Exposed: Myths of Marvel's Silver Age - Part 2

OVER THE LAST FEW DECADES, a great deal has been written about the history of Marvel Comics, not all of it as well-researched as it could have been. And because of this, certain historians have chosen to lift anecdotes from earlier histories without bothering to check the sources of the material they're quoting.

Last time, I took a look at some of the legends that have appeared in successive histories of Marvel Comics and questioned whether they had been verified by the authors or simply repeated based on faith. As with many histories, it seems that opinion often triumphs over fact ... and fans of a particular artist or writer will insist that their hero tells the objective truth while all others lie and dissemble. But as my old friend and collaborator Phil Edwards always said, "There's three sides to every argument - his side, her side ... and the truth."

Back when I was a teenager, the first glimmer we comic fans had that there was an actually history to comics was these two books, both published in 1971. In retrospect, neither were very good. We wouldn't really get a decent history till Steranko's History of Comics (1970), a project sadly aborted before it could get to the Silver Age and the stuff I was really interested in.

I've already looked at the oft-repeated story that Marvel Comics was limited to just eight titles a month during the 1960s (not true), that Stan Lee only got his job at Marvel Comics in 1941 because he was related to publisher Martin Goodman (not true) and that Stan Lee was the cause of Simon and Kirby leaving Captain America in 1942 because Stan snitched about their moonlighting for DC to his cousin-by-marriage Martin Goodman (no evidence to support that).

This time, I'm going to look at a few more cases where it seems to me as if the historians have gone with "Print the legend."

STAN LEE'S FIRST STAB AT GROWN-UP COMICS

To be fair to the comics historians, I should say that this myth has largely come from Stan Lee himself. As far back as Origins of Marvel Comics (Simon and Schuster, 1974), Stan had alluded to the claim that he had a revelatory moment when he realised he was fed up with hacking out copycat strips for Goodman and wanted to do something that would raise both his game and set a higher benchmark for the comic book medium. 

Stan expanded on the story in his autobiography Excelsior; The Amazing Life of Stan Lee (Fireside Books, 2002). "For once I wanted to write stories that wouldn't insult the intelligence of an older reader, stories with interesting characterisation, more realistic dialogue and plots that hadn't been recycled a thousand times before. Above all, stories that wouldn't hew to all the comicbook cliches of years past."

So, The Fantastic Four was born ... right? Well, not exactly, no.

All that stuff about wanting to quit the business and Joan Lee telling Stan to just write comics the way he wanted to, because he had nothing to lose, didn't result in Fantastic Four. It resulted in Amazing Adult Fantasy. At the very least, Stan was working on both simultaneously ... but tellingly, only one had the word "Adult" in its title. Also, only one promised to be "The Magazine That Respects Your Intelligence", right there on the cover. And though both sported a logo that strikingly resembled that of the hit, liberal-leaning Twilight Zone tv show, only one was an anthology of fantasy tales.

In this house ad from Strange Tales 95 (Apr 1962), which came out between FF 3 and FF 4 and the same month as AAF 11, Stan puts Amazing Adult Fantasy and Fantastic Four together, emphasising their common logo style - though tellingly, he places AAF above FF, indicating that he thought the fantasy anthology book best placed to further his agenda.

It's for these reasons that I think I can make a case for Amazing Adult Fantasy being the title Stan thought would bring the older reader to the table.

The Twilight Zone had premiered two years earlier, in October 1959, to outstanding reviews. "Twilight Zone is about the only show on the air that I actually look forward to seeing. It's the one series that I will let interfere with other plans", said Terry Turner for the Chicago Daily News. The New York Herald Tribune said it was "certainly the best and most original anthology series of the year" and Variety called it "the best that has ever been accomplished in half-hour filmed television". 

From the outset, Serling's moral fables, with their liberal worldview and chilling observations about human frailty, won a strong audience following and, later, Emmy and Golden Globe awards. And when you compare the stories that Stan Lee was offering in his anthology titles, especially those drawn by Steve Ditko, you can see just how much of an influence on Lee Serling's series was.

It's not a coincidence that Amazing Adult Fantasy and Fantastic Four shared a similarly styled cover logo. And I think it's fairly safe to say that Stan thought looking to the title design for Rod Serling's intelligent sci-fi tv show The Twilight Zone for inspiration might be the fastest way to reach the readers he was looking for.

So when Stan Lee felt he should do something more worthwhile than the kiddy-fodder he'd been filling the Atlas/Marvel comics with, it seemed natural to beef up the presence of the Serling-influenced Ditko fantasy tales by giving them their own title. So Amazing Adventures' Kirby kaiju stories gave way to the humanist fables of Lee/Ditko. I also think it's significant that Stan Lee almost always signed his stories with Ditko, but didn't much bother with the Kirby monster strips. 

The only reason I can think of that Stan would later downplay the role of Amazing Adult Fantasy in his quest to bring a degree of sophistication to the four-colour comic book is that ultimately the title fell prey to poor sales and was cancelled by Marty Goodman before the new approach could establish itself. Far better to hitch your revolutionary game-changing approach to a success rather than to a failure.

I also can't help but observe that the first few issues of Fantastic Four followed the formula of the Kirby Giant Monster comics, almost as though Stan felt you just couldn't do grown-up superhero tales. Certainly issues 1, with the Mole Man's Godzilla-like subterranean creatures, and 3 and 4, with The Miracle Man's giant marquee monster and The Sub-Mariner's Giganto creature, didn't stray far from kaiju territory.

When you have a successful formula, you'd be nuts to abandon it. So Stan stuck with giant monsters for the first few issues of Fantastic Four, reasoning that if monsters drove sales on Astonish, Suspense and the others, then it would for FF, too.

It wasn't really until Fantastic Four 8 (Nov 1962) that the tone of the comic shifted a bit and Stan made an effort to change the direction of the title. He makes The Thing less angry, the FF start calling him "Ben" instead of "Thing" and Reed begins his quest to revert Ben to his human form. Stan also gets rid of the (rather odd) Reed-Sue-Ben triangle and introduces a new love interest for Ben, Alicia, who initially resembles Sue - though that idea is also jettisoned quite quickly. For me, this is where Stan made a concerted effort to make superhero comics a bit more sophisticated than the standard superhero mags DC were putting out under the editorship of Mort Weisinger - pretty brave, considering how well the Superman family titles were selling in 1961.

And as history would show, turns out Stan was right. Once Marvel got into its stride, sales began to climb and the previously unassailable DC began their decline.

STAN LEE INVENTED THE "MARVEL METHOD"

There is a prevailing school of thought out there, especially among Kirby Kultists, that Stan Lee invented the Marvel Method (of comics writing) specifically to gyp artists out of their plotting payments. The story gets repeated over and over, but without any real evidence to back it up.

I think the first hint I came across - beyond Stan's own explanations in the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins - of how comics were created during the early days was in Steranko's History of Comics, which I would have picked up around the age of 18. In volume 1, Steranko recounts how the classic 44-page battle between The Human Torch and The Sub-Mariner (Marvel Mystery Comics 8 & 9, Jun & Jul 1940) was written and drawn over a weekend.

What's remarkable about this 44-page battle between The Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner isn't that it was the first such character cross-over, pre-dating the first appearance of the Justice Society by several months, but that it was conceived and completed over a weekend! Both books sold out.

"Carl (Burgos) and Bill (Everett) sat down at the drawing boards and composed the first two pages without having the slightest notion about the storyline. John Compton came in and began to plot out a script ... Breakdowns were pencilled as soon as page-by-page synopses were completed. Finished dialogue was written directly onto the pages, then lettered."

That process, with the art produced from a synopsis and the dialogue and captions written and lettered on the finished art sounds a lot like the Marvel Method to me.

More recently, I picked up a copy of The Best of Alter Ego, a compilation of the best articles from the pioneering fanzine of the early 1960s. In it, there was a short essay by Golden and Silver Age artist Paul Reinman, which first appeared in Alter Ego 4 (Oct 1962). Something Reinman wrote reminded me of that account from Steranko's History of Comics. 

"I remember when the artists were just a page, or a few boxes, ahead of the writer. We would come in in the morning and the editor, who mostly doubled as the writer, would say 'Sit down. I'll write an outline of the plot in a few minutes.' While the artist was working on the first page, the editor broke down the rest of the story and typed it for the artist. The dialogue was not written before the artist had finished his inkings. When the artist looked at the breakdown of his story and if the box showed a lot of action he would let his drawing take up most of the space of this box: if it was a close-up or very little action, he would leave more space for dialogue. Well, that's the way it was in the beginning of comics."

MLJ - which later became Archie Comics - had a spat with Martin Goodman over a Captain America villain called The Hangman. It was MLJ partner Maurice Coyne (also working as Goodman's accountant at Timely) who told Joe Simon that Goodman was cheating on the Captain America royalties.

Though Reinman doesn't give any dates, a quick check of his credits on GCD, shows that he spent the first two years of his career working for MLJ on strips like Hangman, The Wizard and Zambini, which appeared in their top titles, Pep Comics, Shield-Wizard and Zip. Though he moved on to DC in mid-1943, I think it's pretty safe to say that Reinman was talking about how they worked at MLJ.

Atlas was at its peak in the mid-1950s, publishing the most titles of any publisher. Sinnott was one of Stan Lee's mainstay comic strip artists, though only the real stars - like Joe Maneely and Bill Everett - got to draw the covers.

Different publishers worked in different ways, but during the 1950s, when Marvel was known as Atlas and Stan Lee was Editor and head writer, the artists worked from full scripts. Joe Sinnott was a prolific artist at Atlas and described the work routine in The Jack Kirby Collector 9 (1995). "I'd go down to the city on Friday, and Stan would give me a script to take home. I'd start on Monday morning by lettering the balloons in pencil. Then I'd pencil the story from the script and ink it and leave the balloons penciled. I'd pencil a page in the morning, and ink it in the afternoon ... I'd bring the story back on Friday and he'd give me another script. I never knew what kind of script I'd be getting. Stan had a big pile on his desk, and he used to write most of the stories himself in those days. You'd walk in, and he'd be banging away at his typewriter. He would finish a script and put it on the pile. Sometimes on his pile would be a western, then below it would be a science fiction, and a war story, and a romance. You never knew what you were getting, because he always took it off the top. And you were expected to do any type of story."

The later, in the post-Atlas years, when Marvel Comics was only known by the tiny letters "MC" on its covers, Stan was still supplying full scripts to his artists. The seeds of the Marvel Method were sown when Stan began to ramp up output at the beginning of the 1960s and found he was struggling to do all the editing and scripting himself. So he began writing with his brother Larry Leiber, who was primarily an artist.

In an interview for Alter Ego Vol 3, No 2 (1999), Lieber explained how those early Marvel stories were done. "Stan made up the plot, and then he'd give it to me, and I'd write the script ... I was unsure of myself just sitting down to write a script. Since I knew how to draw, I'd think, 'Oh, this shot will have a guy coming this way... this shot we'll have a guy looking down on him,' and later I'd sit at the typewriter and type it up. After a while, I'd just go to the typewriter. I would follow from Stan's plots ... Jack I always had to send a full script to." [My emphasis.]

A few months later, dissatisfied with Lieber's scripts, Stan Lee hired some veteran scripters -  Robert Bernstein, Ernie Hart and even Jerry Siegel - to cope with the load, but in the end he realised that to get the kind of stories he wanted for the fledgling Marvel Comics, he'd have to write them himself.

However, there is an important clue here to how Stan arrived at the Marvel Method. He was giving plots to brother Larry to break down into panel-by-panel scripts with dialogue and captions. I've not come across any indication that Larry had any input into the plots. It is possible that, when Stan was working with Bernstein and Hart, he did allow some plotting collaboration but, again, I've not found any statements from the participants to support that.

The above Marvels were the last scripted by Hart, Siegel and Bernstein before Stan took over all the writing chores himself. It's not a huge leap to go from providing brief plots to hired scripters, to providing plots to pencillers, to co-plotting with pencillers.

The next step in the evolution came when Lee rightly realised that it was the characterisation in the script - and the emotions felt by his characters - that made Marvel tales more appealing to his young audience than the old-fashioned, plot-driven DC-style stories. Stan understood that the details of the plot were the least important component. So rather than sit down with some less talented scripters and feed them plots, why not sit down with the artists, thrash out a plot, then have the artist draw it up before the dialogue was written? Pretty much a reversion to how it was done in the early 1940s.

As 1963 rolled over into 1964, it seems likely that Stan found some pencillers were better at fleshing out a brief story synopsis into a 20-page story than others. Steve Ditko appears to have been best at it, and had likely worked that way with Stan during the pre-hero years. Jack Kirby  - even though he'd been used to full scripts from the Marvel Bullpen was able to adapt and add detail to the briefest of outlines. Others, like Gene Colan and Don Heck, needed more hand-holding.

What is interesting is that those who had the biggest issues with how Stan worked - I'm thinking Wally Wood, Joe Orlando and Gil Kane - were all from a background where they would be given some form of full script to work from.

Kane had worked for DC Comics most of his career, and the editors there would hold regular story conferences with the writers to create a plot, then have the scripters - John Broome, Gardner Fox - go home and type up a full script for the penciller. I'm pretty sure the writers didn't get paid for the plotting session.

At EC Comics, where Wood and Orlando cut their teeth, the discipline was even stricter. Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein would plot and script the stories, then give the boards to a letterer to ink in the captions and dialogue. Only then would the boards go to the artist, who would have to fill the pre-ruled and lettered panels with drawings.

Here's a Wally Wood page and a Joe Orlando page - both from Weird Fantasy 13 (May 1952). The artboard was pre-lettered with the captions and balloons and the artists would have to fit their drawings in as best they could. Some artists would find this restrictive and impossible to work with, and others found it worked best for them. Wordy, aren't they?

So from Wally Wood's point of view, it may well have looked like Stan was getting him to "write" the story while taking the credit ... but that's only because Wood had never worked Stan's way before.

Interviewed by Mark Evanier, Wood said, "I enjoyed working with Stan on Daredevil but for one thing. I had to make up the whole story. He was being paid for writing, and I was being paid for drawing, but he didn't have any ideas. I'd go in for a plotting session, and we'd just stare at each other until I came up with a storyline. I felt like I was writing the book but not being paid for writing."

That doesn't really ring true to me. I just can't imagine Stan - the most talkative human being on the planet - just sitting and staring at Wally Wood. I rather think that Wood, like some others, is vastly overestimating the importance of the plot to a comic story. When Wood did actually write an issue of Daredevil by himself, Lee's criticism wasn't of the plot but of the lack of characterisation in the dialogue.

"I persuaded him to let me write one by myself since I was doing 99% of the writing already," said Wood in the same interview. "I wrote it, handed it in, and he said it was hopeless. He said he'd have to rewrite it all and write the next issue himself."

At that stage of the process, there was very little Lee could have done about the plot ... but he sure could fix up the dialogue. 

Joe Orlando, who preceded Wally Wood as Daredevil penciller, also had difficulties with Stan's way of working. After three issue - Daredevil 2 - 4 (Jun - Oct 1964) - he quit because he couldn't deal with Stan asking him to redraw the pages he was turning in.

The point is that every writer or artist has a different history and background. And each has different working habits. What works for some doesn't work for others. What drew Neal Adams to Marvel in 1969 is he'd heard that the artists worked from the slightest of plots and were free to draw the comic their own way.

So it turns out that Stan didn't invent the plot-art-script process of creating comic strips. It's a method that has been in use since the 1940s, which some artists prefer and some don't. I can see how Stan found his heavy workload - as Marvel Comics grew during the early 1960s - meant he had to find ways to get the comic stories completed faster. He tried several different processes before he hit on the one that gave him the best control over how the characters were portrayed. Because Stan was all about the characters and their emotions, just as DC were all about the plots and their resolutions, and thought characterisation was irrelevant ... And we know how that eventually turned out.

I was going to try to squeeze in an account of the 1971 "price war" between Marvel and DC and give some perspective on the sales numbers that have been quoted in a few accounts, but it's the end of the month and I just don't have the time to do it justice this month, so I'll leave it for now and try to publish the last part of this look at Marvel Myths and Legends in a week or two.

Next: The DC / Marvel Price War of 1971

Hulk not smash yet ...

BACK WHEN I first started reading Marvel Comics, in the mid-1960s, I was aware of The Hulk as a co-star in the Tales to Astonish series. To be honest, I liked the Giant-Man stories a bit better, but as I became more familiar with the Marvel titles, I began to pick up hints that The Hulk had enjoyed a life before Tales to Astonish.

I found tantalising references to the nature of these earlier Hulk adventures when the stories started showing up in the reprint books Marvel were putting out in the mid-1960s. The Marvel Tales Annual for 1965 had a reprint of the Ringmaster segment from The Incredible Hulk 3 (Sep 1962). I knew that because Stan had thoughtfully added a caption at the foot of the first page that told me so.

The cancelled Incredible Hulk series was reprinted in Marvel Collectors' Item Classics during the 1960s ... this was the first time I became aware of these comics.

I can't now recall when I did finally manage to find an issue from the original run of The Incredible Hulk, but I'm fairly certain it would have been around 1968, when I began haunting Bonus Books in Woolwich, south-east London. It would take me a year or two, but I did finally manage to track down all six issues, in various conditions (mostly quite tatty), at 6d (2.5p) a throw, amongst the piles of second-hand comics in that tawdry emporium on Woolwich New Road.

When you read the six issues in sequence, it's quickly apparent that The Incredible Hulk was a terrific idea in search of a clear plot treatment. And in many ways, it mirrors the ramshackle development style of Jack Kirby's later Fourth World projects for DC, in that the ideas tumble out of the comics in a disorganised and contradictory fashion, leaving the reader a little confused as to exactly who The Hulk is supposed to be. For that reason, I feel it's quite likely that Kirby actually was the driving force behind the series with Stan trying to make sense of Jack's ideas ... which changed from issue to issue.

Many times over the years, Stan Lee has explained how the idea of The Hulk came about. For instance, from as early as 1974's Origins of Marvel Comics, Stan has always described the beginnings of The Hulk in more or less the same way: "It was patently apparent that The Thing was the most popular character in the Fantastic Four. ... For a long time I'd been aware of the fact that people were more likely to favor someone who was less than perfect. ... It's a safe bet that you remember Quasimodo, but how easily can you name any of the heroic, handsomer, more glamorous characters in The Hunchback of Notre Dame? And then there's Frankenstein ... I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the Frankenstein monster. No one could ever convince me that he was the bad guy. ... He never wanted to hurt anyone; he merely groped his torturous way through a second life trying to defend himself, trying to come to terms with those who sought to destroy him. ... I decided I might as well borrow from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well — our protagonist would constantly change from his normal identity to his superhuman alter ego and back again."

Later, in his autobiography Excelsior, Stan would describe how the name came about. "I needed a name for this monstrous, potentially murderous, hulking brute, who ... whoa! 'Hulking brute' is the exact description, and instantly I knew 'hulking' was the adjective. Well, it wasn't much of a stretch to go from 'hulking' to 'hulk', which sounded like the perfect noun."

As a counterpoint, here's how Jack Kirby described how he came up with the idea for The Hulk, during an interview with The Comics Journal 134 in 1990: "The Hulk I created when I saw a woman lift a car. Her baby was caught under the running board of this car. The little child was playing in the gutter and he was crawling from the gutter onto the sidewalk under the running board of this car — he was playing in the gutter. His mother was horrified. She looked from the rear window of the car, and this woman in desperation lifted the rear end of the car. It suddenly came to me that in desperation we can all do that — we can knock down walls, we can go berserk, which we do. You know what happens when we’re in a rage — you can tear a house down. I created a character who did all that and called him The Hulk. I inserted him in a lot of the stories I was doing. Whatever the Hulk was at the beginning I got from that incident."

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 1

The Hulk appeared straight off in his own title. That might seem a little unusual, at first glance, but the notion of Marvel debuting characters in the old mystery titles like Tales of Suspense didn't actually come along until later. Fantastic Four 1 (Nov 1961) had gone on sale at the beginning of August 1961. The Incredible Hulk 1 (May 1962) went on sale in February 1962 (Marvels were published about three months ahead of their cover dates), at the same time as Fantastic Four 4 (May 1962). We can be pretty sure of this because the interior pages of FF4 carried hand-lettered lines of text like, "You've never seen anyone like The Hulk!"

Fantastic Four 4 (May 1962) had these mysterious hand-lettered messages in the margins of many of the story pages. They do look like they were a last minute after-thought.

Given this timing, it wouldn't have been the Fantastic Four sales figures that prompted Stan and Jack to come up with another super-character comic. If a comic has to go to press six to eight weeks ahead of its on-sale date, then Jack would have been drawing the art in December 1961. So any creative discussions about the concept of The Hulk - if they happened the way Stan describes - would likely have happened in November 1961 at the very latest. At that point, there was no way Martin Goodman would have had any inkling of how the FF book was selling.

Stan has often said that The Thing was his favourite member of the FF, so it seems more likely to me that Stan wanted a Thing-like character that he could explore further in book-length adventures. And this is borne out by the way that Stan made the Hulk's personality a bit like a second-hand version of The Thing's in those early issues of The Incredible Hulk.

Right there at the top of page 5, there's Dr Banner coming over all funny and in the background, through the window, we see the full moon.

Everyone reading this will be more than familiar with the origin of the The Hulk ... of how Dr Bruce Banner, supervising the test of his Gamma Bomb, rushed to pull reckless Rick Jones to safety and was exposed to a massive dose of gamma radiation. But it's easy to forget that the whole rage thing came much later. In the earliest stories, Banner's transformation into The Incredible Hulk was triggered by the rising of the moon so, as well as Jekyll and Hyde, and the Frankenstein monster, there was a bit of The Wolf Man in there as well. And as newly-transformed Hulk brushes Rick roughly aside and stalks off into the twilight, he doesn't sound angry ... just confused and impatient. And his speech patterns, if not especially intelligent, are at least grammatically sound.

In the first story, The Hulk was depicted as grey-skinned ... Stan has always claimed that the printers had trouble consistently rendering the colour from page to page, but the evidence doesn't really support that. The Hulk appears green on page 18 (more as a lighting effect than as a colouring mistake) and I'm betting Stan thought it looked better.

Another important aspect of this first Hulk story is that the character wasn't green. He was grey, probably another Stan allusion to The Frankenstein Monster, who was portrayed as grey in the old black and white films to denote his deadness. Like The Hulk, old Frankie didn't become green until later ... Stan has always told the story of The Hulk's change of colour like this: "In our first issue the printer had trouble keeping the shade of grey consistent from page to page. On some pages his skin was light grey, on others it was dark grey, and on some it looked black. So for the next issue I changed his skin colour to green, a colour the printer had less trouble with."

But to me, that doesn't sound plausible. For a start, if colourist Stan Goldberg specified that The Hulk's skin tone was 25% black to the engravers, then that's what the colour would be. The only way the skin colour would change is if the colourist or the engravers messed up and set The Hulk's skin tone as 25% black on some pages and 50% black on others (the only available tones for this kind of primitive letterpress printing were 0%, 25%, 50% and 100%). That would have resulted in wildly varying skin colours. However, when you look at the actual original comic, The Hulk's skin-tone is pretty consistent throughout, only looking a little darker in the night-time scenes on pages 18 and 19, as might be expected.

The other aspect of Stan's explanation that doesn't work for me is that if indeed the artwork for a comic had to leave the office around two months before the on sale date, it's unlikely that Stan would have seen finished copies of The Incredible Hulk 1 before issue 2 was due to press. And even if he did manage to get his hands on an advance copy, it would likely be way too late to change the colouring of the whole of issue 2.

All pure speculation on my part, but it just seems more believable to me that after issue 1 went to press, Stan was sitting in his office thinking, "Gee, I wish we'd coloured The Hulk green instead of grey!"

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 2

Issue 2 went on sale at the beginning of May 1962, cover-dated July. It's a little odd that The Incredible Hulk was on sale two months ahead of its cover date and Fantastic Four was on sale three months ahead. Maybe there's a reason for that, but it's doubtful we'll ever know.

The issue marked Steve Ditko's first work on the character, as he was inking Kirby's pencils here, not something Ditko did very often. In fact some pages look like Kirby had little to do with them, so I'm wondering if this wasn't more of a case of Kirby layouts and Ditko finished art.

There are touches of Kirby here and there, but for the most part, The Hulk looks very Ditko-ish in most panels of The Incredible Hulk 2.

Again, here The (now-green, no explanation given in the comic) Hulk changes from his Banner form with the onset of night, is quite eloquent ("Now you taste the sting of your weapon!"), and remains relatively calm. Yet, Banner realises that the transformations are dangerous and looks for a way to restrain The Hulk. He hits upon a cave where he can set up a Hulk-proof cell so that Rick can lock him up at night. And right in the middle of this scene, the Toad Men show up. The cave prison would also show up in later issues, as would Ditko, but this still isn't the Hulk as we would later come to know him.

The Hulk here demonstrates quite a level of empathy, recognising, quite consciously, that Man has been hounding him for no good reason ... which is why he hates all humans.

In fact, there's not a great deal to separate this story from any of the tales Lee and Kirby were spinning in any of the other fantasy titles they were publishing. The Hulk is no more than a slightly tamer version of his more menacing cousins - Groot (Tales to Astonish 13), Taboo (Strange Tales 77) and ... The Hulk (Journey into Mystery 62, all Nov 1960). 

So ... Stan's brain-wracking to come up with a name for his newest super-character would have been so much easier if only he'd scanned back over a few issues of Journey into Mystery and re-used the name of one of his old monsters ...

Also, interesting, there's a house ad for Fantastic Four 5, which would have been on sale a little bit before The Incredible Hulk 2 ... but, tacked on the bottom of the ad page is a very interesting "message from the Editors".

Click on the image to expand it, so you can read the Important Announcement text ...

In it, Stan explains that they've had "an avalanche of mail" from readers, but no time to read more than a few, so the announced Hulk letters page won't appear until the following issue. Again, this seems to confirm that the artwork for the comic needed to go off to the printers around two months before the on-sale date.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 3

The cover of the third issue of The Incredible Hulk (Sept 1962) does have kind of frenetic feel about it, proclaiming, "Nothing can stop him now ... he can fly!" while Rick yells, "I can't control him any more!", even though his control over The Hulk had previously only even amounted to a few words of persuasion, which The Hulk hadn't always listened to, anyway.

In the first story, Stan and Jack alter the premise of The Hulk slightly and have him only respond to direct commands from Rick Jones. It does get us away from the more sentient Hulk of issues 1 and 2. The additional development of having The Hulk leap such great distances that it seems as though he's flying is a more logical result of his great strength.

The first of these changes comes about when The Hulk is tricked by Rick into a space capsule then zapped by cosmic rays. When he returns to Earth, The Hulk is pretty ticked off with his teenage sidekick and chases him up a mountain. There, Rick cringes and yells, "Stay back ... please, stop!" and The Hulk stops. Now fully under Rick's control, The Hulk is like a robot, responding only to voice commands. A little while later comes the second change. Rick and The Hulk are cornered by hostile state troopers. When Rick yells, "Get out of here, fast!" The Hulk gathers him up a leaps away, flying for miles before he touches down to earth again ...

At this point, Dr Banner is still transforming to his monstrous alter-ego with the setting of the sun (or the rising of the moon, it varies), so Rick locks him back in his cell until he can figure out what to do.

After a three page recap of the Hulk's origin, Stan and Jack pit The Hulk against his first super-villain, sort of. The Ringmaster is based on an old Marvel foe from the 1940s. Jack Kirby and his then-collaborator Joe Simon were responsible for creating and authoring the first ten issues of Captain America Comics. In issue 5, Captain America comes up against an Nazi agent called The Ringmaster of Crime, who looked essentially the same as the character in this Hulk story.

Jack Kirby had used the idea of an evil Ringmaster as far back as Captain America Comics 5 (Aug 1941). In this wartime story, the villain is a nazi agent, assassinating high-ranking army officials using his wheel of death, though there's no hypnotising.

With The Hulk fully under control of Rick Jones, the teenager feels it's safe to leave the Hulk unattended while he gets some food. In a nearby town he comes across a circus and joins the audience. But this is a the circus of The Ringmaster, a criminal who hypnotises his paying customers and then robs them. Just as Rick is falling under the master hypnotist's spell he sends out a mental distress call to The Hulk. But by the time The Hulk arrives, Rick has succumbed and the Hulk, without orders from Rick, falls motionless and is captured.

The 1960s version of The Ringmaster used his hypnotic powers to render his victims comatose while he robbed them. The character would go on to appear as a regular villain in Amazing Spider-Man, with the concept developed and enhanced by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

The Ringmaster and his cohorts then take their captive and move on to the next town, leaving their audience to recover as best they can. Just as the Ringmaster is about to hypnotise a new audience, Rick shows up with the FBI to arrest the criminals. The sound of Rick's voice revives The Hulk, who proceeds to make mincemeat of the baddies, finally escaping with Rick just as the army shows up.

With its three-page origin recap, The Incredible Hulk 3 does seem like a re-launch issue of sorts. I'm fairly sure the initial sales figures didn't look good, so Stan exerted a little more authority over the title, making the character less similar to The Thing, by toning down The Hulk's conversational abilities and introducing the flight-like leaps, an idea used in the earliest Superman stories. But there are yet more changes ahead in the very next issue.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 4

The fourth issue of The Incredible Hulk (Nov 1962) was another two-story issue. The first story deals with the further changing relationship between Dr Banner, The Hulk and Rick Jones. As the tale starts out, The Hulk is still under the mental control of his teenage sidekick. Here, the device of The Hulk being "out of range" allows the monster to take some independent action, when he prevents a stalled schoolbus being trashed by an oncoming locomotive. Then, moments later, Rick is able to recall the green goliath with the power of thought, despite The Hulk being too far away. It's the sort of contradiction that contributes to these early Hulk stories seeming jumbled and inconsistent.

The Incredible Hulk 4 features one of Marvel's earliest split covers. In the first of the two stories, The Hulk is still under the control of Rick Jones, though Stan isn't sure whether that control is limited by distance or not. Once not under Rick's direct influence, the Hulk seems capable of some rudimentary reasoning.

The second part of the first story has Dr Banner and Rick use a Big Gamma Machine to control the transformations into the Hulk, but retain Banner's mind. The experiment appears to be successful, but Rick quickly becomes aware that the gamma rays have made the transformed Banner more brutish, as though The Hulk's earlier persona and Banner's have been combined.

Later on in the same story, Rick is able to use a handy gamma-ray machine to transform the Hulk back to his Bruce Banner identity. From here on, the machine-controlled switches leave The Hulk with some degree of Banner's intelligence.

And once again, The Hulk is talking like The Thing, with dialogue like, "Save a man's family and they shoot at ya! Come on, Rick - we're takin' off!"

The second story offers another variation on Banner's change into The Hulk. When an alien called Mongu arrives on Earth and issues a challenge, Bruce Banner uses his Big Gamma Machine, now controlled via a floor-mounted panel, to change to The Hulk, but still retaining his own mind ... sort of. While he seems as intelligent as Banner, this Hulk affects the coarse speech patterns of one of Stan Lee's stock thug characters, like the later Sandman or Crusher Creel. In a way it's a bit of a throwback to the earlier characterisation of The Hulk we saw in issues 1 and 2. The same characterisation that I'm pretty sure resulted in those early disappointing sales.

In the second story of the issue, The Hulk talks like an angry version of The Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm. He's capable of cunning and is able to expose the deception of Mongu almost immediately.

And it wouldn't change much with the following issue, as the Hulk takes on Tyrannus and the oriental communist General Fang.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 5

Issue 5 of The Incredible Hulk went on sale at the beginning of November 1962, cover-dated January 1963. Other Marvels on sale that month were Fantastic Four 11 (still being published a month ahead of the other titles), Journey into Mystery 88, Strange Tales 104 and Tales to Astonish 39. Stan was already beginning to build quite a line-up of costumed heroes.

Even at this early stage, the Marvel line was beginning to take shape, most of the lead stories pencilled - and perhaps co-plotted - by Jack Kirby.

Like the preceding two issues, this one was also a two-story book. The first tale was cover-featured and pits The Hulk against a subterranean menace called Tyrannus in "The Beauty and the Beast" and the second story trotted out Stan's favourite villains of the period, the communists.

It's not too clear in the first story exactly what Stan's title is referring to ... Is Betty the "Beauty", or is it the foppishly handsome Tyrannus? Is the "Beast" the Hulk, or the evil Tyrannus? And are the villain's subterranean hench-things the same subterraneans that follow The Mole Man , as seen in Fantastic Four 1 (Nov 1961)? In the opening scenes, Tyrannus explains to his little yellow followers that he was banished to the centre of the Earth by Merlin many centuries ago. Is this the same Merlin that would try to take over the world just a few months later in Journey into Mystery 96? It's all a bit confusing.

The plot of the Tyrannus story revolves around Betty to some degree, but she really is treated like a mere plot device here, rather than as a character. Tyrannus is depicted watching her via his viewscreen (though it functions more like a crystal ball) right at the start. Then at the conclusion of the tale, Rick's dialogue tells us that Betty has developed (convenient) amnesia and won't remember anything that happened.

All too quickly, Tyrannus has made friends with Betty Ross and spirited her away to his underground kingdom. When a curious Banner and Rick Jones try to follow, they find their way blocked by a huge boulder. Only one creature has the strength to move such a weight, and the pair rush back to Banner's lab to effect a familiar change.

But when Banner returns as The Hulk, the boulder barrier has vanished. Maybe Jack had forgotten to draw it and Stan was just writing round the discrepancy, but whoever was responsible, it feels like careless storytelling. The Hulk follows Tyrannus to his underground kingdom, but is almost immediately rendered unconscious by a volcanic gas weapon and captured. With Betty Ross as a hostage against his obedience, there's a couple of scenes with The Hulk as first a gladiator then a slave. Fortunately, Rick manages to release Betty and The Hulk is free to battle Tyrannus and his underlings head-on.

In this story, The Hulk retains enough of Banner's personality to care about Tyrannus' threat to Betty, and keeps his aggression in check, something the later Hulk would find impossible - even if he could remember who Betty is.

"The Hordes of General Fang" is one of those by-the-numbers commie tales that were used so often at this period in Marvel's development. The first three pages show The Hulk, out taking his exercise (!), then attacked by General Ross' men with an ice missile. The Hulk escapes and returns to Banner's lab where he becomes human once again using the Big Gamma Machine. 

Hearing radio reports of an asian warlord, General Fang (great name), invading a peaceful eastern principality Banner decides to take a hand as The Hulk. After reviewing a book about eastern legends (!), The Hulk takes off, on a commercial airliner, for Taiwan. Once there he must first battle his way through communist Chinese forces to reach his intended foe. Fang's soldiers are depicted in communist uniforms, though they're never identified as such. Perhaps Kirby's intention was that Fang and his forces were communist deserters, but Stan deemed it too complicated. Then the point of The Hulk's research is revealed. He dresses up in a furry costume and attacks Fan's army as ... The Abominable Snowman.

That's right ... your eyes aren't deceiving you. That's The Hulk dressed up in a furry onesy, pretending to be The Abominable Snowman. Not really sure why the deception is needed, when he can just trash General Fan's army with his enormous strength.

The General Fang story is probably the daftest of these early Hulk tales ... but the title was about to take a dramatic turn with perhaps the most pivotal change of this early run.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 6

"The Hulk vs The Metal Master" is a book-length tale that differs considerably from what had come before. The most obvious difference was that Kirby was no longer penciller (or plotter). Stan's other heavyweight artist Steve Ditko had come on board as penciller and inker. Whether this was to have been a fill-in issue or a permanent change is hard to say.

Looking at the evidence, the timing of The Incredible Hulk 6 (Mar 1963) could indicate that Stan was clearing Kirby's schedule to accommodate the impending Fantastic Four Annual 1 (Jul 1963) and his imminent takeover of the Thor strip, starting with Journey into Mystery 93 (Jun 1963). However, the replacement for The Hulk's book was to be Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos 1 (May 1963), also drawn by Kirby, which would make it look less like a scheduling conflict.

At this point, Ditko was only drawing The Amazing Spider-Man - issue 1 cover-dated the same month as The Incredible Hulk 6 though it was on the stands almost a month earlier - so it does seem more plausible that the Hulk title had been promised to Ditko to fill in the gap months between Spider-Man issues. Which indicates that Stan felt The Incredible Hulk was floundering and needed a shot in the arm to get it back on track. And supporting this idea is the fact that when the Hulk was cancelled after just one Ditko issue, Stan was more than prepared to accept a pitch for a new character Dr Strange, which has been well-documented elsewhere.

In the Metal Master story, The Hulk is still talking like a bar-room Ben Grimm, and still transforming via his Big Gamma Machine. But when the Metal Master arrives to threaten Earth with his metal-controlling powers (powers not so vastly different from Magneto, who would be menacing the fledging X-Men just six months later), Banner transforms into The Hulk. All except his face, that is.

From the look of the art here, Steve Ditko is putting everything he has into this issue of The Incredible Hulk. The artwork actually looks more polished than the work he was doing at the same time on The Amazing Spider-Man. And that cinematic row of panels across the centre of page 8 ... perfectly conveys the true power of The Hulk.

No problem. The Hulk can just use one of these casts "Banner made of his head and mine, in order to study 'em!" as a mask. Whoa, wait, how's that again? Banner made a cast of The Hulk's head? And the Hulk sat still for that, did he? No, wait ... aren't Banner and The Hulk the same person? Now I'm confused again ... OK, it's dumb plotting, but you have to admit, those panels where the soldier pulls the Hulk mask off the unconscious Hulk, only to find The Hulk's real face underneath ... that's a pretty cool scene, right? And pure Ditko. I don't think Stan would ever have come up with that weird an idea.

Right after that, there's a scene where the captured Hulk rages at Rick Jones, paranoid that the teenager has betrayed him. It's the first glimmer we get that The Hulk has anger management issues, fuelled by his feelings of persecution. There was no sense of this in the Kirby-drawn stories, but here it is, emerging in the very first Ditko version of the character.

Here, more than ever, The Hulk's behaviour seems to be similar to that of schizophrenia ... his feelings of persecutions lead to an uncontrollable anger and he makes unfounded accusations at the people closest to him. Once he becomes Banner, he is once again rational.

Then, upset by The Hulk's rejection, Rick asks General Ross about joining the army, but at 16 he's too young. So he turns this into a positive and with his pals forms the Teen Brigade, a national network of kids with radios who share information to help the authorities whenever needed. And of course, they're needed pretty much right away. Banner has an idea that will defeat the Metal Master and the Teen Brigade gathers the necessary equipment.

With the supplies, The Hulk (not Banner) builds a big cannon he intends to use on the Metal Master. I won't say how The Hulk is able to use such a weapon against a creature who controls all metal, as it's a clever twist and you may not have read the issue yet. But Banner's plan works and the menace is defeated.

When The Hulk tries to use the Big Gamma Machine to revert to Dr Banner, the device mysteriously doesn't work. It's the Hulk's fury at his plight and the way the authorities have treated him that triggers the transformation.

But here's the best bit ... once The Hulk has finished with The Metal Master, he leaps away, back towards his lab. But when he tries to revert to Banner using his Big Gamma Machine, the process doesn't work, and Banner appears to be stuck in Hulk form. The final straw is when he hears that The Hulk has been pardoned in return for saving Earth from the Metal Master and he gets angry. He gets so angry that it triggers the transformation back to Bruce Banner. Now, granted, that's the exact reverse of later Hulk stories - where anger triggers the transformation to The Hulk and calmness causes the change back to Banner - but the germ of the idea is there. Is it Ditko's idea or Stan's? It's not possible to say now. From what I've read, at this point in Marvel history, with a limited number to titles to get to press every month, Stan was still plotting at least the non-Kirby comics. Certainly, the story is tighter, more structured and more consistent here than it ever was while Kirby was on the title.

And Kirby's story about seeing an enraged mother lifting a car off her child? Sorry, Jack, but I just don't believe that's true. The mother-lifting-the-car tale was a common urban legend at the time, one my own mother recounted to me when I was a kid. The science is shaky, and most sources agree that adrenaline wouldn't give the muscles such a surge of strength, let alone be delivered fast enough to permit such a feat. And more importantly, The Hulk wasn't a big green rage monster while Jack was drawing him. That wouldn't come until the later Tales to Astonish stories, drawn by Ditko. Whoever came up with the whole "don't make me angry" schtick ... it sure wasn't Jack.

Despite some of my criticisms here, I still truly love this run of The Incredible Hulk. Yes, they're corny, contradictory and in some spots just plain dumb ... but they're also incredibly endearing. And back in my early teens these six books were the absolute holy grail of Marvel issues for me - I was obsessed with owning them.

In examining them again, I can see that this version of the Hulk might possibly have been Jack Kirby's brainchild, but the enduring Hulk that would go on to massive publishing, television and movie success wasn't this Hulk at all ... it was Stan Lee and Steve's take on the character that would prove the successful one.

The Hulk would also appear in Fantastic Four 12, cover dated the same month, but on sale three weeks earlier, then not again until The Avengers 1 (Sep 1963), six months later and would regularly appear in that title until issue 5 (May 1964), all drawn by Jack Kirby. In all of these appearances, whenever the transformation between Banner and The Hulk is shown, it's always using the Big Gamma Machine, except at the end of Avengers 3, where the change back to Banner is caused by "the excitement ... the stress" and in Avengers 5, where Banner's transformation to The Hulk is entirely spontaneous. Then, Fantastic Four 25 and 26 (Apr & May 1964) show the Hulk being changed back to Banner via a "gamma pill" Rick Jones pops into his mouth, though he's still talking like a slightly ticked-off version of Ben Grimm.

Just five months later, Hulk would first appear in Tales to Astonish 59 (Sep 1964) as a foe for Giant Man, where his transformation to the Hulk is for the first time directly attributed to anger, scripted by Stan Lee and drawn by Dick Ayers. Then the following month, the character kicks off in his own series, written by Stan and once more drawn by Steve Ditko. It's here that the familiar version of the Hulk - the one that changes when his heartrate rises or falls and utters catchphrases like "Hulk smash" - really comes into his own.

NEXT: THE HULK ON TV

Captain America: The Sixth Avenger

AROUND 1964 I discovered Marvel Comics and almost immediately abandoned the DC Superman, Green Lantern and Flash books I had been reading up till that point. In early 1965, I came across a copy of Tales of Suspense 64 (Apr 1965), which featured the wartime adventures of Captain America, a character who immediately became my all-time favourite superhero. Around the same time - probably the same month, given the cover dates - I found a copy of Avengers 15 (Apr 1965), which starred Captain America working with his fellow team members in a contemporary setting, looking not a day older. How was this possible? My ten-year-old brain was confused.

Much later, when I'd back-filled my small collection of Marvel Comics a little, I was able to figure out what was going on.

The revived and revised Human Torch appeared in the first issue of Fantastic Four. The Sub-Mariner made his Silver Age debut a few months later in FF4. Martin Goodman also had Stan spin The Human Torch off into his own series in Strange Tales, beginning with issue 101 (Oct 1962).

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had begun the Marvel Age of Superheroes by revamping one of Publisher Martin Goodman's 1940s properties, The Human Torch, and co-starring him with the rest of the Fantastic Four in the first issue of their self-titled magazine in November 1961. A few months later, in Fantastic Four 4 (May 1962), Lee and Kirby revived Prince Namor, The Sub-Mariner, as a villain for the FF to fight. It only remained for Stan to find a way to bring back Captain America and he'd put an end to Goodman's requests to revive all of the major 1940s Timely characters.

Stan was right to be wary. Captain America was very much a character for the time, born on the eve of America's involvement in the Second World War, Cap was depicted on the cover of his debut comic socking Hitler on the jaw. After the war drew to a close in 1945, the nation seemed to lose interest in patriotic superheroes - well, actually in all superheroes - and Captain America's sales declined quite rapidly. So finding a way to bring back a character that the comics-buying public had given up on in the late 1940s and who no longer had a purpose now that Nazi Germany was two decades in the past wasn't going to be easy.

The dying of Timely heroes was a sad affair. Captain America's own title turned into a horror comic that lasted one more issue. His final battle was against The Red Skull in Captain America's Weird Tales 74 (Oct 1949). The Human Torch's last appearance was in Marvel Mystery Comics 92 (Jun 1949), and Sub-Mariner's own title died with issue 32 the same month.

Casting around for somewhere to park Captain America, Stan figured that Strange Tales was the most appropriate place, but hedging his bets, had Jack Kirby draw up a tale for ST114 (Nov 1963) where one of Johnny Storm's old enemies, The Acrobat, disguises himself as Captain America and carries out robberies. Even the Torch is fooled right up till the last moment, when he yanks "Cap's" mask off.

Someone must've messed up, because Captain America is shown throughout the story wearing red panties, just like Superman. And if you look closely at the cover, you can see he was coloured that way there too. Stan must've blown a gasket when the cover proof came in and had someone patch over the erroneous pants on the blue film, resulting in purple pants (solid cyan over solid magenta) ... not quite as bad as red, but still wrong.

The final caption box owns up to the fact that Stan was trying out the character to see what readers thought. Fan reaction must've been positive because, a few months later, Captain America turned up in The Avengers 4 (Mar 1964), as a replacement for the increasingly unstable Hulk. It's actually a pretty good tale, and interestingly, uses the Sub-Mariner as the catalyst for Cap's return.

Behind the iconic cover is an epic 23-page tale that describes how Captain America came to be revived by The Sub-Mariner and inducted into The Avengers, who'd become his family for the next ten years.

Prince Namor escaped The Avengers at the end of issue 3, and now fetches up in the Arctic, where he needlessly bullies a band of Inuits who are minding their own business and worshipping their frozen god. The Sub-Mariner flings the idol into the sea, where it thaws out and is brought on board the pursuing sub of The Avengers. The idol turns out to be famous WWII hero, Captain America ... and he's still alive.

You can tell that Stan hasn't really got the measure of the character yet, as most of his dialogue sounds stilted and unnatural. "I am not lucky enough to forget forever ... to forget that I was once the man the world called ... Captain America!" he says moments after waking up from a coma. Of course, if he'd just woken up from a coma, and had no reason at this point to know that twenty years had passed, then his claim is slightly odd. And then, "I've no need of tricks!" intones Cap. "Test me! Try to conquer me!" He sounds more like a robot than a man of the 1940s.

Cap then reveals that, back in the final days of the war, he and Bucky were trying to stop a saboteur's explosives-laden drone plane taking off. The pair make a daring leap to the plane, but Cap loses his grip and the plane explodes, killing his young sidekick. That must've been some leap, because the heroes start somewhere in the European Theatre of Operations and Cap hits the water off the coast of Newfoundland. But why quibble? Cap sinks into the icy sea and the lowered temperature maintains him in a state of suspended animation until The Avengers fish him out in 1964.

Jack Kirby's action scenes in Avengers 4 are as dynamic as always, but you kind of get the impression that Stan's heart wasn't really in the scripting, or that he hadn't got a handle on the character at this point.

Then, there's a bit of shennanigans with an alien turning the Avengers to stone at the request of Namor, but they're rescued by Cap, and then the new Avengers finally tackle The Submariner who, yep, manages to escape again.

The idea of an alien who turns folks to stone and who has been mistaken for the legendary gorgon, Medusa, is a plot device right out of Lee's earlier fantasy stories - "Call Her ... Medusa" from Journey into Mystery 96 (Sep 1963) is just one example.

Interestingly, Namor doesn't seem to recognise Captain America, though you'd have thought that, given they were 1940s contemporaries, they'd have at least known about each other, even if they'd never met - but weren't they in the All-Winners Squad together (All-Winners Comics 19, Fall 1946)?

Captain America is the undoubted star of Avengers 4 and, as you might expect, he has the lion's share of the action. He's instrumental in figuring out what happened to the "missing" Avengers and in tracking down the sunglasses-wearing character who fired a strange weapon at his team-mates. Once the other Avengers are restored, the team goes after Namor and though each has a moment of combat with the Sub-Mariner, it is Cap who frees hostage Rick Jones moments before an earthquake forces Namor to return to the depths.

The inker's not credited on Avengers 4 ... I'd always assumed it was Paul Reinman, as that's who'd inked the issues on either side which didn't look much different, but the Grand Comicbook Database gives the inker as George Roussos. Either way, I wasn't that keen on the inks, thinking they looked rushed and messy. I'm sure George Roussos had his fans but I wasn't one of them.

Captain America's very next appearance was briefly in Fantastic Four 25 and more fully in FF26, where he and the Avengers found themselves in a scrap with the FF over who had first dibs on The Hulk.

These two comics were heavily advertised in the other Marvels of the day and were both on my "must-get" list. When I did manage to track down copies, I wasn't in the least disappointed.

The tale pretty much carries straight on from Avengers 4, and was probably more about Stan consolidating the Avengers and Captain America as part of the Marvel Universe. Strangely, the first contact between the Avengers and the FF is when The Human Torch and Captain America have the first skirmish on page 13, yet no mention is made of the pair's first "meeting" in Strange Tales 114. It seems odd that Stan missed the opportunity to have Cap speak a line like, "You're up against the real thing, this time, sonny!"

It really is a great Marvel event, featuring 80% of the company's main characters in one adventure. Giving the tale two issues meant that the storytelling felt uncramped and satisfying and it remains to this day one of my all time favourite Marvel tales. There are a couple of minor niggles. Stan still hadn't really found The Hulk's voice yet, and in many panels he talks a bit like The Thing. And the resolution, where Rick Jones drops an "emergency gamma-ray treated capsule which Banner gave me months ago" into the Hulk's mouth and the Hulk, transforming back to Banner, falls into the Hudson River does seem a bit unimaginative - or perhaps too imaginative - and seems like a Jack Kirby plot-point. Inking is once again by George Roussos (as "George Bell") and is, if nothing else, consistent with the previous Avengers issue.

Jack Kirby adds a montage of The Avengers with both The Hulk and Captain America present, even though up to this point they haven't appeared together in the team and it's even debatable whether Bruce Banner would be aware of Cap as an Avenger. But Kirby partially redeems himself with this fabulous two-thirds page panel of the living rock being forced up to the surface world by the Lava people.

Avengers 5 (May 1964), which came out the same month as FF26, continues The Hulk storyline and also brings back Molto the Lava Man and his underground race from the Thor tale in Journey into Mystery 97. The Lava Men are trying to get rid of a weird growing rock which threatens to engulf their subterranean kingdom by forcing it on the surface people. Thor's former enemy Molto counsels against this, but his people refuse to listen. And we all know where that's going to lead.

Iron Man enters the earth below the Living Rock and encounters the Lava People. He tries to reason with them, but they attack him. Thor intervenes and demands to speak to their ruler. But an impasse is reached when the Lava Men explain that Thor striking the Living Rock will only cause more damage. In the meantime another group of Lava Men attack Captain America triggering a further skirmish, with Iron Man and Giant Man getting involved.

Meanwhile, not far away Banner transforms into the Hulk, then comes across the Avengers and attacks them. Thor attempts to halt the Hulk with his hammer, but a sneak attack by the Lava Men's leader with a radioactive weapon causes Thor to transform back into Don Blake ... and now the Avengers no longer have the raw power to destroy the Living Rock. But the team find a way to taunt the Hulk, so that his massive fists strike the Rock in the exact spot to trigger an explosion that destroys it.

The issue also included a new letters column in which future comics artist and inker Alan Weiss writes to say how he prefers "George Bell's" inking over Paul Reinman's. So that shows how much I know.

As Cap bonds with his new team-mates and gets all depressed about the fate of Bucky, we're introduced to the villain responsible for the death of Cap's young partner. Zemo is a man given to walking all over his fellow man (literally) and immature temper tantrums. Already I dislike him.

Avengers 6 (Jul 1964) is a bit of a landmark, for two reasons. It's the first monthly issue, which means sales must have been very good right from the get-go, and it's the first time the Avengers face a team of super-foes. We open with Captain America demonstrating the transistor-powered magnets that Iron Man installed in his shield. This was probably an attempt to bring the character more "up-to-date", but the idea was quickly jettisoned, as revealed last time when I covered Tales of Suspense 62 (Feb 65, just seven months after Avengers 6).

This issue also introduces Baron Zemo and retrospectively adds him to Marvel history as a main foe for Captain America, and in Sgt Fury 8 (Jul 1964) as a wartime adversary for Fury and his Commandos. It's revealed that Zemo is the saboteur responsible for the exploding plane that killed Bucky and now, surviving in exile in the Amazonian jungles, the ex-Nazi is ready to bring the fight to Captain America once more.

Also in Avengers 6, we get the origin of (the masked) Baron Zemo and a return grudge match between Cap and the man responsible for the death of Bucky. The same month, Zemo turned up (twenty years earlier, sort of) in Sgt Fury 8 - without the magenta mask.

So the villain recruits a bunch of second-banana villains to help him battle his way through the Avengers to get to Cap, saying to his henchman, "You must find three people for me, if you value your life!!" though Stan doesn't explain how Zemo's henchman will be able to get them to work together. 

First to show his face is old Giant Man foe The Black Knight, who's flying around the city on his winged steed spraying Zemo's mysterious Adhesive X everywhere, bringing traffic to a halt and causing chaos. Next, defeated Iron Man villain The Melter does pretty much the same, but first melting the guns of any police nearby. Then Thor's old enemy Radioactive Man arrives, also squirting the nasty superglue all around. After a bit of pushing and shoving, The Avengers hit on the idea of asking Paste-Pot Pete for help, reasoning that his expertise in glues and adhesives might also extend to solvents. Pete strikes a deal for an early release and the Teen Brigade are dispatched to switch Zemo's Adhesive X for Pete's super-solvent.

But it's Captain America that comes up with the plan to defeat Zemo's super-powered allies. They'll simply switch foes. So Thor battles The Black Knight, Giant Man and the Wasp tackle Radioactive Man and Iron Man takes on The Melter ... oh, wait a minute ... that wasn't part of Cap's plan. It only remains for Captain America to give Zemo a pounding and the tale can draw to a close.

The inking here was by Chic Stone, one of my own personal Silver Age favourites. Though not quite as inspired as the work he was already doing on the Fantastic Four comic, notably issue 30, which came out the following month - probably because Stone was getting Marvel out of a deadline disaster here - the work is still crisp and fresh and in my opinion far better than the inking work we'd seen so far on this title.

However, Stan seems a lot more confident with Cap's voice in this story, and we already see the guilt-laden side of his personality, blaming himself for the death of Bucky and unable to move on from the trauma, yet motivated by a sense of duty to continue the fight regardless of his own feelings. It's a take on Cap that would continue for the next decade and a half and would be further explored by Roy Thomas in much later Avengers issues.

At the beginning of Avengers 7, the Executioner and The Enchantress get kicked out of Asgard for ganging up on Thor in Journey into Mystery 103. So they seek out their next career move with Baron Zemo, even though he's hardly an equal opportunities employer.

Of course, Zemo was back in Avengers 7 (Aug 1964), along with new allies The Executioner and The Enchantress who'd previously battled Thor in Journey into Mystery 103 four months earlier. Even though Zemo was supposed to have been tear-gassed in his escape craft and picked up by the police at the end of last issue (albeit, off-camera), here he is, back in his South American hideaway, abusing the natives like nothing ever happened.

The driving incident for the plot of this issue is when Thor is hypnotised into drinking a magic mind-control potion by the wiley Enchantress. You'd think Thor would be a little more cautious around that woman after The Last Time. But, no, in he blunders and gulps down the brain-altering brew like it was Vimto or something. With his head suitably re-arranged, Thor now sees his follow Avengers as demons and picks a fight.

After knocking back The Enchantress' Love Potion Number 9, Thor gets all discombobulated and thinks his Avengers pals are scary monsters and super-freaks ...

But though it's full of sound and fury, the battle between the Avengers seems a bit by-the-numbers, compared to the attention Stan and Jack lavish on Captain America this issue. No fewer than six pages - more than a quarter of the story - is taken up with establishing Cap's character and following his feud with Baron Zemo.

Once again, Captain America is driving the storyline of this issue of Avengers. There's a fun sequence at the beginning where Cap hires a bunch of wrestlers as sparring partners, then he has a mope about Bucky and snaps at Rick for trying on Bucky's old costume.

And is it just me, or is the splash page of this issue inked by someone other than Chic Stone? Looks more like Paul Reinman's inking. Of course we know that very often back in the day, Stan would want art re-drawn as it came in, so it's possible that the figure of Cap was redrawn, or even added in by another artist before press-day.

Looking back on this today, this doesn't look like Chic Stone work, particularly Giant Man's face and the inking on Cap's figure. Or maybe someone did a last-minute touch-up.

Avengers 8 (Sep 1964) is a change of pace. Stan and Jack leave Zemo alone for a moment and introduce a new menace, Kang, a diabolical scientific genius from the future who may or may not be either related to Dr Doom or actually be Dr Doom.

It's a little surprising that Stan didn't have this cover re-drawn. You'd think he'd argue that you can't see Kang clearly and The Avengers are crowded into a quarter of the cover. When he shows up inside, Kang looks a tad fey. And, interestingly, it's the Teen Brigade that save the day.

The character first appeared in the guise of Rama-Tut, the time-travelling antagonist from the story in Fantastic Four 19 (Oct 1963), and then turned up in the Fantastic Four Annual 2 (1964) where he rescues Dr Doom, floating in space after his last defeat by the FF. Trying to return to his own time, Kang overshoots by a few centuries and crashlands in a barbaric and desolate future. Quickly tiring of ruling a dying world, he decides to time travel to the 20th Century and conquer Earth ... which is when he runs in to The Avengers.

The team seems a bit chaotic in its battle against Kang. Their powers have little effect against him, then they're all captured, leaving only The Wasp and Rick Jones and his pals to free the others and defeat Kang.

It all seems a bit rushed and I wasn't wild about the Dick Ayers inking here, either. I get that Marvel was running to tight deadlines - goodness knows I've had my own share of producing strips to a deadline on the weekly comic 2000AD - but even so this issue does seem a bit ramshackle. That same month, Kirby had also drawn Fantastic Four 30 (a gorgeous art job with Chic Stone, covered in an earlier blog entry), Journey into Mystery 108, X-Men 7 and 37 pages of story plus five pinups in Fantastic Four Annual 2 (all also Stone, so no wonder he didn't have time for Avengers 8). And Dick Ayers also pencilled the 18-page epic Giant Man/Hulk battle in Tales to Astonish 59, so they were all probably stretched a little thin.

Though Avengers 9 dredged up Zemo once again, his new creation Wonder Man was an interesting, if short-lived, character. The machinery used to give Simon Williams "Wonder" powers would come up again in Marvel legend in the origin of long-time Avengers villain Power Man.

Avengers 9 (Oct 1964) was the first issue to be pencilled by Don Heck, who would go on to have a long association with the title, supplying most of the art up to issue 40. Here we again had Ayers on inks, unfortunately not the best fit for Heck's art. I always enjoyed Don Heck most when he inked his own pencils.

I wouldn't see this issue until quite some time after it was published as it was another of the books caught up in the big Marvel/Thorpe and Porter distribution snafu of late 1964. Zemo returns (again!) as the main villain, only this time, instead of finding allies to join him, he creates one. He offers convicted white collar criminal Simon Williams the opportunity to acquire super-powers and join him to get revenge on Tony Stark's "bodyguard" Iron Man and his Avengers team-mates. The catch is, the process that gives Williams "Powerman" powers will also kill him in days unless an antidote is administered. So, Zemo, Executioner and Enchantress stand by as Wonder Man infiltrates The Avengers and sets them up for betrayal. Of course, Williams has a change of heart at the last moment and sacrifices himself so The Avengers may live.

The Marvel house ad in Avengers 9 showed some of the other Marvel mags we weren't able to get in the UK because of the importers not distributing the October and November titles in the newsagents here.

But once Kirby was no longer supplying the art (and plotting or co-plotting, if indeed he was), then the Avengers stories became fairly routine. Avengers 9 was entertaining because of the unusual concept of Wonder Man as a villain-turned-hero, but otherwise, Jack Kirby was sorely missed.

Avengers 10 (Nov 1964) was also a difficult issue to find in the UK, and when I did finally track down a copy, it turned out to be not one of my favourites. The plot has Zemo (sigh) ally himself with another time-travelling tyrant, Immortus. This new fellow kidnaps Rick Jones and holds that over Captain America to force Cap to bring the other Avengers to him. He then pits them against warriors from different eras of history.

Between Thor's disappearing tights and the hokey ending where The Enchantress cancels the entire shameful episode out of existence, this was one of the weakest instalments of The Avengers of the early era.

The issue does bear the earmarks of having been rushed. Besides the plot not being the best-thought-out story in that run of early Avengers, there seems to be some problems with the colouring, as Thor's blue leggings come and go from page to page, and he's depicted more than a few times with bare legs. The ending is weak, as well ... with her team-mates facing certain defeat, The Enchantress turns back time so that the whole Immortus episode never happened.

Avengers 11 (Dec 1964) brought back Kang as the main villain. Fashioning a robot duplicate of Spider-Man using the technology of his ancestor Dr Doom, Kang sent it back in time to lure the Avengers into a trap. The cover art is misleading on way too many levels. For a start, Iron Man isn't in the story at all - he's busy trying to convince his supporting cast over in the same month's Tales of Suspense 60 that he didn't murder Tony Stark and has requested a leave of absence from The Avengers. And the "Co-starring Spider-Man" line isn't exactly true. The real Spider-Man appears for only a couple of pages at the tail end of the tale.

Avengers 11: Even with the addition of Chic Stone on inks, I didn't think Don Heck had really gotten a grip on the Marvel style of action. He wouldn't really come into his own as the definitive Avengers artist until after Thor, Iron Man and Giant Man left.

And there's definitely something weird going on with the cover art. Over on Nick Caputo's blog, there's a detailed examination of this cover and Nick explains his thinking behind the credits he assigns. But I also have a couple of thoughts to add to Nick's careful dissection. Nick thinks the Spider-Man figure is an addition, pencilled by Steve Ditko inked by Chic Stone, and he is very likely correct as Mr Caputo has a great eye for this kind of thing. To me it's certainly evident that, no matter how much I love Stone's inking, he really doesn't get Spider-Man at all. When you look at the Spider-Man figure in detail, there are many problems with it. The mask is drawn incorrectly. The border round the mask's eyes is left open for colour instead of being solid black, as is the Spider chest-emblem. Often pencillers will leave areas of black as outlines and just mark them with a small "X" to indicate to the inker to fill them in ... maybe the penciller (Ditko) forgot, or thought he would be inking it. But it's quite surprising that Stan's eagle eye didn't catch this snafu. And I'm not mad about the background webbing, either, where Chic Stone inked in the circular pencil guidelines when he should have erased them.

Here, I've taken the liberty of correcting the mistakes on the Spider-Man figure on the cover of Avengers 11. The eye detail on the mask has been blacked in (on the right), along with the chest emblem. And the weird blue highlight on the front of the mask has been recoloured yellow to match the other highlights on the costume. And I've gotten rid of some of the circular guide lines on the webbing in front of Spidey's face that Chic inked instead of erasing (If you look closely, you can see the compass hole in the centre of the webbing).
Click on the image to enlarge it.

The other small niggle is with Stan's scripting. Five month's earlier, in Tales to Astonish 57 Jul 1964), the villain Egghead had engineered a fight between Giant-Man and Spider-Man. In that story, there was quite a bit of dialogue around the idea of wasps and spiders being natural enemies, so Janet Van Dyne was quite hostile towards Spidey. In Avengers 11, there is much the same kind of conversation when "Spidey" shows up, yet no one mentions that Giant-Man and Spider-Man had battled months before, not something you'd think Hank Pym would easily forget. Perhaps this contributed to Stan's decision to remove the "heavy-hitters" from The Avengers ...

But in the end, because the plot basically "cheats" and doesn't really give us "Spider-Man meets The Avengers", what should have been a terrific issue ends up feeling a little bit "meh!". The whole concept of Spider-Man trying to join The Avengers - with this same line-up, even though Iron Man and Thor had been replaced by Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver by that point -  would be done a lot better two years later in Amazing Spider-Man Annual 3 (1966).

Avengers 12 (Jan 1965) gave us a break from the machinations of Kang. The story opens with Giant-Man getting an alert from his ants that there is great danger underground. Giant-Man summons the rest of the Avengers ... but his colleagues seem annoyed to be called in on the say-so of some ants. This is pretty unlikely, as these heroes have been through a lot together and you'd think by now they'd have learned to trust each other. So having Thor flouncing off in a huff because he has "more pressing matters to attend to" doesn't really ring true. I can't think what could be more important as Thor was between adventures, and in his own title that month was battling The Hulk in a flashback to the events of Avengers 3.

Behind the terrific Kirby and Stone cover is another odd tale which looks like Stan still didn't have a handle on how this comic should run. Weirdly, The Red Ghost shows up in the last act of the story for no good reason that I can see. And Thor's own title that month was a flashback to The Hulk battle in Avengers 3.

A few pages later, The Avengers have a change of heart, but before they can set off to find Hank Pym to see if he needs any help, they're attacked by a squad of The Mole Man's subterraneans. Just as The Avengers prevail, the subterraneans vanish in a wisp of smoke, and the Avengers set off to find Giant-Man. They invade the Mole Man's kingdom, free Giant Man and defeat the underground hordes. 

Captain America again had a couple of good scenes. It is he that tries to get Iron Man and Thor to listen to Giant-Man's warning, and it's Cap who prevents a robbery and retrieves vital components for Iron Man's burrowing device. But I'm still not sure what The Red Ghost was doing in there. 

Dick Ayers was back inking Don Heck for this issue, though I have to say, this was a much better job than he did on Avengers 9.

Jack Kirby (with the help of Chic Stone) shows everyone how it should be done, when The Avengers guest-star in X-Men 9 (Jan 1965).

The same month as Avengers 12, the team also make an appearance in X-Men 9, pencilled by Jack Kirby and inked by Chic Stone. Presumably, Stan was trying to goose the sales of the mutant book by including the more successful Avengers as guest stars. It's not much more than a walk-on, really, as The Avengers track some unknown evil to distant Bavaria. It turns out to be X-Men foe Lucifer and after the obligatory skirmish, The Avengers leave Prof Xavier's young heroes to fight their own battle with Lucifer.

The evil Count Nefaria (that's him on the cover, looking like a demented keyboard player) makes America believe The Avengers have turned traitor and soon they're hunted by the US military ...

Dick Ayers would return as inker on Avengers 13 (Feb 1965), an issue which at least gave us a new villain - Count Nefaria - and a new criminal organisation - The Maggia - as antagonists ... which may or may not have been influenced by James Bond's Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE. The smooth Count lures the Avengers to his castle under the pretext of a charity event, then produces holographic duplicates of the heroes, which he then sends to the Pentagon to declare war on the US. Now hunted as traitors, it doesn't take The Avengers too long to figure out who's behind the plot. So they take the battle to Nefaria. But in the final skirmish, The Wasp is wounded and the issue, unusually, ends on a cliffhanger, with Janet Van Dyne's life in the balance.

With Avengers 14, Stan brought back Jack Kirby to produce layouts for Don Heck to work over. This would continue for three issues until Stan was happy with the title's level of storytelling. The splash page straightaway looks better for Kirby's input.

I reckon Stan couldn't have been any more pleased with the last few issues of The Avengers than I was. Don Heck is a great artist, but on these early issues, he struggled to deliver his best work. So Stan got Jack Kirby to provide layouts for The Avengers 14 (Mar 1965). And in a bit of a departure, Lee credits himself with the plot, Kirby with layouts (underlining that this isn't a Jack Kirby story) and handed the scripting job off to brother Larry Leiber and the previously unknown "Paul Laiken", obviously a pen-name. There were probably reasons for the alias, but then Stan goes and gives it all away on the letters page by revealing that 14 pages of script were by Larry Leiber and Larry Ivie ... Ivie was perhaps better known as a writer for Jim Warren's Creepy and Eerie, though he contributed scripts to Tower Comics during the latter half of the 1960s as well.

The plot has Thor in a race against time to secure the services of Dr Svenson of Norway who is the only one who can save The Wasp's life. It's the least he can do after how mean he was to Giant-Man just two issues previously. But when Thor grabs the reluctant doctor and flies him back to America, it turns out that Svenson is an alien impersonator. The Avengers' only chance to save The Wasp is to find the rest of the aliens and, hopefully, the real Dr Svenson. Our heroes manage to track the Kallusians to their hidden base in the Arctic. It turns out the aliens are hiding from their enemies on Earth and Dr Svenson is helping them willingly. But The Avengers force the Kallusians to leave Earth and face their hunters in outer space so our planet is not destroyed in the inevitable war when the enemies of Kallu catch up with them. The Wasp is saved ... but we never find out what happened to the Kallusians.

The next few issues of The Avengers I covered in an earlier post. And I'll leave my favourite period of The Avengers - when the lineup changed to Hawkeye, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, lead by Captain America - for another time.

Next month I want to take a look at some of the earliest appearances of Marvel characters on television, starting with ... Captain America.

Next: Marvel Superheroes on TV!