Daredevil: Hooray for Wally Wood

THE VERY FIRST DAREDEVIL comic I ever saw - around Easter 1965 - was Daredevil 5 (Dec 1964), with its striking Wally Wood cover and interior art. It was also Wood's first work on the title, and for Marvel, taking over from his old EC colleague and occasional inker Joe Orlando.

Daredevil 5 was Wally Wood's first work for Marvel since the four stories he'd done for Atlas around the middle of 1956, shortly after the tragic collapse of EC Comics, and an uncredited pencil job under Colletta inks for Love Romances 96 (Nov 1961), coincidently the same month that Fantastic Four 1 came out.

At the time I was mesmerised by the idea of a blind superhero and - not knowing Wally Wood from Adam - Stan's cover blurb trumpeting the arrival of "the brilliant artistic craftsmanship of famous illustrator Wally Wood" completely passed me by. This may not have been the first time Stan puffed up an artist on the cover of one of his mags, but he'd never done it with this much hyperbole before.

However, as much as I loved the very idea of Daredevil, I wasn't mad about Wally Wood's art in this issue. Admittedly, at the time, I certainly wasn't aware of the brilliant work he'd done on the EC science-fiction titles, but my sensibilities were more in line with the work of Kirby, Ditko and Heck, and this new guy, with his tiny figures and crowded pages, just wasn't ticking any boxes for me.

WHO THE HECK IS WALLY WOOD?

Wallace Allan Wood was born in Menahga, Minnasota on 17 July 1929. As a child he devoured the great newspaper strips, like Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant and Terry and the Pirates. In love with drawing, he once dreamed he found a magic pencil that could draw anything. Wood graduated from high school in 1944 and enlisted in the Merchant Marine. In 1946, he transferred to the US Army Airborne 11th Paratroopers and was posted to occupied Japan. After demob in 1948, Wood found work as a waiter, and lugged his bulging portfolio around New York, trying to get drawing work from any publisher who'd let him in the door.

Wally Wood

Wood's luck began to turn when he met John Severin in a publisher's waiting room in October 1948. Wood visited the Charles William Harvey Studio where Severin was working and was introduced to Charles Stern, Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman. Learning that Will Eisner was looking for artists, Wood hurried over and was hired on the spot to draw backgrounds on The Spirit. The following year, Wood became an assistant to George Wunder, who'd taken over drawing Terry and the Pirates.

A George Wunder Terry and the Pirates daily from 1949. This would have been the period that Wood was working as one of Wunder's assistants, inking backgrounds and perhaps lettering.

Also during 1949, Wood got a foot in the door at Fox Publications, doing lettering on romance comics. He quickly graduated to backgrounds, then inking. Towards the end of 1949, Wood was contributing illustrations to the pulp magazines Six-Gun Western, Fighting Western, and Leading Western, for Trojan Publishing's Adolphe Barreaux, as well as getting actual comics work from Fox. His first Fox art was a ten-page story, "My One Misstep", in My Confession 7 (Aug 1949). More stories followed in My Experience, My Secret Life (he did his first Fox cover for issue 23) and My Love Affair.

While at Fox, Wood turned his hand to any kind of comic ... romance, classics and crime.However, it wasn't long before his varied work for Fox caught the eye of other publishers in the field ...

Pretty soon, Wood was branching out into other genres, doing comedy (Judy Canova), crime (Martin Kane, Private Eye) and jungle (Frank Buck). "For complete pages, it was $5 a page ... Twice a week, I would ink ten pages in one day," Wood later recalled in a 1981 interview for The Buyers' Guide. It was inevitable that others would notice Wood's talent and with new art partner Harry Harrison, Wood started contributing art to the blossoming EC comics - at first on Pre-Trend titles like Modern Love 5 (Feb-Mar 1950) and Saddle Romances 11 (Mar-Apr 1950), and on the very earliest New Trend titles, starting with Crypt of Terror 18 (Jun-Jul 1950) and Weird Fantasy 14 (Jul-Aug 1950).

Wally Wood's first work for EC was good (Weird Science 5, Jan-Feb 1951), but within a few short months, his art style transformed into something phenomenal (Weird Science 13, May-Jun 1952). And at the very same time, his old boss, Will Eisner, hand-picked Wood to take over the art on The Spirit (27 Jul 1952) for a brilliant (but ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to update the strip for the Space Age.

Very, very quickly, Wally Wood went from being a jobbing artist to a master craftsman. The speed of his improvement was simply astonishing. And even more incredibly, despite the ever-increasing amount of detail in his pages, he turned out art faster and faster. He would be one of Harvey Kurtzman's go-to artists for the new MAD comic (which would become vitally important later on in his career), where he'd craft pitch-perfect parodies of the great comics strips he'd loved as a kid, like Superman, Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant. And in his spare time, he managed to find time to draw a couple of classic comics for Avon ... 

Even while working almost flat-out for EC Comics, Wood moonlighted at Avon, producing high-adventure, science fiction and horror stories with equal ease. The quality never faltered ...

By mid-1952, Wood was working exclusively for EC, earning a princely $50 a page (by contrast other publishers were paying $15-20 a page). For the May-June 1952 issues alone, he contributed:

• seven pages to Two Fisted Tales 27, 
• cover and seven pages to Shock Suspenstories 3, 
• a six-pager and an eight-pager to Weird Fantasy 13 
• a cover plus an eight-pager and a six-pager to Weird Science 13. 
• And, of course, four weekly eight-pagers for The Spirit newspaper strip. 

That's 76 pages - pencils and inks over an eight week period ... 38 pages a month ... all of it finished to an incredible standard. No artist today could compete with that schedule. Wood was like an unstoppable machine. 

His value to EC was cemented by Editor Al Feldstein, who wrote a love-poem to Wood, "My World", illustrated by Wood himself, which ran in Weird Science 22 (Nov-Dec 1953)

No other artist at EC was treated with the level of respect that Wally Wood enjoyed. His work got better month-by-month and Wood ultimately became the star of his own strip in the last issue of Weird Science.

In his mid-twenties, Wood was having the time of his life. He was earning an eye-watering amount of money. His work jags lasted for days until he collapsed at his drawing board. His marathon art sessions were fuelled with alcohol. But he was young and his body could take the extraordinary punishment.

Even when EC crashed and burned in 1955, after the the Comics Code killed the horror books, and Bill Gaines' attempts to do the sanitised New Direction books (including Aces High, Extra, M.D. and Valor) failed, there was still MAD. Gaines turned his comedy comic into a 25c magazine, raised the page rates even higher than they were on the EC colour comics, and for the next ten years, Wood cruised straight on as MAD's star artist, winning "Best Comic Book Artist" two years in a row at the 1957 and 1958 National Cartoonists Society Awards. But even that wasn't enough ...

For about 12 glorious months, Wally Wood inked Dave Wood and Jack Kirby's Sky Masters newspaper strip, selected for the job - no doubt - because of his stints on the Weird Science/Fantasy comics for EC and of course "The Spirit on the Moon" for Will Eisner.

In 1958, Jack Kirby asked Wood to join a space-oriented newspaper strip project as inker. The strip had begun life as "Space Busters" devised by Kirby and scripter Dave Wood (no relation), but they'd been unable to find a home for the strip. Early in 1958, DC editor Jack Schiff was approached by an agent, Harry Elmlark, who was looking for a syndicated space strip for the newspapers. Kirby and Dave Wood showed Schiff Space Busters, but he wasn't that impressed. But he did encourage Kirby and Wood to take another swing at it, very likely offering some ideas of his own. The project morphed into Sky Masters of the Space Force and that was when Kirby asked Wally Wood to ink the strip.

In the late 1950's, Wally Wood was still MAD's busiest artist, and was creating gorgeous illustrations for science fiction market-leader Galaxy. It was probably the very pinnacle of his career. But trouble was just around the corner ...

By this time, Wally Wood was working almost exclusively for MAD, but was also providing high quality illustrations for men's magazines and science fiction magazines like Galaxy. It all went well for a while, but then Kirby had a falling out with Schiff over payments and the whole thing turned legal. So Wally Wood left them to their squabbles - and dumped Challengers of the Unknown, which he'd also been inking over Kirby - and once again concentrated on his MAD work and his science fiction illustrations. But as the 1950s drew to a close Wood was feeling restless and a bit put-upon. He was suffering from chronic headaches and was drinking ever-more heavily to dull the pain. This, coupled with the crash of Sky Masters, led to him becoming tetchy and in 1964, as his art was beginning to suffer, MAD rejected one of his strips, Wood's first rejection since around 1950. Making matters even worse, the editor who rejected his art was Al Feldstein, the same guy who'd written "My World" ten years earlier. Feeling crushed, Wood phoned the editorial offices and quit MAD.

Artist Russ Jones, who'd been assisting Wood at that time recalled in a later interview, "MAD sent Woody a rejection slip on a comic strip lampoon, and it about killed him. Yes, the job was covered in liquid paper, but it was great compared to what Bob Clarke produced. I think the guys at MAD were just kidding around, but it backfired! I stood rooted when Wally called Bill Gaines and quit. Poor Bill ... he called many times to try and talk Woody back ... but no go. Poor Wally ... he threw out his biggest client. The whole affair was sad. No winners."

For Monster World 1, Wood wrote and drew an adaptation of the 1932 Universal horror, The Mummy. The next issue of the magazine continued the Mummy adaptations, but Wood was conspicuously absent, turning the work over to assistant Russ Jones and former EC stablemate, Joe Orlando.

With all his bridges burnt, Wood had nowhere else to go, so he returned to four-colour comics, first working for the lowest payers in the field, Charlton, on war books like D-Day 2 and War and Attack 1 (both Fall 1964), then a quick eight-pager for Warren's Monster World 1 (Nov 1964) - an adaptation of the Universal horror movie The Mummy, with assistant Russ Jones. It was at this low ebb that Wood - probably on Joe Orlando's advice - turned to Stan Lee for work and was assigned Daredevil. And that's why Stan was trumpeting the arrival of Wood on Daredevil as though it were the Second Coming ...

THE ARTIST WITHOUT FEAR

With his second job on Daredevil - issue 6 (Feb 1965) - Wood seemed to have a better grasp of what Stan Lee was looking for, but for my money, the pacing was still off. Too many pages in the story are covered in speech balloons, making me think Wood hadn't devoted enough space to the character exposition that Stan liked to include in his books. On the other hand, the action sequences were very well thought-out. Wood had wisely cut back from the amount of detail he would have included in his EC science fiction strips, rendering his fight scenes in a clean, spare style that far better suited the material.

Wood's work on Daredevil 6 was a slight improvement over the previous issue, but the civilian scenes were still way too wordy and the fight sequences, while well crafted lacked variety.

But something wasn't quite right. It was as though Wood didn't get the Marvel way ... Was he just phoning the work in? Probably not, though long-time collaborator Dan Adkins said of that period, "[Wood] got the highest rate in the industry. $200 per page at MAD magazine where he was the most popular artist. When he quit MAD magazine and went over to Marvel Comics, Marvel's starting rates at the time were $20 per page to pencil and $15 per page to ink. Out of respect to Wally, they paid him $45 per page to pencil and ink, but not the bonus money he was looking for."

When viewed as single units the Daredevil pages looked, well, same-y. Where Kirby or Ditko would mix long-shots and close ups depending on the needs of the scene and the emotion to be conveyed by each panel, Wood framed everything at the same distance.

Some time later in his career, I wasn't able to determine when, Wally Wood created the legendary 22 Comic Panels That Always Work ... but I wasn't seeing any evidence of that thinking in Wood's Daredevil stories.

The story itself united two b-class villains - The Ox from Amazing Spider-Man 10 & 14 (Mar & Jul 1964), and The Eel, last seen battling The Human Torch in Strange Tales 117 (Feb 1964) - with a new villain, Mr Fear, whose "fear gas" can turn anyone into a nervous wreck. It's an interesting idea, pitting The Man Without Fear against Fear itself ... but what should have been a definitive clash of opposites ends up being a fairly pedestrian filler issue. Fortunately, the title would move up a gear with the next issue.

Daredevil 7 (Apr 1965) was where Wally Wood took hold of the character and began to make Daredevil his own. First, he redesigned DD's costume, using the devil part of the character's name to inspire a more streamlined approach, and giving the hero a satanic look.

Daredevil 7 introduced a new costume for DD and demonstrated that the hero's will was almost as powerful as The Sub-Mariner's sea-born super-strength.

Next, Wood's story breakdowns and page design seemed much more confident. Yes, he was still using sequences of mid-distance shots for most of the fight scenes, but there was a much more concerted effort to mix up the long-shots, close-ups and splash panels.

The plot has Sub-Mariner return to the Surface World to bring a civil lawsuit against the air-breathers for depriving his people of the right to live on land. And he decides that Nelson & Murdock are the lawyers for him. But the attorneys tell him that there's no one to sue, as no individual, company or nation represents the entire human race. So Namor decides that causing a bit of mayhem and getting arrested will get him his day in court. This part of it sounds very much like a Lee plot device.

No sooner has The Sub-Mariner surrendered himself to the police and is arraigned for his crimes than word reaches him that the craven Warlord Krang has instigated a rebellion against Namor in their native Atlantis. The Sub-Mariner decides the needs of his realm are more pressing than his legal case against the humans and leaves the jail as though the bars were so much cardboard. The final battle, in which a hopelessly out-matched Daredevil fights Namor until he passes out, pretty much defined the hero's character for the next couple of decades.

But already, Wood was feeling he was being taken advantage of. The Marvel Method used by Stan, which worked pretty well for his other artists at this time, was rankling Wally Wood. He felt that he was doing at least half Stan's job without getting the credit or the payment that he deserved. Later, in an angry editorial in his self-published Woodwork Gazette, Wood described an editor he called Stanley, who "came up with two surefire ideas... the first one was 'Why not let the artists WRITE the stories as well as draw them?'... And the second was... ALWAYS SIGN YOUR NAME ON TOP... BIG."

Here's something interesting ... Wood's original layout for Daredevil 7 page 4. You can see that Stan has asked for changes and the finished art is slightly different from the first pencil rough.

Nonetheless, Wood sucked it up and carried on as, at this point in his career, he didn't have that many options open to him. 

Daredevil 8 (Jun 1965) introduced a new villain who, though a little bonkers, I always quite liked ... The Stilt-Man. It was also the second cover in a row to feature a newspaper headline as a way of explaining what was going on. Maybe Wood wanted that to be a thing, but it didn't pan out, or perhaps it was just coincidence.

Daredevil 8 gave us a cut-away plan of Daredevil's billy club. Later in the issue, it's also revealed that Daredevil's cowl contains sophisticated radio equipment to monitor police wavebands. Later in his career, Daredevil's powers would let him do that without the need for electronics. During the battle, Wood gives us some nice images of Stilt-Man towering above the city skyline.

The story has Matt Murdock engaged by a scientist who says his invention has been stolen by his employer. But as Murdock investigates the claims further, it becomes apparent that whoever has the invention is also The Stilt-Man. No prizes for guessing who the real baddie is ...

At the same time, Stan (I'm sure it was Stan) is planting seeds, suggesting that it might be possible to restore Matt's vision. In fact, Karen Page is shown suggesting that Matt consults an eminent Boston eye specialist, Dr Van Eyck. But Matt is reluctant, fearing it may compromise his powers, and Karen gets angry with him and storms out. And this sets up the situation for the next issue ...

Daredevil 9 drafted in Giant-Man artist Bob Powell to help Wally Wood by doing finished pencils over Wood's layouts. I'm not sure how that helped Wood, given that he was still (to his mind) co-writing the comic without credit or payment. The tale itself is fun, pitting Daredevil against knights in armour, a common Wood trope.

Some changes were in effect with Daredevil 9 (Aug 1965). Even though Wood was a proven speed-demon, he's assisted on this issue by Bob Powell, with whom he'd worked on the notorious Mars Attacks gum-card series. Powell had also stepped in when Joe Orlando found himself unable to work with Stan Lee on the Giant-Man strip a few months earlier.

The plot contrives to send Matt Murdock, at Karen Page's instigation, to a European dictatorship, run by an old college acquaintance of Murdock's Klaus Kruger, the Duke of Lichtenbad, whence eye specialist Dr Van Eyck has emigrated. Once there, Daredevil is caught up in a peasants' revolt and battles Kruger's palace guards, who are all togged up in medieval armour. It's quite a fun issue, and I was always a sucker for knights in armour ...

Issue 10 brought more changes in the creative duties. With Wood increasingly disgruntled with Stan Lee's way of working, Stan credited Wood with writing as well as drawing the story, with Bob Powell providing layouts. But the way Stan did it only served to enrage Wood further.

It seems likely that Wood was agitating behind the scenes to be given proper credit as co-writer on the Daredevil comic. And with this issue he gets his wish. Continuing his fondness for cutaways, this time round Wood gives us a diagram of The Organizer's headquarters.

The intro of the splash page of the issue says, "Wally Wood has always wanted to try his hand at writing a story as well as drawing it, and Big-Hearted Stan (who wanted a rest anyway) said okay. So what follows next is anybody's guess. You may like it or not, but, you can be sure of this ... it's gonna be different!" It's not the most gracious announcement I've ever seen, but there's another caption box at the end of the story that might give further insight into Stan's tone.

Apparently, after campaigning to be credited with writing Daredevil, Wood declined to script the second half of the story, leaving Stan to sort out the plot threads as best he could. "Now that Wally got writing out his system," says Stan's closing caption, "he left it to poor Stan to finish next issue. Can he do it? That's the real mystery! But while you're waiting, see if you can find the clue we planted showing who the Organiser is! It'll all come out in the wash next issue when Stan wraps it up. See you then!" So I can begin to see why there might be some growing acrimony between Stan and Wally. It's likely this is the point where Wood had told Stan that he was quitting

All that aside, Daredevil 10's not half bad ... there are a few stylistic differences, but broadly Wood does a pretty good job of making the characters all sound like themselves. And with Bob Powell doing the layouts, there's much more variety in the framing of each panel. 

The plot has a mysterious character, The Organizer, recruiting a quartet of crooks and giving them animal costumes and powers to carry out a series of crimes. They are Cat-Man, Frog-Man, Bird-Man and Ape-Man. Given Stan's penchant for animal-themed villains, I suspect he may have had something to do with the casting. Curiously, though there is an Ape-Man featured as one of The Owl's henchmen in Daredevil 3, Ape Horgan, this one appears to be a different person, Monk Keefer. Even more confusingly, the Cat-Man character in this tale has the civilian name of Townshend Horgan. Was he intended to be a relative of the first Ape-Man? Or did Wood (and Stan) just get a bit muddled with their characters' names? It's the sort of continuity glitch that Roy Thomas would obsess about fixing in Marvel's later years.

There's further dissension in the letters column. One reader, Larry Brown, complains that Daredevil is turning into Gadget Man and that "all these gadgets detract from the credibility." In the response, Stan says, "Want us to let you in on an inside squabble, Larry? Sturdy Stan agrees with you - he is also opposed to so much gadgetry. But Winsome Wally really digs those hoked up appurtenances, and - being Wally's the guy who has to draw them, Stan went along with him. But we'll see how the future mail goes." Thus were the battle lines drawn. There probably wasn't any walking back from this point.

We probably shouldn't be that surprised to see Stan taking potshots on the Daredevil letters page. He must have been pretty ticked off with Wally Wood. And while it's not like Stan to be anything other than gentlemanly, he couldn't have been best pleased at Wood's attitude, considering Stan likely saw himself as trying to help out an artist he admired who was going through a bad patch. And given the circumstances, Wood's tetchiness is not that surprising either, as from Wood's point of view, Stan was getting him to co-write the comic - perhaps more than co-write - take all the credit and pay him just $45 a page. After all, at MAD they gave him full scripts and paid him $200 a page.

Daredevil 11 was plotted and scripted by Stan, pencilled by Bob Powell and inked by Wood. In the circumstances, the most surprising thing is that Wood stuck around long enough to ink the story at all. In the event it's not a bad issue, and benefits from some of Powell's characteristic touches, like the cinematic four panels across the top of page 17 (above right).

Daredevil 11 (Dec 1965) left Stan trying to finish a story begun by Wally Wood. He actually does a pretty fair job, though at times there looks to be a bit to much text on the page. The pacing of the hectic story is much helped by Bob Powell's layouts and pencilling, as he is more adept at bringing variety to the panel framing than Wood had been. 

The issue closes with Matt announcing he's taking a leave of absence from Nelson & Murdock and Stan announcing that next issue there'll be new villains and a new artist, though he gives no hint as to who either might be.

Meanwhile, though Wood had inked this issue of Daredevil, he had already planned his escape route. A former Archie Comics editor, Harry Shorten, had approached Wood during 1965, trying to recruit him for a new venture, Tower Comics. Tower Publications had been a publisher of erotic and science fiction paperbacks from 1958, established by one of the co-founders of Archie Comics, Louis Silberkleit, and now, seeing the success of Marvel, wanted to get into the comics business. Wood called Shorten's offer "a dream set-up. I created all the characters, wrote most of the stories, and drew most of the covers. I did as much of the art as I could... But it was fun."

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents 1 (Nov 1965) was the first of the Tower Comics line. Much of the interior art was by Wood, and it betrayed the same limitations I saw in his Daredevil work, with nearly every panel being framed as a mid-shot. Most of the scripting in this issue was by Len Brown, though Wood co-scripted the Dynamo story in the back of the book.

Wood hired old colleagues from his EC days - Al Williamson and Reed Crandell - to help out with the art, and commissioned his own wife Tatjana Wood to colour the covers. He created the characters T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, NoMan, Menthor and Dynamo. Pretty soon, Gil Kane, Steve Ditko, George Tuska and Mike Sekowsky joined. Scripts were by Len Brown (who had worked with Wood on Mars Attacks and had helped conceive the THUNDER Agents), Larry Ivie and Wood himself. And the comics were mostly 25c, 64-page giants.

The only problem was ... the stories were just dull.

Tower Comics lasted from 1966 to 1969, when distribution problems cause Tower Publications to fold the line.

NOW WHAT?

To me it seems quite apparent that Stan was angry and disappointed with Wood's behaviour. It was highly unusual for him to contradict or criticise any of his team in print, but he did - however mildly - with Wood. You can see that, for Stan, the prospect of Wood joining the Bullpen was a big event. Though as my esteemed fellow Marvel blogger Nick Caputo mentioned in the comments last time, Stan did namecheck artists on Marvel covers before this, I think we can agree that line on the Daredevil 5 cover, "under the brilliant artistic craftsmanship of famous illustrator Wally Wood", goes a bit beyond the customary Lee hyperbole.

Add to this that many have said that Stan would often give work to those who needed it, whether Stan (or Marvel) needed it. There's a story that one day during the 1950s, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman found a stack of "inventory" stories that Stan had commissioned to help out freelancers financially, but hadn't published. Goodman got angry and told Stan he had to stop commissioning until the backlog was used up. In the early Sixties, Stan had given Joe Siegel, creator of Superman, work scripting Human Torch stories for Strange Tales, but that hadn't worked out so well. By 1968, it was getting hard for Siegel to find work, so Stan hired him as a proofreader in the Bullpen.

What would the Sub-Mariner solo strip in Tales to Astonish have looked like if Wally Wood had drawn it instead of Gene Colan? And why wasn't Everett asked to draw Sub-Mariner? After all, he created it. Or had he blotted his copybook (at least temporarily) with his deadline issues on Daredevil 1?

Stan probably saw Wood as being in a similar situation in the late summer of 1964, right after Wood had recklessly quit MAD magazine. So he gave the guy a job. This wasn't just charity. Stan knew a legendary artist when he saw one. And not only did he want Wood drawing Daredevil, but legend has it that he was going to give Marvel's new Sub-Mariner strip to Wood as well. In his Alter-Ego magazine, Roy Thomas said that, “Wally was slated to go from Daredevil onto the then-up-coming Sub-Mariner solo series in Tales to Astonish [#70, Aug. 1965].”

So it must have stung that Wood was so disgruntled with Lee and Marvel from the get-go, and by the time Wood quit, I'm fairly sure Stan wasn't that sorry to see him leave.

However, in the end, it didn't work out so bad for Stan and Marvel. The very next issue of Daredevil featured the art of John Romita - albeit over Kirby layouts - and that association worked out pretty well over the years.

Next: The Fab Four

Strange Tales: Here's the Thing ...

WITH STAN LEE taking a much more active hand in Marvel's anthology titles during 1964, following his first revamp of Strange Tales, Journey into Mystery, Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense in the last couple months of 1963, it became apparent as 1964 wore on that Stan wasn't quite happy with the B-team titles quite yet. Starting with Strange Tales, he would further evolve those mags with more radical changes, the first of which was introducing the "split-cover" idea.

Doctor Strange had been appearing in Strange Tales beginning with a couple of appearances in issues 110 & 111, then returning as a permanent back-up in 114 (Nov 1963), the first to see Stan scripting the main Human Torch feature. But the magician was nowhere to be seen on the following Strange Tales covers - aside from a cameo on issue 118 - until June 1964's Strange Tales 121. 

Strange Tales 121 sported Marvel's first regular "split cover" format - the idea wouldn't be rolled out to the other anthology titles until the end of 1964.

That issue brought back The Plant Man as an adversary for The Torch - not the strongest of villains - and had him spraying The Torch with acorns for the "jeopardy cover". The story relied on some of the more familiar cliches from earlier stories - The Torch getting doused with water so he can't Flame On and a scene with Johnny telling the Fantastic Four not to interfere as he has to do this on his own. When Johnny does defeat The Plant Man, he does it with the help of The Thing, who trashes the plants holding Torch's girlfriend Doris Evans captive, opening the way for the villain's capture. It's all a bit by-the-numbers and not up to Stan's usual standards.

Behind the second split cover, the three former Doctor Doom henchmen embark on a scheme to defeat the FF one-by-one and use asbestos ropes and sheets to douse The Torch's flame and imprison him. But once Johnny escapes and dries off using his handy all-body dryer, he gives them a darn good hiding.

Strange Tales 122 (Jul 1964) saw the return of Doctor Doom's henchmen, Yogi Dakor, Bull Brogin and Handsome Harry (I don't think they had a team name at this point) from Fantastic Four 23 (Feb 1964), though Stan references FF22 in error all the way through the Torch tale. In that Fantastic Four story, Doom uses the three underlings to distract the FF and when their mission is done, he banishes them to a handy parallel dimension. At the beginning of Strange Tales 122, Stan tells us that the three were transported back to earth when Doom drifted away into the stratosphere and lost his hold over them. 

In FF 23, Doctor Doom recruits three common crooks and enhances their natural abilities to make them the nemeses of each member of the FF. Bull Brogin is the Thing equivalent, Handsome Harry's hearing is heightened so he can track The Invisible Girl and Yogi Dakor is made impervious to flames. They're a kind of precursor to the The Frightful Four.

Inexplicably, the three villains are still loyal to Doom and resolve to defeat the Fantastic Four, this time one at a time, so that Doom will be proud of them ( I'm guessing they don't realise Doctor Doom doesn't do gratitude). Not surprisingly, they decide to tackle The Human Torch first. Using asbestos props, they capture the Torch - a little too easily, in my opinion - lock him in a handy caravan, then set off to capture Johnny's sister, Sue. While they're away, Johnny's unable to burn through the asbestos ropes that bind him, so he just generates billowing smoke. The fire brigade are called and they free the trussed-up Torch.

The Torch quickly catches up with the villains, who are waiting for Sue Storm at Johnny's house. He makes pretty short work of the baddies and, once they're under wraps, it only remains for Johnny to get told off by Sue for making a mess of the house and for The Torch to plug Fantastic Four 28 ("on sale now") before bringing the last solo Human Torch adventure to a close.

ENTER ... THE THING

I couldn't have been the only one who though these Human Torch tales were a bit ... well, lacklustre ... because, starting with the very next Strange Tales, Stan added The Torch's team-mate The Thing as a regular guest star, though the announcement on the cover was quite low-key.

The lead story in Strange Tales 123 introduced new characters and concepts ... and a new artist. The lead story added The Thing as a regular team-up partner for The Torch, it also introduced a new villain The Beetle, who would go on to menace other Marvel heroes - notably Spider-Man. And the "new artist" was Carl Burgos, who had created and drawn the original Human Torch in the 1930s and 1940s.

It must have been a "Why didn't I think of this sooner" moment for Stan. It was pretty evident from the Fantastic Four character-dynamic that the constant bickering between The Torch and The Thing was one of the key attractions of that book. That kind of "friendly enemy" characterisation could be traced back to the good-natured rivalry between Ham and Monk in the Doc Savage novels of the 1930s, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone could name earlier examples.

Though Doc's companions, Ham and Monk, were always at each other's throats, they'd often find themselves in tight spots together ... and woe betide anyone who picked on one of them while the other was present. (Click to enlarge, if you want to read the text.)

Strange Tales 123 (Aug 1964) also introduced a new super-villain, The Beetle, whose arrival coincided with the first appearance of Carl Burgos as artist on the Silver Age Human Torch. Of course, Burgos had created, written and drawn the original Human Torch, cover-featured on the very first issue of Marvel Comics, who had gone on to star on the covers and in the interiors of almost the entire run of Marvel Mystery Comics, from 1939 to 1949.

Though the Marvel Mystery covers were almost all drawn by Alex Schomberg, Burgos continued to write and draw the Human Torch stories until he was drafted in 1942. After the war, Burgos got into advertising and only returned to comics with the 1950s Atlas superhero revival.

I hadn't realised it until I dug out my copy of Strange Tales 123, but it's likely that the oddball appearance of The Beetle is all down to the design sensibilities of Carl Burgos. There isn't another Marvel villain that looks quite so ... well, odd. I wasn't mad on Burgos' version of The Thing. He'd drawn Ben a bit like a gorilla with orange hide ... far from the chiselled look of the character in the concurrent Fantastic Four 29.

In FF 29, Ben Grimm looked quite different, drawn by the dream team of Jack Kirby and Chic Stone, the stone-like look of The Thing already well established.

The Beetle would go on to become a Spider-Man villain, appearing in Amazing Spider-Man 23 & 94, as well as battling Daredevil in issues 33 & 34 later in the 1960s.

After his ill-advised goofy clown costume in his first couple of appearances, Paste-Pot Pete was given a sleeker costume in Strange Tales 124, though it would be a few months before he'd change his name to The Trapster.

With Strange Tales 124 (Sep 1964), Ben Grimm became an official co-star with The Torch, and the pair were up against future Frightful Four member Paste-Pot Pete once more. However, Stan and Dick Ayers gave the villain a makeover, with a more serious-looking costume and a more menacing colour scheme. After his appearance in Avengers 6 (Jul 1964), helping free New York from Baron Zemo's deadly super-adhesive, Pete was parolled. But instead of doing something useful, he tries to scheme his way through a battle with Torch and The Thing, inevitably coming off second best.

Stan's dialogue is entertaining as always, as he opens the story with a fun argument between the two pals, but I'm still not convinced by Dick Ayers' take on The Thing.

The Torch and The Thing are more interested in scrapping than in being interviewed by two Life magazine reporters (who look a lot like Larry Leiber and Jack Kirby) - until they hear that the Sub-Mariner is heading for Manhattan, and decide to fight him instead of each other.

Strange Tales 125 (Oct 1964) sported a Jack Kirby cover and an A-list supervillain foe. It also had The Torch and The Thing make a complete mess of the situation, something that's become very familiar in comic stories these days, but at the time was quite unusual.

When The Torch and The Thing's feuding is interrupted by a couple of reporters from Life magazine looking for an interview with Reed and Sue, Ben and Johnny are ticked off that they're not the interview subjects and throw the reporters out. Then, seeing on TV that The Sub-Mariner is approaching Manhattan, the two stop fighting and decide to show Reed and Sue who the real stars of the team are by battling Prince Namor themselves.

What the pair of nincompoops don't realise is that Namor is on his way to New York to attend peace talks, brokered by Reed Richards, and the duo's bombastic battling of the Sub-Mariner simply ensures that Namor will never trust the surface people again.

At the time, we comic readers could never imagine such a thing would happen in DC's world. Flash and Green Lantern never made mistakes like that, and the only way Superman would ever mess up that way is if he was under the influence of Red Kryptonite, or it was an elaborate hoax to dissuade Lois Lane he wasn't Clark Kent after all.

Weirdly, this issue also contains part one of "The Message", one of the obligatory text stories that were appearing in most of the Marvel Comics of this period. But though the footnote promised part two would appear in the next issue of Strange Tales, it never did, and this was the last time a text story - or more properly, half a text story - would appear in the title.

Over in the other anthology comics, the last text story in Tales to Astonish was in issue 57 (Jul 1964). In Tales of Suspense, it was issue 58 (Oct 1964). And in Journey into Mystery, it was issue 108 (Aug 1964). All four titles gained letters pages after the text stories stopped, except for Astonish, where readers had to wait until issue 61 (Nov 1964) to see their letters printed.

In this version of a familiar plot, The Thing escapes the Puppet Master's control when he reverts to his human form, "due to the unbearable tension", of fighting the mind control. Elsewhere in the issue, Marvel advertise four tantalisingly out-of-reach (for UK readers) issues, then on-sale.

Strange Tales 126 (Nov 1964) was essentially just a re-hash of the Torch story from issue 116. The Puppet Master takes control of The Thing and turns him against his own best friend. This version threw in The Mad Thinker for a bit of variety, as the two had teamed up previously to battle the FF in Fantastic Four 28 (Jul 1964).

And though my own copy of ST126 has the familiar Thorpe & Porter "9d" stamp on the cover, this issue was one of those that suffered from the spotty to non-existent distribution caused by the great T&P price hike snafu of 1964, that I've written about here before. So this issue's house ad - "4 More Marvel Masterpieces" - featured four Marvel Comics that were nigh-on impossible to find in the UK at the time, though I have seen copies of Astonish 61 with T&P price stamps, so some copies did make it over here.

On the plus side, there's the first letter column, "Strange Mails", which includes a letter from Paul Brackley of Hornsey, London, right here in the UK, who rates Strange Tales as his fourth favourite Marvel comic, and tells us he's moving to Australia. I wonder if he kept reading Marvels ...

This trio of covers established Chic Stone as the regular inker over Kirby pencils - though Strange Tales 128's cover was inked by Sol Brodsky, in a rare (for this period of Marvel) art contribution.

For the remaining three issues of Dick Ayers' run on the Human Torch stories, the artist is credited - at least at the Grand Comics Database - as having co-plotted the stories. Strange Tales 127 (Dec 1964) had a slightly off-beat story where The Torch and The Thing are behaving like spoilt six-year-olds, telling Reed Richards that they can manage fine without him. So Reed tells them they're free to take on some cases on their own. The very first thing that turns up in an invitation to a race - which itself is a bit odd - that turns out to be a trap set by a mystery villain. Though the plot seems a bit contrived, I think I was more bothered by Reed's out of character reaction to Johnny and Ben's bad behaviour.

I like the story in Strange Tales 128 (Jan 1965) better, if only because it featured two of my favourite characters at the time - Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch. And The Thing's status as a co-star is further cemented by his addition to the cover's Marvel Comics corner box.

And Strange Tales 129 (Feb 1965) featured the return of the criminal team no one cares about, now named the Terrible Trio. The former henchmen of Doctor Doom - Yogi Dakor, Handsome Harry Phillips and Bull Brogin - break out of jail and cook up another doomed scheme to trap Torch and The Thing.

After three issues, Stan must have realised that this material wasn't firing on all cylinders, at least not creatively. Yet in 1964, of all the Marvel anthology titles, Strange Tales was outsold only by Journey into Mystery, which was a de facto Thor comic anyway. So I think Stan wanted to give it one more try before he re-thought the title.

Stan wisely emphasised Dr Strange on this Strange Tales cover, as the Torch-Thing team-up story inside is daft, to say the least. Interesting to see a Kirby-Stone take on the Master of the Mystic arts, though.

With Strange Tales 130 (Mar 1965), Stan replaced Ayers as artist on the Torch and Thing stories with Bob Powell, who was also taking over as Giant-Man artist in Tales to Astonish the same month. Powell was, in my opinion, a better storyteller than Ayers and I looked at the reasons for that in my Giant-Man postings last year. But his approach to the Torch and Thing stories seems to be more of a cartoony, comedy style ... at least for this story. Perhaps this has something to do with the "funny incident" nature of the tale, where Johnny and Ben take their dates to a Beatles concert and end up foiling a box-office robbery, but in truth, the style wasn't toned down much for the next adventure.

With this issue, Bob Powell supplies the cover art as well ... the result is that the cover image is much more effective than the story it's selling. The only way I think this could have been marginally improved is if the inset of Dr Strange had been left out.

Strange Tales 131 (Apr 1965) featured the return of The Mad Thinker. The villain was never one of my favourites, and even from his first appearance in Fantastic Four 15 (Jun 1963), I thought he was more annoying than menacing. I can see where the idea had come from - computers were just entering the public zeitgeist and were seen as almost magical machines that could extrapolate uncanny predictions from available data - but beyond that, the character had no, well, character.

The story in Strange Tales 132 was a little muddled, probably the result of a last-minute scripting job by Warren writer-artist Larry Ivie. It's never really clear what the rogue scientist, Professor Jack, is up to. But the highlight is The Thing being given the undercover name of "Josiah Verpoorten" ... though John Verpoorten wouldn't officially work for Marvel until 1967, he must've been known, at least to Ivie, in 1965, as it's too much of a coincidence to have The Thing named for the six foot six, 290 pound inker-turned-production manager.

The Torch and Thing story in Strange Tales 132 (May 1965) sported a new writer, Larry Ivie. Even though Stan had been plainly unsatisfied with his previous attempt to farm out the scripting chores on some of the secondary Marvel titles to seasoned pros, here he was getting a Marvel outsider to pitch in with scripting.

My suspicion is that this was more of a scheduling crunch than a serious attempt to palm the Strange Tales writing off onto someone else. And Stan makes mention of my chief criticism on the story in the letters page at the back of the book, when he asks the readers, "can you figure out exactly what our Torch and Thing story was all about? We have to admit it had us pretty confused! We read it over and over again and never could quite understand what the villain was really after." That must have stung Ivie, who was after all just helping Stan out of a deadline jam, and was a seasoned pro in the comics biz, contributing writing and art to Castle of Frankenstein, publishing his own mag Monsters and Heroes and providing script and art to the Warren titles Creepy and Eerie. Sometimes Stan could be a little careless of other people's feelings ... 

Johnny and Ben can be forgiven for not recognising The Puppet Master in this story, but isn't it odd that Alicia wouldn't recognise the sound of her own step-father's voice?

Strange Tales 133 (Jun 1965) trotted out another villain that, by that time, I'd grown a little bored with. When Johnny and Ben are dragged - by Doris Evans and Alicia Masters - to an art exhibit featuring incredibly lifelike mannequins, they fail to recognise the "artist", who has altered his appearance so he no longer resembles a ventriloquist's dummy. 

Can anyone explain why Stan and/or Jack thought it was a good idea to depict the Puppet Master as a puppet, rather than as a puppet master? It's bugged me for decades ...

I could never understand the rationale behind Kirby's depiction of The Puppet Master, back in Fantastic Four 8 (Nov 1962) ... did Jack just have a thing for comedy villains (Paste-Pot Pete, I'm looking at you)? Or did Stan have something to do with it?

I guess we'll never know the real reason for Stan's decision to give up on The Human Torch series in Strange Tales. The sales on the title were strong and growing from 1964 to 1965. But the stories weren't inspired. By definition, the plots had to be a kind of Fantastic Four "lite", with none of the epic sweep that Stan and Jack were putting into the parent title. Then there was the issue of continuity. Stan had already removed the big hitters from the Avengers comic because of the difficulties of having Thor battle Zemo in The Avengers, yet be undergoing the Trial of the Gods for three months in his own comic. In fact, while Johnny and Ben had lost their superpowers in Fantastic Four 39-40 (Jun-Jul 1965), they were merrily battling The Puppet Master and Kang, fully powered-up, in Strange Tales 133-134.

This final tale was pencilled by Bob Powell and inked by Wally Wood. Over in the Daredevil title, Wood was getting help from Powell with his artwork, so there looked to be a strong synergy between the two artists.

So it was that Strange Tales 134 (Jul 1965) marked the end of the Human Torch series - and ironically, it ends on a bit of a high-note, with a tale that felt much more like an FF story than the majority of the Torch run. And it had the additional bonus of being inked by Wally Wood, who always brought a degree of finesse to any artwork he was involved in. The plot has The Watcher task The Torch and The Thing with travelling back in time to prevent future villain Kang from defeating Merlin the Magician, taking control of Camelot and altering the course of history. As with all time travel stories, there are plot holes you could drive a truck through, but the overall impression is that this a big story to end the run on.

In the issue's letter page, Stan is taken to task by reader Richard Willis for allowing the lead strip to descend into a mixture of comedy and foul-up, then Stan uses the opportunity to announce big changes for the coming issue, which would remain for the moment a surprise.

The August issue of Strange Tales would see Johnny and Ben replaced by another Marvel character who was usually busy elsewhere. But this version of Nicholas Fury would be a C.I.A. colonel who's offered the role of running a mega-intelligence organisation, S.H.I.E.L.D. answerable only to the United Nations.

The same month, Giant-Man's position in Tales to Astonish would be usurped by Prince Namor, The Sub-Mariner. Interestingly, Daredevil 7 (Apr 1965) was designed as a dry run to see how Wally Wood would handle the character, as Stan wanted him to draw Namor's series in Astonish. But Wood reportedly hated the Marvel method of working and wanted full story credits for his work, something that Stan was reluctant to give. In another example of Marvel irony, not two years after that, Stan allowed artist Jim Steranko full writing credits on Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. when he took over with Strange Tales 155 (Apr 1967).

Funny old world, isn't it?

Next: Shhh ... it's a secret!