretty much not going to pay too much attention to what I do, right?' He said, 'That‘s true.' I said, 'Well, then, I‘d like to do that.'"

It reality, it didn't really turn out that way. Adams completed the interior pencils without incident, then turned his attention to the cover. His first attempt was rejected out of hand by publisher Martin Goodman. Any idea why?

Neal Adams' first version of his cover for X-Men 56 had the main characters lashed to the cover's logo. Martin Goodman felt that this obscured the logo too much and rejected the art. Adams then had to redraw it. Though the logo is still rendered as an object in the final art, no one had a problem with this and the cover made it into print.

Despite the early wobble, as it turned out the X-Men book wasn't cancelled a couple of issues later. Adam's art re-invigorated the title and it trundled on for another year, faltering only after Adams left the title.

Later artists who tried to mess with the X-Men logo had more success, though not always from an artistic standpoint, especially once we got past the 1980s and into the 1990s. Perhaps the Marvel editorial staff felt that the X-Men title was big enough to take the hit, but whatever the reason, the X-Men masthead went on to be come one of the most messed-with in the company's stable.

There was messing with the Uncanny X-Men logo during the 1980s, but it all seemed a bit half-hearted, like someone was waiting to get told off for committing the cardinal marketing sin.

There's three good examples in the 1980s of the artist messing with the logo. Uncanny X-Men 176 (Dec 1983), by John Romita Jr, is a little timid. The logo is rendered as an object being shattered by Cyclops' eye-beam, but it's not especially striking. It probably sounded a lot better on the phone to editor Louise Simonson, but I wonder if the result lived up to the description. JRJR's cover for Uncanny X-Men 181 (May 1984) does exactly what Adams did back on X-Men 56, to less effect and Uncanny X-Men 184 (Aug 1984), doesn't exactly set the logo on fire ... well, it does, but only in the literal sense.

Shattering the logo seemed to be a trend in Uncanny X-Men logo fiddling between 1990 and 2006. Marvel should have been able to come up with more than a single idea in sixteen years, shouldn't they?

The next tranche of logo fiddling came in 1990 and in 2000, where we were treated to some simple logo breaking. Jim Lee did the same trick two issues running as part of the "Extinction Agenda" storyline. Then, on Uncanny X-Men 377 (Feb 2000), Adam Kubert also pulled that stunt as part of the Apocalypse saga. Six years later, Roger Cruz trotted out the same - by now, tired - gag with Uncanny X-Men 474 (Aug 2006).

A bit more rooting around in my back issue box turned up further examples of shattered Marvel logos. Thor offered a couple of examples for your consideration. When Walt Simonson took over the scripting and drawing of Marvel's Mighty Asgardian, on Thor 337 (Nov 1983), the title was in dire need of a shot in the arm. Walt delivered just that and had the new "Thor" shatter the logo on the magazine's masthead. But unlike other applications of this corny old idea, there actually was a reason for it this time. Simonson was signalling his intent to completely re-write the storybook on Thor. Few will argue that he didn't do that. So in this instance, using the image of the logo being shattered actually does work.

Walt Simonson's run on Thor was heralded by this - literally - striking cover. The three year run is considered one of the best in the character's history. The idea was cribbed later on Thor 451 and yet again on Thor 459.

What's especially clever about Simonson's cover is that he doesn't just depict the logo being shattered, but all the "furniture" of the cover. And on the issue immediately after, the old-style Artie Simek designed Thor logo was replaced by a sleek, contemporary design that still managed to evoke the ancient, epic style of Asgard, the calligraphy credited to Alex Jay.

A later issue of Thor, 451 (Sep 1992), repeats the layout of Thor 337, though I haven't read the issue, so I'm not able to say whether there was a reason for this. Then, just a few months later, also for no reason that I'm aware of, the Marvel editorial trotted out the same idea again on Thor 459 (Feb 1993).

The Amazing Spider-Man also had its share of shattered logos. On Amazing Spider-Man 237 (Feb 1983), it works especially well, as cover artist Ed Hannigan has the blast from Stilt-Man's gun shattering not just the logo, but all the other "dressing" on the page, pre-dating the Thor 337 cover by almost a year. Todd McFarlane's cover art for Amazing Spider-Man 328 (Jan 1990) actually pre-figures the same idea he used on Hulk 378 (Feb 1991). It's okay, but as I said, I never cared much for Todd's version of The Hulk. And the idea was used once more on the cover of ASM 382 (Oct 1993), though this is probably the lest effective of the three.

How many ways can you shatter a Spider-Man logo? Not many it would seem. This trope turned up three times during the original run of Amazing Spider-Man, each time slightly less effective than the time before.

And finally, Captain America also got in on the act, using the cliche twice in less than a year. Curiously, the shattered logos on Captain America 354 (Jun 1989) and Captain America 379 (Nov 1990) are identical, barring the colour design. Was there a reason for that? Or was it just the production department taking a short-cut? I wouldn't know as I didn't collect Cap this far into its run.

The only connection I can see between Kieron Dwyer's design of Captain America 354 and Ron Lim's for Cap 379 is the identical logos. Maybe I'm missing something.

WAS IT WORTH IT?

I think if you're going to do something smart and bold with a magazine's cover logo, then the surprise effect will work well. The Batman and Flash covers I talked about at the start of this blog entry are exactly that. But Carmine Infantino was a talented designer as well as artist, so he knew how to break the rules effectively. Likewise with Jim Steranko, whose graphic design skills were a big part of his success, both in his comics of the 1960s and his later publishing efforts in the 1970s. But after a while the messing just falls under the law of diminishing returns.

The list here of messed-with covers not exhaustive, but it is a little exhausting. In many ways, the Marvel editorial made the marketers' case for them. There's probably fewer benefits to be had from messing with the logo than there is from consistency. Evolve the logo, by all means, if it's looking old-fashioned or has just become too familiar. But messing with the logo for dramatic effect - especially when the drama is a bit lame - can only be counter-productive when the same idea is trotted out time after time.

Next: A "mess with the logo" interlude - 2000AD

The Hulk on TV (and Jack vs Stan, again)

THE INCREDIBLE HULK was one of the first Marvel characters to make it to the small screen. Back in 1966, with the quite terrible Batman tv show inexplicably topping the ratings, others were looking around for comic book properties to option. A company called Grantray-Lawrence approached Marvel with a proposal for a syndicated cartoon tv show collectively called The Marvel Superheroes. 

Though the ads called the show "Marvel Super-heroes", the actual on-screen title was "The Marvel Superheroes". The featured characters were the stars of Journey into Mystery, Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish.

The show would be very cheaply produced and use artwork from the comics with very limited animation. Marvel publisher Martin Goodman probably looked at the massive sales boost DC's Batman titles had gained from the Adam West show and figured that with his characters on tv, he too would get a big increase in circulation.

I won't dwell long here on how well or badly the cartoon producers adapted the Hulk comic stories for tv. I covered that process pretty extensively when I wrote about the Captain America cartoons a couple of blogs back. I have to say, though, that the theme tune for The Hulk is way more annoying than the Captain America one ... here's the lyrics:

Doc Bruce Banner,
Belted by gamma rays,
Turned into the Hulk.

Ain’t he unglamor-ous!

Wreckin’ the town
With the power of a bull,

Ain’t no monster clown
Who is as lovable

As ever-lovin’ Hulk! HULK! HULK!

The animators reached back into the vaults and used the story and art from the entire run of the original 1962 run of Incredible Hulk comics, with varying degrees of success.

The DVD of The Incredible Hulk that I have includes a booklet with an episode guide and a breakdown of which comics the cartoons are adapted from.

The remaining cartoons adapted Tales to Astonish 60-62 (Episode 6), 63-65 (Episode 3) 65-68 (Episode 4), 68-71 (Episode 5), 73-74 (Episode 7), 75-77 (Episode 12), 81-83 (Episode 13) and Avengers 2 (Episode 8).

The first episode used the artwork from The Incredible Hulk 1 largely unchanged, though The Hulk is coloured green throughout rather than the grey of the original comic.

The first episode is a pretty straightforward adaptation of Incredible Hulk 1 (May 1962), though for some reason, the communist villain The Gargoyle appears here as "The Gorgon".

The second episode uses the startling Ditko-inked artwork from The Incredible Hulk 2 (Jul 1962). As noted last month, I thought this art looked like there was more Ditko in there than Kirby, and I've always liked this interpretation, though I could see how Stan might think it a bit too fearsome for his then-intended audience of ten-year olds.

Steve Ditko's version of The Hulk, despite working over Kirby pencils, was much more monsterish than seen in the issues on either side.

There was then a smattering of stories from Tales to Astonish before viewers would see an adaptation of one of my all-time favourite Steve Ditko art jobs, The Incredible Hulk 6 (Mar 1963).

The ninth episode of the Hulk cartoon adapts The Incredible Hulk 6, albeit in truncated form, to fit the 13 minute running time.

It's an okay adaptation, but there's the occasional shot where they've dropped in a Kirby Hulk face, then in the very next shot, it's back to the Ditko version again. It must have been a little disconcerting, especially for non-Marvel fans, seeing The Hulk changing in appearance from scene to scene.

The other really weird thing the animators did was to colour the old, clunky Iron Man armour from Avengers 2 (Nov 1963) in the style the newer red-and-yellow Iron Man Armour ... wouldn't it just have been easier to frame the whole episode as a flashback and leave the armour yellow?

The old style Iron Man coloured up to match the newer colour scheme. Is it me, or is that just plain wrong?

But as I don't want to spend an entire blog entry dwelling on the peculiarities of each cartoon, here's a scan of Ditko's original artwork for the for the story's splash page (not owned by me, unfortunately) from that classic Hulk issue ... and then we can move on to something I've been thinking a lot about since last time.

The incredible splash page from The Incredible Hulk 6, as pencilled and inked by Steve Ditko who would go on to revitalise the character during his Tales to Astonish run.

JACK KIRBY - A SLIGHT RETURN

If you're regular reader of this blog, you'll recall I mentioned I had doubts that Jack Kirby could fairly be called the sole creator of The Hulk, as he has claimed in interviews. My main area of concern was that many of the main "distinguishing characteristics" of The Hulk couldn't really be attributed to Jack Kirby, as they hadn't been present during old Greenskin's first appearances in the original run of The Incredible Hulk (1962). Just so we're clear, I think these are:

• Banner changing to The Hulk while under stress (which is related to)
• The angrier the Hulk gets, the stronger he gets
• Hulk always talking about himself in the third person ("Hulk smash!")
• The Hulk's distinctive green skin

Granted the last one is a little debatable, as Jack Kirby rarely was responsible for a character's colours. I only include it here because Hulk's green-ness is a major part of his Unique Selling Point.

Thinking about it over the last few weeks, I realised that what my assertion boils down to is that Jack Kirby's Hulk wasn't the successful one, and it took major intervention by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to turn the character round from cancellation to a cornerstone of the Marvel Universe.

An angry - and very long - interview with Jack and Roz Kirby was published in this issue of The Comics Journal at the beginning of 1990. I still have my original copy somewhere.

A cursory search of the Internet will turn up many differences of opinion around who actually created the Marvel Universe. Mostly, those with a view line up either in the Stan Lee camp or with team Jack Kirby. What is surprising is just how polarised opinions are. And I think Stan Lee has come in for a lot of criticism that isn't actually deserved, based mostly on the assertions that Jack made in his now-notorious interview in The Comics Journal 134 (Feb 1990).

In it, Jack says that Stan made no contribution to the Marvel lineup and that Jack created just about all the Marvel characters alone and that he also wrote all the stories he drew. I found the anger and mean-spiritedness of the interview quite upsetting at the time, as I had always admired both Stan Lee - I'd met him a few times while I worked at Marvel UK during the 1980s - and Jack Kirby, whose work I had actively collected during the 1970s, including all those terrible Archie titles and the pre-hero Marvels.

Jack Kirby, pictured in 1970, and Stan Lee some time in the mid to late 1970s.

How could Jack said such terrible things about Stan Lee, who had always been so generous in giving credit to Jack in both the Bullpen Bulletins and Origins of Marvel Comics for doing most of the creating? Especially given that Jack Kirby had the reputation for being one of the kindest people in the business. For a long time I wondered if Journal editor Gary Groth was taking advantage of Kirby and egging him on to the level of bitterness we see in the interview. But I don't now think that's the case, either.

I do think that from Jack's point of view he actually did create much of the material during the early days of Marvel, but equally, I don't accept that Stan did nothing and just hogged all the glory. I think the issue is that Jack and Stan had very different ideas about what constitutes "creating" a character ... and as a writer and editor myself, I naturally have a little more sympathy for Stan's viewpoint.

BACK TO BASICS

Obviously, when we're talking about things that happened in 1961 and the couple of years that followed, you have to bear in mind that memories get hazy, and all us have a tendency to re-write history with ourselves as the hero. Just look at Future Shock: The 2000AD Story for an example of that. But what is certain is that Stan Lee was the editor at the fledgling Marvel Comics and a story or an idea would not have gone in the comics if Stan hadn't approved. Yes, publisher Martin Goodman had the power of veto, and decided whether titles lived or died, but while a series was running, Stan got to say what saw print and what didn't.

For that alone, even if you don't want to give Stan credit for anything else, you have to admit he had at least the good taste to publish Jack Kirby's (and Steve Ditko's) work. Just what the exact nature of that work was, I will try to ascertain in the paragraphs that follow.

The problem with being ("just") an editor is that when things go wrong, you get all the blame and when things are going swimmingly, you get none of the credit. I learned that hard lesson in the period immediately after my short tenure as editor of 2000AD. My friend Philip de Sausmarez calls it "having all of the accountability and none of the authority". It's also characterised by the phrase, "Success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan". And that's a phenomenon you'll see in just about any business that has a P&L sheet.

Superman was the first "superhero", as you might infer from his name. Immediately he appeared, others scrambled to put out their own versions. Wonder Man was created by Will Eisner and was quickly sued out of business. Captain Marvel on the other hand managed to survive for fifteen years before DC lawyers were finally able to close him down.

To begin to understand how the argument over "creatorship" brewed in the first place, you first have to consider how comics were made and consumed back at the dawn of the industry and how that changed once Marvel Comics evolved new audiences for illustrated storytelling. It's related to the old show business anecdote of the Whistling Dog, the idea behind it being that booking agents were so enthusiastic about the idea of a dog that could whistle that none of them stopped to ask whether the dog was any good at whistling. It was the same with comics. When Superman first appeared in 1938, there was such a scramble among publishers to get their hands on superhero characters that they didn't stop to consider whether the material they were buying was any good or not.

During 1973 and 1974, DC Comics published a number of 100-page editions of their comics. Most of these had just the regular twenty or so pages of new material and padded out the rest with reprints from the Golden Age.

This helps me to understand why it was that I didn't care much for Golden Age comics, while people whose opinions I respected - Roy Thomas and my friend, uber-collector Mike Hill - thought there was nothing better than a Golden Age comic and variously built their careers riffing off those old books or spent hundreds and thousands acquiring the original comics. When DC started publishing their 100-Page Super-Spectacular comics in the early 1970s I grabbed as many as I could to read the wealth of Golden Age material they reprinted. The sad fact was that I found most of those old tales pretty much unreadable. Badly written and crudely drawn, they just didn't have the entertainment value I could find in any Stan Lee comic I cared to pick up.

In the years since, I've thought on-and-off about why that might be. Was it a generational thing? No, because I love movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Okay, is it just that writers were just better thirty years later? Again, no ... movies produced inside the studio system both pre- and post-WWII were always at least competent - some positively shone, when they used writers of the calibre of Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett, Ben Hecht and William Faulkner. These days it doesn't take too much effort to uncover a contemporary movie stinker - just take a gander at SyFy or The Horror Channel ...

Though both Fighting Yank and The Red Bee were reasonably successful comics during the 1940s, hardly anyone remembers them today.

And when you look at the comics that surrounded Marvel on the newsstands during Marvel's formative and glory years, including the DC Comics, you could see that they were still being produced under the same mindset that gave us such long-forgotten characters as Fighting Yank and The Red Bee. And that mindset took the view that The Idea was enough.

In the mad scramble to publish long-underwear characters that vaguely resembled Superman, the publishers and editors didn't much care whether their characters were competently written and drawn, they were just looking to publish something that looked a bit like Superman. Then once the furore died down (and once National got done with suing those who sailed a little too close to the Man of Steel), more skilled creators like Will Eisner and, of course, Simon and Kirby were able to pitch new ideas to editors for characters that were more than just Superman clones.

Though the cover of Jumbo Comics 15 was drawn by Sheena-creator Will Eisner, the interior story was by Bob Powell. The cover and interior art for the Blackhawk story was by Chuck Cuidera, with Eisner supplying only the script.

But again, because this stuff was all so new, packagers like Eisner were able to create concepts, then turn them over to lesser talented journeymen and be confident that the concept was strong enough to carry the books forward, even without the original creator's input. So Eisner (and his partner Jerry Iger) created franchises like Sheena Queen of the Jungle and Blackhawk, and turned them over to competent craftsmen like Mort Meskin, Bob Powell and Chuck Cuidera to do the actual heavy lifting. And through the 1940s, that was enough.

Young Romance, created by Simon and Kirby in 1947, was the first of a boom in "love comics". A few years later, Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein started a deluge of horror comics with Crypt of Terror (later Tales from the Crypt).

As the Atomic Age rolled around, readers began to tire of superheroes and sales began to dip. Publishers panicked and began replacing the costumed characters with different ideas. Simon and Kirby invented the romance comic and everyone scrambled to get aboard the love boat. In 1950, Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein created the first ongoing horror comics and set off another gold rush. But all were still convinced that it was the concept that sold their books. And as far as their existing target audiences were concerned, they were more or less right.

Right at the beginning of the first entry in this blog, I quoted the famous saying, "the Golden Age of science fiction is twelve", which can easily be paraphrased as, "the Golden Age of comics is ten". The point is that the median age of comic readers was traditionally always ten. That held true on both sides of the Atlantic. And ten-year olds are not the most sophisticated of consumers. So while comics were catering to that age demographic, there was no pressure on the publishers to do any more than keep coming up with new concepts. If a book was well-written or drawn, that was all well and good, and would probably contribute to a title's longevity, but the quality of the delivered material was never a deal-breaker. 

I'll admit to reading the occasional Charton comic back in the 1960s. The strips drawn by Steve Ditko, like Gorgo and Captain Atom weren't too bad, but the rest of the company's output was for the most part below average.

Look at Charlton Comics ... the occasional Ditko story notwithstanding, most of their output was pretty terrible and regularly sold 100,000-plus copies per month per title. Heck, Martin Goodman's Atlas comics were routinely a couple of notches below adequate and they too were selling similar numbers. Not even DC (formerly National Periodicals) paid much heed to quality of the material they were publishing. The much-feared and reviled DC editor Mort Weisinger was famously quoted in Steranko's History of Comics as saying of Superman, "He's invulnerable, he's immortal; even bad scripts can't hurt him."

Much as I enjoyed the Julius Schwarz edited DC comics when I was eight, looking back now it's easy to see they had no real humanity about them. No one ever got angry or irritated or sad in a Schwarz book ...

And it was into that exact environment that Stan Lee thought he could launch his own take on superheroes, a view that tried to present super-heroes as real people and have them react to their situations as you or I (or Stan) might react. Now, of course, we take that approach for granted, but back in 1961, no one had thought of that before. Over at DC, Weisinger, and his colleague, editor Julius Schwarz, were still ploughing the furrows that had been marked out during the 1940s, using many of the same writers and artists. Yes, Schwartz's retoolings of The Flash and Green Lantern had a modernistic patina to them, courtesy of the sleek pencils of Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane - and, arguably more important, the glossy inking styles of Joe Giella and Murphy Anderson - but the editors were using the same old writers they'd always used. Gardner Fox and John Broome were still churning out the same old-school, plot-driven stories they had during the 1940s.

PLOT-DRIVEN vs CHARACTER-DRIVEN

It took me years to understand the difference between plot-driven and character-driven stories, though I'll happily admit I can be a bit slow on the uptake. Even though I worked extensively with gifted writers like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and, most notably, Steve Parkhouse, I didn't think too closely about the mechanics of creating a story. I first heard the phrase "character-driven" uttered by Steve Parkhouse. And I had no idea what he meant. But after a while of trying - and for the most part, failing - to create workable fiction, it began to dawn on me that the best stories don't have characters manipulated like puppets to serve the necessities of the plot. You have to have the characters decide the plot turns, based on what the character would do in a given situation.

If you are ever reading a story or watching a tv show or movie and you think to yourself, "Why on earth would he do that?" ... that's an example of a plot-driven story. It means that the character is acting out-of-character in order to help the writer get where he wants to story to get to.

That's what those old Silver Age DC comics were doing, month after month after month. And that works just fine when you're in a marketplace where the customers are young and unsophisticated and are more interested in the novelty of the concepts than they are in the quality of the storytelling. To be fair, it worked just fine for DC pretty much from 1938 right through to about 1965. And as my old Fleetway publisher Jon Davidge was very fond of saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Comics was just about the only area of creative writing where you could get away with that stuff. Okay, there's a special place reserved in Poor Storytelling hell for writers of 1960s and 1970s tv shows ... and now I come to think of it, 1940s radio shows were pretty awful, too. But in the 1940s and 50s, the comic was the nadir of storytelling.

But the problem was that the comic book marketplace was changing thanks, in no small part, to the efforts of Stan Lee. Pretty soon, the old way of creating comics was not going to work. Audiences were becoming smarter, not necessarily good news for the comics industry. Perhaps Stan actually recognised that or perhaps his different approach to how characters were written was just a lucky coincidence. Either way, it lead to an elevation in the average age of Marvel Comics readers and ultimately, to the average age of all comic readers. And that wasn't necessarily good news for the comic industry, either.

WHAT JACK DID

So what exactly was Jack Kirby's contribution to the Marvel Universe and why did he say those terrible things about Stan Lee in that notorious interview in The Comics Journal 134?

After parting company with Martin Goodman over arguments about Captain America royalty payments, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby went over to National where they produced Manhunter and Sandman for Adventure Comics, Newsboy Legion for Star Spangled and Boy Commandos for Detective Comics.

The old school guys, who had come up through the 1940s, really did believe that the Concept was enough. So Simon and Kirby were able to produce Captain America and The Vision for Timely, then move over to National where they first revamped Sandman, then pumped out Boy Commandos and Newsboy Legion, while Captain America Comics continued as one of Timely's best-selling titles.

After the war, Simon and Kirby struck out on their own and published their own comics in partnership with established publishers, starting with Young Romance, Black Magic with Prize and Boys' Ranch with Harvey.

Even as late as the 1950s, Simon and Kirby were coming up with hit concepts, like Boys Ranch, Black Magic and Young Romance, and were well-respected in the industry for it. Towards the end of the 1950s, Kirby took over Green Arrow in 1958 for National after creating Challengers of the Unknown in 1956, neither of which would resemble the Marvel characters that would emerge just a couple of years later.

This was the strip that effectively finished Jack Kirby's relationship with National Comics. Challengers editor Jack Schiff claimed royalties from Jack and the Wood brothers for not very much work (it seems) and the creators fought him in court, resulting in Kirby being blacklisted at National.

Even though he claims not to remember the reasons for his departure from National at the end of 1958 in the Comics Journal Interview, the fact is that Jack Kirby got into a legal battle with National editor Jack Schiff over whether Schiff was entitled to a payment for his minimal involvement with Dick & Dave Wood and Jack Kirby's syndicated newspaper strip, "Sky Masters of the Space Force". And even though Kirby eventually lost and Schiff got his money, National closed ranks and by the beginning of 1959 Jack Kirby had no one else to sell his pencil to but Atlas.

At Atlas, Kirby was content to coast along on the monster books for almost three years before he or anyone else thought about doing superhero characters. It's fairly well-documented that Martin Goodman wanted something that would cash-in on the rising success of National's Justice League of America comic and instructed Stan to produce a team-up book with Captain America, Human Torch and Sub-Mariner. What happened next would change the course of Martin Goodman's, Stan Lee's and Jack Kirby's lives.

And this is where accounts vary.

Jack Kirby has always maintained that he and he alone came up with the concepts for The Fantastic Four. And let's allow for a moment that that's true. But if, as Jack claims, Stan did nothing, why is it that everything Kirby did both before and after Marvel doesn't read like his Marvel stuff?

I think it was because in Jack Kirby's mind, The Concept was all that mattered. He didn't understand character-driven stories, and so provided concepts (and plots) along with his art, but didn't bother with stuff like motivation and characterisation.

The perfect example of why it matters how a comic is written is The X-Men. When the title began in the early 1960s, it sold well enough and after running for two years, was finally stable enough to go monthly. First Kirby stepped back, then Stan handed the reins to Roy Thomas ... and then the title began to founder. Three years later, it was cancelled. If the title was succeeding on the strength of its concept alone, it should have lasted longer. The problem was that it was a great idea, just not very well done - and by the mid-1960s, you just couldn't get away with that any more.

By the late 1960s, The X-Men was selling the lowest number of copies of all the Marvel super-hero titles. Even Sgt Fury was selling better than X-Men. The new X-Men revamp of the mid-1970s was a whole different story, though.

When The X-Men was revived in 1975, it was pretty much re-tooled from the ground up to be very much character-driven, with new X-Men members who were written much more in a Stan Lee than in a Jack Kirby style. And we all know how the title performed after that.

WHAT STAN DID

When Stan worked with Jack on those early comics, Stan brought something to the table that didn't appear in the mags of other publishers at that time - emotions. For the most part, Superman, Batman, Flash and Green Lantern were deadpan and emotionless in every adventure. If Superman experienced any emotion, it was because of Red Kryptonite. Certainly Kirby's Green Arrow or Challengers never expressed annoyance or fear. Jealously was something that only Lois Lane displayed.

These two DCs are cover-dated the same month as Fantastic Four 1 (Nov 1961). Seems that Superman's toughest day is because his robot's melting fingers might give away that Clark Kent is Superman. I'm not sure how Lois would get from A to B with that one, but never mind. Over in Lois's own title, her big problem is she's inexplicably acting like a ... umm ... hussy.

The Fantastic Four, however, were a big bundle of unrepressed emotions. The Torch was playful and irritating, and The Thing was irritated, morose and short-tempered. Mr Fantastic was boring, pompous and over-protective of Sue, and Invisible Girl was solicitous, caring and yes, even occasionally, jealous.

Not only that, but those elements of emotion appeared all the way through the Marvel line, whether Jack was drawing the comics or not.

And, most importantly, the effect was that it attracted readers older than that traditional ten-year-old demographic. So readers stayed with Marvel Comics past the age when boys normally gave up comics and got interested in sport or girls. And that's what shaped the comics industry right up until the present day.

HOW MARVEL CHANGED THE COMICS INDUSTRY

Today, the audience for comics is largely a nostalgic one. Very few young readers are coming in at the bottom end of the age-range. There have been many discussions about why that should be, though few have been able to offer a solid explanation. My own view is that it's a collision of several factors. 

The tv versions of Sheena, Superman and Flash Gordon. Comic sales began their long, slow decline in the late 1950s. Many kids of comic reading age were able to get their comics fix (and other similarly themed entertainment) on television ... for free.

Television was certainly a big one. In the late 1950s, kids could watch the dramatised adventures of Superman, Flash Gordon and Sheena Queen of the Jungle right there in their own living rooms. For free. And tv made audiences lazy. Why go to the bother of reading when you can lie on the floor and have the actors talk out of the television to you?

As the Sixties rolled into the Seventies, kids' toys got more sophisticated, then computer games came along, and by the end of the 1970s newstand comic sales had tanked. So the industry came up with a new plan ... and serviced the aging fans via comic shops and the direct market.

And all that time, with Marvel offering stories aimed at older readers, and DC trying to follow that trend, and with continuity becoming ever-more involved, it's no wonder that new readers in that 7-8 age range weren't getting into comics to replace the readers lost at the top of the age range.

So for the last forty odd years comics have come to rely more on retaining the readers they already had, catering to them past the teenage years and well into adulthood. 

... AND BACK TO THE MAIN POINT

All the time that the comic industry was changing, because of what Stan was doing with the stories in Marvel Comics, Jack Kirby seemed oblivious. He didn't realise that the audience demographic was changing and that the readers were buying Stan's stories because of the emotional connection they felt with the characters and their situations.

Much of the time, Kirby didn't even look at the finished comics, so maybe he was assuming that the stilted dialogue he was scribbling in the page margins of his pencils was being faithfully lettered by Sam Rosen. And even if he had read Stan's dialogue, I doubt he would have understood how Stan had made it better.

Of course, sometimes, Stan wanted the story to be slightly different to how Kirby, or Ditko, had drawn it, and would get other artists to make changes, so the art would conform to Stan's dialogue. But that's what most editors do. Some are more considerate about it than others, but essentially, editors regularly change stuff before it goes to print. Even book editors who are dealing with sole authors and actual copyright holders. I don't think that could have been a surprise to Kirby.

Here's an extract from the New York Herald-Tribune article by Ned Freedland. The full article was reprinted in The Collected Jack Kirby Collector 4.

I think Jack Kirby's bitterness towards Marvel, and especially Stan, in the late Sixties was a combination of Jack simply not understanding that the audience for comics had moved on since the 1940s and 1950s and a Big Idea was no longer enough, plus Jack not appreciating the enormous contribution Stan's humanistic dialogue was making to the finished product. What finally tipped Jack over the edge was that 1966 article in the New York Herald-Tribune by Ned Freedland that made Stan out to be the driving force behind Marvel and Jack to be like the "assistant foreman in a girdle factory". Jack - somewhat unreasonably - blamed Stan for the tone of the article and their relationship was never the same again.

WHAT A SHAME

It's a real pity that Jack Kirby reached the end of his life believing that Stan Lee screwed him over. Because when you look at the evidence and listen to what others, who were there at the time, say ... well, that just doesn't hold water.

Stan pretty much invented credits on comic books. At the time, no one else did it. Occasionally, artists would sign their work - and more often than not the production department would white the signatures out - but it wasn't common. If Stan really was the egotistical maniac Kirby made him out to be, Lee would have credited just himself or left the artist's name off. In fact, Stan went all out to create a star system at Marvel and freely talked about how the Marvel Method worked in his Bullpen Bulletins.

John Romita told the Comic Book Artist, "I had heard all of the inside stuff, like from the Herald-Tribune article that insulted Jack, that he thought Stan was a part of. Stan could not convince him of that, and certainly could not convince Roz that Stan hadn’t encouraged the writer to make fun of Jack. I know for a fact that Stan would rather bite his tongue than say such a thing, because Jack’s success would've been his success. There’s no reason to run Jack down. Stan had the position; he didn’t have to fight Jack for it. I don’t think Jack ever wanted the editorial position; if he wanted credit, he deserved credit. Stan used to give him credit all the time; he used to say most of these ideas are more than half Jack's."

If anyone screwed Jack, it was Martin Goodman. But even then, Marty was just following industry practice. Original artwork was never returned. In fact, the companies went as far as supplying pre-printed art boards to the artists so the pencillers couldn't claim they owned the physical bristol boards. And Marty thought credits were a courtesy, one he'd never have extended without Stan's urging.

Should Marvel have paid Kirby and his family when the characters made millions in other media? Well, yes ... it would have been the decent thing to do. But when have you ever heard of a big company paying anyone unless it absolutely has to? And Stan had asked Jack many times to join the Marvel staff as Art Director, but he always refused. Perhaps if Jack had taken the company shilling, he too might have end up with a million-dollar pension for doing the occasional promotional appearance.

But it wasn't to be, and Jack Kirby went to his grave believing that Stan Lee had betrayed him, which doesn't seem to be the case at all. And that is the real tragedy here.

Next: Some Astonishing Tales