Marvel's Weird One-Shots (or, Hey ... where's issue 2?)

THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1960s was a strange time for Marvel Comics. Stan Lee had established a strong line of comic books by 1966, and was less restricted by distributor Independent News' eight-titles-a-month rule. With a roster of 20 titles, many of them monthly, Martin Goodman was also sneaking in Annuals (which seemed to be exempt from the distributors' monthly limit) and some puzzling one-shots.

I have no recollection of when I first saw Marvel Super-Heroes 1 (Oct 1966). And back when I was twelve, it never occurred to me to question why a comic was published. I'm sure I would have thought it was simply a companion magazine to the other giant comics I loved so much, Marvel Tales and Marvel Collectors' Item Classics. Expensive though they were at 1/6, almost double the price of a regular comic, they provided me and many other Marvel latecomers easy access to the earliest Marvel stories. I think at the time I had already picked up Avengers 2 and Daredevil 1 from one of the second-hand shops I haunted, so for me the big draw with MSH1 was the reprint of the Golden Age Human Torch and Sub-Mariner battle from Marvel Mystery Comics 8 (Jun 1940).

The casual observer would be hard pressed to know why Stan Lee had put together a comic that reprinted the first issue of Daredevil (then a little over two years old) along with the second issue of The Avengers (Avengers 1 had been reprinted in Marvel Tales 2 the year before).

Ever since reading in Fantastic Four 4 (May 1962) that there had been Sub-Mariner comics in the 1940s, I'd been intrigued to know what they were like. And here was Stan showing us not only some pages from the Golden Age of Comics, but also his first text story from Captain America 3 (May 1941). 

To be honest, the Golden Age was a bit of a disappointment to my 12 year old self. Even at that age, I could grasp the historical importance, but I thought the actual comic strip was crudely drawn - I mean, I thought I could have done better myself - and was badly written. Not like the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby tales I was reading in the contemporary Marvels. And from there on, I never really warmed to the comics of the 1940s.

None of this explains, however, what the point of Marvel Super-Heroes 1 was. Despite promising in the small print that the title would be published quarterly, the second issue never appeared. And I didn't find out the answer to that until fairly recently. Because what we fans couldn't know was that Marvel publisher Martin Goodman had ordered Stan Lee to get a comic on the newsstands called Marvel Super-Heroes to promote the forthcoming September 1966 release of the syndicated Marvel Super-Heroes tv show.

Here's one of the ads that ran in Marvel comics for the Marvel Super-Heroes syndicated television cartoon show. No sign of Daredevil here. I wonder what Stan was thinking ...

So the comic came out in July 1966 (in the US), to promote a show that debuted in the autumn of 1966 on American television and because the comic didn't even carry an ad for the show, we had no way of knowing in the UK that the two had anything to do with one another. Stan didn't even explain the connection in the Bullpen Bulletins page for October 1966, when he announced the MSH comic. 

From Stan's wording here, it does sound like Marvel Super-Heroes was planned as an ongoing title, but its slot was taken by Fantasy Masterpieces, which eventually underwent a title change to Marvel Super-Heroes anyway. Click on image to enlarge.

This could have been because Martin Goodman didn't want any info about the forthcoming tv show leaked too early. Stan plugged the show in the very next Bullpen Bulletins page in the November cover-dated issues. Then, a year later, Marvel would change Fantasy Masterpieces, a title reprinting mostly Golden Age and Atomic Age Marvel characters, into a comic that would showcase new characters under consideration for their own titles. Stan called it Marvel Super-Heroes.

The first try-out in the newly revamped Fantasy Masterpieces was for Captain Marvel. There would be more, but only the above Kree warrior would go on to have his own series from 1968 to 1979, which would cement the reputation of Jim Starlin as a top writer-artist and give us Thanos as a major Marvel villain.

During the negotiations for the Marvel Super-Heroes show, Martin Goodman had held back Spider-Man and Fantastic Four from consideration, because I suppose he figured he could get a better deal for those characters if the 1966 Super-Heroes show did well. It must have worked, because in 1967, Marvel announced that network ABC would be screening Spider-Man and Fantastic Four cartoons as part of their Saturday morning show, "Hannah-Barbera's World of Super Adventure". The Fantastic Four cartoon was produced by Hannah-Barbera, and I'm presuming this made for better quality of animation than the low-budget, limited animation we got with the Marvel Super-Heroes show. I'm saying "presume" because I've never seen any episodes. That's right, the series was never screened in the UK and wasn't released on DVD, as the Hannah-Barbera catalogue is owned by Warner Brothers - who probably don't want to be promoting Marvel characters in competition with their own DC properties.

This ad appeared in the November-dated Marvel comics during 1967 (which would have been on sale in August), though the cartoons were mentioned in the Bullpen Bulletins page in the October-dated Marvels.

The Spider-Man half of the hour slot was produced by Grantray-Lawrence and wasn't much better quality animation than that of the MSH show they had also produced. I wrote a little about the show in an earlier blog, so I won't rehash that here ... but as with Marvel Super-Heroes, Martin Goodman hatched a plan to promote both Marvel Comics and the Marvel cartoons with a special one-shot mag, America's Best TV Comics 1 (Nov 1967).

Though it wasn't branded as such, the comic was produced by the Marvel Bullpen and featured - front and centre - a severely edited Spider-Man story (reprinting just ten story pages from Amazing Spider-Man 42) and another ten pages from Fantastic Four 19.

Though not branded as such, America's Best TV Comics was certainly a Bullpen Production, mostly under the watchful eye of key Marvel production man Sol Brodsky. There's evidence of Paul Reinman, Frank Giacoia and Bill Everett art inside.

The rest of the comic was filled out with a Casper the Friendly Ghost reprint, and some specially commissioned strips featuring George of the Jungle, Journey to the Center of the Earth and King Kong, by various members of the Marvel art staff. Sixty-four pages of comics for 25c ... and no ads. And no Beatles, probably due to contract issues, or perhaps the fact that the cartoon feature Yellow Submarine was either under way, or about to start production, and the loveable Moptops were keeping their options open. I'm pretty sure this wasn't distributed in the UK, and I picked up my copy at a London Comics Convention some time in the late 1970s.

I bought this comic off the spinner rack in 1967 and it was worth every penny of the 1/6 price tag. Not only did Daredevil battle six of his most dangerous enemies across 39 pages of story, there were cracking back-up features about DD, all illustrated by the brilliant Gene Colan.

Around the same time, Marvel prepared another one-shot, the Daredevil Annual 1 (Sep 1967). OK, technically an Annual isn't a one-shot, but in all fairness the second (all-reprint) issue didn't appear until 1971 - well outside the fabled Silver Age of comics and therefore in my book doesn't count!

The comic essentially tried to invoke the same magic as the frankly fabulous Amazing Spider-Man Annual 1 from 1964. And to be fair, with the incredible Gene Colan artwork it almost managed it. The main story was a rattling good read at 39 pages of all-new Gene Colan art, and at the time Colan was my absolute favourite Marvel artist. Backing that up were 16 pages of pinups and behind-the-scenes explanations of how DD's billy club works, and like that.

The pinups in the Daredevil Annual were pretty darn good. The Daredevil pinup was iconic and as a 13 year-old, I was especially taken with the portrait of Karen Page ... Colan always did draw gorgeous girls.

Beyond the comics it published in 1967, Marvel was affected by other big changes in the industry. The first was that National Periodical Publications (it didn't officially change its name to "DC Comics" until 1971) was bought by Kinney National, a car park company that had money to invest. They would later also buy Warner Brothers-Seven Arts. This was important to Martin Goodman's operation because National Periodicals also owned Independent News, the company that distributed Goodman's magazines and comics ... and it was National's Jack Liebowitz who maintained the limiting stranglehold over the number of titles Marvel could put on the newsstands.

I can't be sure, but it seems pretty likely to me that someone at Kinney looked over the sales figures of Marvel and thought, "Why the heck are we limiting these guys? They could be selling millions more comics for us if we just let them!"

As mentioned at the end of my October 2019 post, according to the audited ABC magazine sales figures, by the beginning of 1967, Marvel was beginning to edge in front of DC in sales. So it's likely that the bean-counters at Kinney removed the restrictions, paving the way for Marvel's expansion at the end of 1967 and into 1968, beginning with the Marvel anthology titles Tales to Astonish, Strange Tales and Tales of Suspense.

For years I wondered why Martin Goodman structured the expansion of the anthology titles the way he did. I've laid out a plan of the 1968 expansion in the below table so you can see at a glance how Suspense, Astonish and Strange Tales were converted to single character titles.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
Tales of Suspense	97	98	99	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
Captain America	-	-	-	100	101	102	103	104	105	106	107	108
Iron Man	-	-	-	-	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Iron Man & Subby	-	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
Tales to Astonish	99	100	101	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
Sub-Mariner	-	-	-	-	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Hulk	-	-	-	102	103	104	105	106	107	108	109	110
Strange Tales	164	165	166	167	168	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
Doctor Strange	-	-	-	-	-	169	170	171	172	173	174	175
Nick Fury	-	-	-	-	-	1	2	3	4	5	6	7

In April, Tales of Suspense was retitled Captain America and Tales to Astonish became The Incredible Hulk. Now to my 13 year old way of thinking, Marvel should have put Iron Man and Sub-Mariner immediately into their own titles. But Martin Goodman was likely much more savvy when it came to newsstand distribution, so he held the Iron Man and Sub-Mariner titles back a month. I'm now guessing he did that so as not to stretch the pocket money of his young customers too thin in a single month.

However, that would have left Marvel readers without an Iron Man or a Sub-Mariner story in April 1968 ... so Goodman simply put a new comic on the schedule ... the one-shot Iron Man and Sub-Mariner 1.

Iron Man and Sub-Mariner 1 had wall-to-wall Gene Colan art, so that was an excellent reason to buy it ... also the stories continued right on from Tales of Suspense 99 and Tales to Astonish 101.

Unfortunately for Editor Stan, both the Iron Man and Subby tales were right in the middle of a story arc, so it wasn't possible to do a special Iron Man/Subby battle or team-up issue along the lines of Tales to Astonish 100 (Feb 1968). This also makes me suspect that Goodman's decision to expand the three anthology titles into six comics was likely quite a sudden one. So Stan had to find a way to continue the storylines and yet still fit in with Goodman's staggered launch approach for Sub-Mariner, Iron Man, Doctor Strange and Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD.

This was how Stan announced the expansion of the Marvel line in the early months of 1968 ... a little cryptically, it's true, but it's not hard to guess what would be happening after the appearance of Iron Man and Sub-Mariner 1. Stan's also talking up Not Brand Echh and the forthcoming Captain Marvel title.

And he did that by cramming two 11-page instalments of the Iron Man and the Sub-Mariner story arcs into one regular-size comic mag. The following month, both characters would get their own titles ... but for comic readers in the UK, the spotty distribution meant that I picked up both IM&Subby 1 and Iron Man 1 (May 1968) off the same spinner rack at the same time.

Later the same year, I came across the 68 page giant Tales of Asgard 1 (Oct 1968). This simply packaged up the "Tales of Asgard" back-up strips from Journey Into Mystery 97 - 106 in a double-sized 25c package. I'm really not sure what the point of that was ... the back-up strip had been chopped out of Thor's ongoing comic with issue 145, replaced in Thor 146 with The Inhumans. When that mini-series came to an end, the main Thor strip was expanded to 20 pages to fill the comic. Was Stan - or possibly Martin Goodman - testing the waters to see if the readers wanted "Tales of Asgard" back? Certainly, Thor was the best-selling of the former anthology titles (averaging 295,000 copies a month during 1968, compared with the next best-selling, Astonish at a tad under 278,000).

As promising as the cover was, Tales of Asgard was just a bunch of reprints from the old Journey into Mystery comics of the early 1960s. What a shame Jack Kirby didn't get to do a full-on epic length version of Ragnarok, instead.

Whatever the reason, the comic remained a one-shot (it was billed that way in the mag's indicia), and we wouldn't see "Tales of Asgard" again for a very long time.

That same month, Marvel published the first Hulk Special, another mag that wouldn't have a second issue - at least not for several years, and all-reprint, at that. (Edit - Kid Robson has pointed out that the second Hulk Special did appear just a year later. It just seemed a lot longer to my tweenage self.)

I never get tired of looking at this ... one of Stan's less-successful editorial decisions was getting Marie Severin to redraw the Hulk's face on Jim Steranko's overnight cover art he did for the Hulk King-Size Special 1 when Dan Adkins couldn't deliver the job to deadline.

I won't go too much into the content of Hulk King-Size Special 1 (Oct 1968), as I covered it in some detail both in the "Messing with the Cover" entry in this blog and in the more recent Inhumans entry, just a couple of months back. The story was a mammoth 51 pages, a record I believe for a single story at the time, which left little room for any back-up features. Also, that job kept penciller Marie Severin away from the regular monthly Hulk title, opening the way for newcomer Herb Trimpe to take over, a strip he would later become inextricably linked with.

And that was pretty much it for Marvel one-shots in the Silver Age. As the 1960s drew to a close, and Martin Goodman was edged ever-closer to the door by Marvel's new owners, Perfect Film and Chemical, the company aggressively expanded the line, looking to crowd DC Comics and other competitors off the newsstands, stretching themselves thin and compromising the quality of the content in the longer term ... but that's a story for another time.

Next: Exposed - Myths of the Marvel Silver Age

Separated at Birth 3 - more comic cover cliches

I LOVE COMIC BOOK COVERS, especially those of the 1950s and 1960s. And because I look at so many, I can't help but notice trends, tropes and cliches in the cover concepts of the decade of my childhood. By far the worst offender was DC Comics, the company that was my introduction to American comic books. But as they were firmly aimed at 10-year-olds, they can be forgiven for assuming readers in 1958 wouldn't be readers in 1963. For my part, I began switching over to Marvel Comics around 1964, and later back-filled the issues I'd missed, so I probably only followed DC for about three years.

But here, then, another batch of oft-repeated comic cover idea from DC Comics, with the occasional offering from Marvel. Let's start with ...

LION'S-HEAD REVISITED

Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, DC's dark overlord Mort Weisinger struggled to know what to do with the omnipotent character Superman had become. So he manufactured a whole supporting mythology around DC's superstar hero - Kandor, The Phantom Zone, Red Kryptonite, and so on - and made exposure of Superman's secret identity the single biggest threat to the character. Oh, and weird transformations. 

As weird transformations go, sticking a lion's head on Superman is up there ... so much so that five years later, DC published a sequel. Because weirder is better. In a kind of cockeyed variation, Action Comics 240 (May 1958) gave us a (stone) lion with Superman's head.

Of course there's only so many transformations Superman can undergo, so it's inevitable that occasionally we'd get repeats. Like having his head replaced with a lion's. 'Cos that really believable, right? Action Comics 243 (Aug 1958) presented a tale in which Superman turns down an impulsive marriage proposal from the descendent of Greek sorceress Circe and is punished by being transformed into a human lion. Turns out Circe's technology is Kryptonian and Otto Binder and Wayne Boring's tale tries, a little unsuccessfully, to mine a "Beauty and the Beast" theme. Five years later, DC offered a sequel, sort of, in Superman 165 (Nov 1963). This later story, by Robert Bernstein and Curt Swan, takes the core idea and reworks it. But some of the references to the earlier tale don't quite fit the facts, and it turns out to be another Mort Weisinger hoax tale and not an actual appearance by the real Circe at all. Such was the way of early 1960s Superman Family titles.

LET'S GIVE THEM A BIG HAND

Another widespread cover concept was the "Giant Hand from Nowhere". This oddball cliche turned up on many DC fantasy covers during the early Silver Age, but also - with a slightly different spin - on some later Silver Age Marvel covers.

The stories behind the covers: though they appear very similar, the tales in these comics are quite different. In My Greatest Adventure 32 (May 1959) the hand from another dimension is just trying to retrieve its property and the destruction is collateral. In Strange Adventures 110 (Nov 1959), the hand belongs to a benign alien obsessed with saving an Earthman and the hand in Batman 146 (Mar 1962) is a hoax.

Titles like My Greatest Adventure and Strange Adventures presented mild horror and science fiction tales in which square-jawed Earthmen combatted the oddest threats from inner space, outer space and other dimensions. More than once, these menaces were big hands from Elsewhere ... sometimes attached to a giant, sometimes not.

Sometimes the horror wasn't mild enough. Back in 1956, a year or two into the rule of the Comics Code Authority, Stan Lee tried his own take of the giant hand story. It was cover-featured on Astonishing 50 (Jun 1956). The Code deemed the cover too horrific for young impressionable minds and insisted that the giant arm be given a suit sleeve and a wristwatch ... because that's much less frightening, right? Even if the scene on the cover had appeared in the actual story, the Code revisions would have been rendered even more nonsensical as this was supposed to the giant arm of a jungle native.

The people who live in the Fantastic City are way too scary for readers of 1950s comics, so the Atlas production department altered Carl Burgos' art to put a business suit on arm of this giant denizen of the asian jungles. Somehow, the Alan Class reprint of this cover used the original, unaltered version, so we lucky comics historians get to see both the original and the re-touched art.

Later on in the 1960s, the giant hands showed no signs of going away. DC comics continued to feature the occasional giant hand and Marvel too used the idea, although in a more symbolic way.

The Action Comics cover fronts a Wayne Boring story about a giant robot, written by a young Jim Shooter. The Amazing Spider-Man cover scene is in the comic - they're also giant robotic hands. The Avengers cover is purely symbolic and isn't found in the story.

By the time we got to 1966, Superman was going through a bit of a rocky patch. Doubtless there were reasons why Weisinger brought back artists like Wayne Boring and Al Plastino to draw the lead Superman feature in Action Comics, but even to my 12 year eye, their respective drawing styles seemed to belong to the previous decade. The front cover image is almost certain to be a Weisinger idea that apprentice scripter Jim Shooter had to write a story around. It's not very good. The Spider-Man cover is deliberately misleading. The story would have us believe Spider-Man has been shrunk to six inches tall by Mysterio. But anyone who knows the villain would realise he's former special effects guy, so it's unlikely that Spider has really been miniaturised.

ALIEN BIRDMEN

OK this one's a bit of a cheat, because both examples are by the same artist ... the brilliant Gil Kane. No one typified the house style at DC better than Kane. Always at his best when paired with slick inkers, like Joe Giella and Murphy Anderson, Kane had a bit of a blind spot when it came to aliens.

The birdman alien on the cover of Strange Adventures 67 (Apr 1956) is by Gil Kane and Joe Giella and the birdman on the cover of Green Lantern 6 (May 1961) is by ... Gil Kane and Joe Giella. That's a pretty goofy background alien on the GL cover, too. But even though I was a confirmed Marvel fan by 1967, I still was able to admire Murphy Anderson's take on Hawkman.

These birdman examples are typical of Kane's goofiness. I thought the idea of giant hawks with human heads battling a man with a hawk's head in Hawkman 18 (Feb 1967) a far more intriguing idea.

HIKING HIGH-RISES

Who wouldn't be captured by the thought of a building that just ups and strolls around? Certainly not comics readers. The idea must've worked for DC, because they used the concept more than once.

It seemed to be a pattern, didn't it? Julie Schwartz would come up with an outrageous science fiction concept for one of his fantasy titles, then a short time later Mort Weisinger would steal the idea for his line of Superman comics. I sure hope DC Publisher Irwin Donenfeld wasn't fooled by Weisinger's shenanigans. 

The first time was on the cover of Strange Adventures 72 (Sep 1956) for a story by John Broome and Sid Greene that has aliens giving a movie producer a preview of their invasion plans. So spectacularly daft was the idea that Mort Weisinger pilfered it a year later and reworked the whole Living Building thing into a Superman cover for Action Comics 234 (Nov 1957).

GORILLA TACTICS

One of DC Editor Julius Schwartz's favourite gimmicks was the intelligent gorilla. Obviously, he had some kind or research or intelligence that "proved" to him that gorillas on the covers of comics sold. Or maybe he just monitored the sales and drew that conclusion for himself. Whatever the reason, it seemed that every other Strange Adventures cover featured a smart ape.

Gorillas with human brains and intelligent gorillas would be a common concept in Schwartz's covers. In this series of three, the gorilla is restrained in a chair, which indicates to me that this is Julie recycling cover ideas.

The earliest appearance I could find was Strange Adventures 8 (May 1951). Legend has it that Schwartz put a gorilla on the cover and Publisher Irwin Donenfeld was delighted at the bump in sales. He asked Schwartz to repeat the idea. Pretty soon, all the DC editors wanted to put gorillas on their covers, and Donenfeld had to limit them to one gorilla per month. It's a great story, but the evidence doesn't really bear it out.

The idea of smart gorillas subjugating humans was a common trope in Strange Adventures, pre-dating 1963's Monkey Planet novel by Pierre Boulle, which would also form the basis for the cult 1960s movie, Planet of the Apes. 

There are a few gorilla covers on other DC comics of the early 1950s, but it was on Strange Adventures that the idea would crop up again and again, then abruptly stopped around 1960. The variations on a theme would include intelligent gorillas, criminal gorillas, intelligent criminal gorillas and technologically advanced gorillas. Had gorillas suddenly become old hat? Had they stopped selling comics? Or was Schwartz just fed up with them?

Criminal gorillas was another idea that would crop up more than once in Schwartz' fantasy titles, especially Strange Adventures. He liked the idea so much that he would use it in his later superhero titles as well.

Well, not quite ... Schwartz would give the idea another try in his revived superhero titles of the late 1950s, pitting The Flash against the super-intelligent gorilla, Grodd, but as the second half of the 1960s swung around, the idea seemed to completely fall out of favour and disappear.

One of the best of the early Flash villains was Gorilla Grodd, a renegade from a race of super-intelligent gorillas living in an advanced city in the African jungles. The character would enjoy a long career in various DC comics and appeared in the live action Flash TV show in 2014. 1964's Doom Patrol 86 also featured a gorilla foe.

Even if Julius Schartz was tired of gorillas, they did crop up in some of Mort Weisinger's titles right through into the late 1960s. Never really one for sophistication, Weisinger would often use gorillas, or people changing into gorillas, as comedy relief.

In Adventure Comics 219 (Dec 1955), a gorilla chances to drink water contaminated with kryptonite and develops x-ray vision. Those kinds of coincidences were commonplace in Otto Binder stories. Later in life, Superman encountered more than one super-powered gorilla.

We'd also see the occasional super-gorilla. The first super-ape was yet another survivor from Krypton, who'd landed on Earth as a baby and was brought up by kindly gorillas in the African jungle. As he grew up, Supergorilla became protector of the animals and was eventually relocated to a distant uninhabited world - along with other surviving supergorillas from Krypton ... then never heard from again. A couple of years later, Superman discovered another supergorilla, this one a giant about 15 feet tall. The creature turns out to be a Kryptonian scientist, accidentally turned into a gorilla. The cover scene - with the supergorilla dressed in Superman's costume makes for a great cover image, but doesn't actually appear in the story. 

If you think Otto Binder's Titano stories are daft, try reading the E. Nelson Bridwell tale of Superboy and Beppo the super-monkey trading physical forms in the above masterpiece, Superboy 147 (Oct 1967).

Not all super-powered gorillas disappeared into obscurity. One notable exception was the King Kong swipe Titano, who was twenty feet tall and had kryptonite vision. Not technically a gorilla, but a chimp grown to monstrous size by cosmic rays, Titano also (miraculously) had kryptonite vision, which of course he menaces Superman with. Superman renders him harmless and dumps him in the Jurassic era. A year and a half later, Titano is back and causing trouble in Metropolis again. Once more, Superman carts the ape back through the time barrier to live with the prehistoric monsters, just like King Kong.

The Wonder Woman issue above was before the Andru & Esposito makeover of the the late 1950s, and is just too silly to describe, not helped by very crude Harry Peter art. The tale in Batman 114 (Mar 1958) has Batman team up with a smart circus ape to defeat the gang who robbed the circus.

Gorillas also turned up in such unlikely titles as Wonder Woman, Batman, and even in a later Julie Schwartz-edited Detective Comics, issue 339 (May 1965). The Gardner Fox-Carmine Infantino story has an amateur scientist accidentally give a gorilla human intellect and the creature goes on a crime rampage in Gotham City.

Just what it was about gorillas that captured young reader's imagination, I couldn't really say. It wasn't a particular draw for me at that age ... though I have a nostalgic fondness for The Flash's several battles with Gorilla Grodd, and thought Gorilla City was a pretty cool concept. But other than that, the over-use of the idea just seemed a bit silly to me.

Julie Schwartz comes up with a great idea - a winged gorilla - then milks it for all it's worth, having several of them as the antagonists in Hawkman 6 (Feb 1965) and 16 (Oct 1966).

However, just when you think it can't get any dafter, DC gave us ... flying gorillas. Yes, back in 1961, Julius Schwartz had a story in Strange Adventures 125 about gorillas that sport wings and are stealing Earth's atmosphere. As might be expected, the aliens are defeated by a plucky, pipe-smoking scientist. Schwartz would remember the idea and re-tool it to provide a suitable enemy for Hawkman later in the 1960s. 

CAGED IN

Another common image used in early Silver Age comics is that of a human in a cage. Again, the pioneer of this concept was DC editor Julius Schwartz. He'd visit this theme often in the fantasy comics of the mid-1950s, like Strange Adventures, then revive the concept for his early 1960s super-hero books.

The earliest example I found was this cover for Strange Adventures 23 (Aug 1952). It would appear eight years later on House of Mystery 102 (Sep 1960), and again on Mystery in Space 102 (Sep 1965), with Adam Strange locked up by hostile robots.

His friend and colleague Mort Weisinger would also exploit the idea on a number of Superman family titles, from Superman to Legion of Superheroes. Superman in particular  would frequently find himself locked in a cage.

It's probably a good idea to take Superman's powers away before you lock him in a cage. In the slightly daft Superboy story in issue 96, Pete Ross acquires superpowers and usurps Superboy's place in life. The much later Superman story has a double caged by Superman ... or is it the other way round?

Sometimes, it would be a kryptonite cage because, after all, no normal steel cage is going to hold the Man of Steel. And sometimes it would be some other kind of kryptonite-powered deathtrap. The early Legion story in Adventure Comics 267 (Dec 1959) exploits the common feeling of alienation, and has Superboy turned on by his friends, the Legion of Superheroes. Of course, it's all a misunderstanding, and Superboy hasn't really turned into a criminal.

The cover for Superman 160 (Apr 1963) and the very similar Action Comics 377 (Jun 1969) both have a caged Superman being executed by criminals.

I sort of assume the bars of these cages aren't actually fashioned out of kryptonite. Surely, they'd be steel coated with kryptonite paint, wouldn't they? Does anyone know how strong kryptonite is? Should it be indestructible like Superman and therefore completely impossible to carve? Do you actually care?

In Detective Comics 313 Batman is trapped in a cage by criminals when he steps onto a giant record player. Adventure Comics 321 (Jun 1964) shows Lightning Lad locked up in a cage for apprently betraying Legion secrets to their arch-enemy The Time Trapper, but the trap is Lightning Lad's. And The Hawk family are put in a cage by a well-meaning alien when it thinks the heroes are being hunted by criminals.

Of course, other DC heroes would find themselves in cages, too. Batman fell victim to a flying cage in Detective Comics 313 (Mar 1963), in a tale by veteran writer Dave Wood and mainstay Batman artist Sheldon Moldoff. These daft Batman tales would shortly give way to the sleek revamp by Schwartz and Infantino. The locking up of Lightning Lad in a cage is the result of another misunderstanding. In Hawkman 3 (Aug 1964), Hawkman and Hawkgirl are caged for their own protection by a "super-intelligent alien bird".

THAT ABOUT COVERS IT

If you think I've unfairly singled out DC Comics for this cornucopia of cannibalised covers, then I can only respond that they were by far the worst culprits of the practice. There's nothing wrong with recycling ideas, I guess, if you're convinced your audience turns over every few years, and you consider publishing comics a business rather than an artform.

But I think that goes to the heart of why DC saw their fortunes decline during the 1960s and upstart Marvel start upwards. Stan said at the time he was creating stories for Marvel that he would find entertaining himself. So he figured, Why abandon your readership every five years when you can just keep them and make the kind of comics they'll like just as much when they're 16 as they did when they were 11. 

But DC never quite grasped how they were going wrong and even tried to "DC-ise" Kirby's Fourth World books without even realising what they were doing. And that pretty much sums up why I stopped reading DC comics around 1965 when I was ten and switched almost exclusively to Marvels.

Next: Weird One-shots

The Inhumans: Part 2 - Stardom Beckons

THERE WAS NO PLAN FOR THE INHUMANS, at least not at first. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had introduced Madam Medusa - unheralded - as a member of the Fantastic Four foe group The Frightful Four. And for eight issues of the Fantastic Four comic - 36 (Mar 1965) to 43 (Oct 1965), Medusa haughtied her way through the stories, coldly collaborating with The Wizard and his team to bring about the defeat and/or demise of the Storm family.

Tea and antipathy - The Frightful Four's dislike of each other is obvious from the start. So why does Medusa hang out with a group of people she despises. In the end, Stan and Jack never really explained that.

While the other Frightfuls each had a clear motive for doing what they did - mostly being previous foes of Johnny (The Human Torch) Storm in numerous Strange Tales adventures - there was no such reasoning behind Medusa's enmity towards the FF. She was literally a character with no motivation. More importantly, Stan's scripts never even hinted that she had any reason whatsoever for fighting alongside The Wizard et al, something I discussed a little last time.

So when Marvel - still operating under DC honcho Jack Liebowitz's distribution constraints - was unable to add two new titles to the lineup - editor Stan Lee decided to include the concepts of The Black Panther and The Inhumans in the Fantastic Four adventures.

As the idea of a solo Inhumans comic wouldn't have been discussed and vetoed until the spring of 1965, I'm calculating that Stan would have told Jack that the characters had to be integrated into FF around June 1965 at the latest, when work on Fantastic Four 44 (Nov 1965) was beginning. Medusa first appeared in FF36 (Mar 65), which Kirby would have been drawing in August or September of 1964.

Folding The Inhumans into the Fantastic Four comic wasn't an especially easy task. Stan and Jack only had twenty pages a month to play with, so they could only devote three or four pages an issue to their new characters. They solved this by having Maximus create an impenetrable barrier around the home of the Inhumans, The Great Refuge, so that Johnny (The Human Torch) Storm would be separated from his Inhuman love-interest Crystal.

Back in Fantastic Four 48 (Mar 1966), we left The Inhumans trapped behind an impenetrable barrier created by mad Maximus' Atmos Gun ... no way in and no way out. This allows Stan and Jack to play out the drama of The Inhumans separately from the adventures of the FF, with only the slightest overlap ... at least for the time being. 

This plot device allowed Stan and Jack to use up the ideas that they'd formulated for The Inhumans solo comic, by playing out the Shakespearian twin dramas of Black Bolt and his royal family trying to find a way to escape while combatting the mad machinations of Maximus and showing us Johnny Storm's quest to be reunited with his lost love Crystal.

In FF54, the Human Torch takes some time out from his Fantastic-Fouring to set out with his football player pal Wyatt Wingfoot, in a borrowed Wakandan air-ship, to reach his lost love Crystal of the Inhumans.

Along the way, we follow Johnny Storm and his friend Wyatt Wingfoot as they try to breach the barrier and reach the Inhumans - first meeting Prester John, whose Evil Eye weapon may just hold the key to breaching the barrier, then later encounterng Lockjaw, the Inhumans' giant, dimension-hopping dog. But neither of these story-loops really advances the plot, entertaining as they are. So ultimately, Johnny's quest is unsuccessful.

Inside the barrier, Medusa and the other Inhumans try to convince crazy Maximus to use his technological knowledge to free them from the negative energy prison separating them from the outside world.

In the meantime, on the inside, Black Bolt, Medusa and the other Inhumans try to persuade the hopelessly insane Maximus to raise the barrier. And when that fails, Black Bolt takes matters into his own hands and uses the uncontrollable power of his own voice to shatter the barrier, releasing the Inhumans into our world.

And that pretty much runs from Fantastic Four 52 (Sep 1966) until Fantastic Four 61 (Apr 1967), when Crystal and Johnny are reunited. From that point on, their own drama concluded, The Inhumans are relegated to the role of guest stars in the Fantastic Four's comic. But they're pretty good guest stars.

The saga of The Inhumans coils its way through ten issues of the Fantastic Four comic, mostly in the background and unheralded on the majority of the covers, but it's a significant presence nonetheless. Once the political conflict between Black Bolt and Maximus is done, Stan and Jack seem uncertain where to take the characters next.

In Fantastic Four 62 (May 1967), after Reed Richards is accidentally launched into the Negative Zone - a mysterious region not unlike one of Doctor Strange's mystical dimensions and not be confused with the Negative Zone that surrounded the Inhuman's Great Refuge - Triton of The Inhumans comes to his aid.

In FF62, it's the Inhuman Triton who enters the Negative Zone in an attempt to rescue Reed Richards ... in all fairness, Stan could have chosen any number of characters. Was he just trying to keep The Inhumans on the readers' radar?

Triton hangs around long enough to help the FF battle Negative Zone escapee Blastaar and his new-found partner-in-crime The Sandman. But being that this is the Fantastic Four's comic, they finally manage to defeat their enemies on their own.

We all think Stan and Jack are giving us a bit of a rest from the Inhumans for a bit, but with the introduction of The Kree - an advanced alien race who visited Earth millennia before - we're being set up for further Inhumans back story and a lot more besides

Fantastic Four 64 (Jul 1967) introduces a new - but related - foe for the FF. With Crystal increasingly present in the Baxter Building, Reed, Sue and Ben take off for a short vacation, leaving Johnny in New York. And on a remote desert island they meet an ancient Sentry robot, left on Earth eons before by an advanced race called The Kree.

The Sentry is awakened when a couple of archeologists stumble across a Kree base. In a startling coincidence, the very same location in the South Pacific is selected by Reed, Sue and Ben for their vacation spot and pretty soon a difference of opinion breaks out, only ending when The Sentry is trapped in the collapsing Kree base. Except that's not actually the end of it. The FF's victory sets off a series of events as The Kree are alerted to the destruction of their property on Earth.

Looking back, it seems extremely odd that Stan and Jack thought it was unremarkable that Johnny and Ben slept in the same bed. Probably unlikely to happen in a 2019 comic book. More innocent times, perhaps. Elsewhere in the issue, The FF clash with a Kree prosecutor and win on appeal.

The rather strange opening of Fantastic Four 65 (Aug 1967) has all four having a common dream about the Supreme Intelligence, leader of the Kree. What they don't know that this is a harbinger of the approach of Ronan The Accuser, who aims to make the FF answer for destroying the Kree base. Not unnaturally, The Fantastic Four have other ideas and pin Ronan's ears back for him.

For the next couple of issues, The Inhumans would take a back seat while Stan and Jack give us Him and the Mystery of the Beehive. Only Crystal hanging around the Baxter Building reminds us that The Inhumans haven't gone away. And that leads us into Fantastic Four Annual 5 (Nov 1967) ...

For the preceding four years, the Fantastic Four Annuals had always been an event, featuring The Sub-Mariner, the Origin of Dr Doom, the wedding of Reed and Sue, and the return of the original Human Torch. To try to top that, Stan and Jack give us a team-up with The Black Panther and The Inhumans against a new villain, The Psycho Man.

Not one of my favourite Annuals from Marvel ... though it did have the announcement of Sue's pregnancy, a bunch of cool Inhumans pinups and the first Silver Surfer solo story to recommend it.

Unfortunately, the Psycho Man is a bit forgettable, and the involvement of the Inhumans doesn't really shed any light on their own story, simply serving to include the characters without any purpose beyond fighting alongside the FF. I kind of wonder if they were only in there to promote Jack Kirby's Inhuman origins series that began in Thor 146 the very same month ...

When Jack Kirby finally got his Inhumans solo series, it was stuffed in the back of Thor as a replacement for Tales of Asgard. The series would tell the story of the origin of the species in 

I'm not really sure what the purpose of switching "Tales of Asgard" out of Thor and bringing The Inhumans in. It's true that Stan had been promising Jack an Inhumans series for a couple of years, but something always seemed to get in the way and block it. It's also possible that Stan was concerned that Kirby not be overstretched, putting two major Marvel books - Fantastic Four and Thor - as well as the Captain America feature in Tales of Suspense, in jeopardy of running late. But the resulting compromise - seven episodes at five pages a month - wasn't much of a consolation prize.

Jack Kirby finally had his Inhumans solo series, but at five pages per episode, there wasn't really a decent amount of space to actually tell the full history of the characters.

The first couple of chapters tell of how The Kree initiated the Inhuman genetic experiment on Earth during the Paleolithic era. Then we jump forward to (almost) the present day and look at the individual Inhumans, beginning with Black Bolt ... or so we think. There's an interesting scene where we see Black Bolt as a baby, and the inevitable situation of the destruction caused when the child's super-powerful voice almost destroys the Inhumanas' city of Attilan.

This section is sort of interesting. The idea of a baby with a super-destructive voice would definitely present its parenting challenges, but other than that, there isn't anything else we don't already know. How much better might this have been if Jack had had 20 or 40 pages to explore the formative years of Black Bolt?

Then we jump forward to a 19-year-old Black Bolt and his first meeting with his cousins and his first run-in with his mental brother Maximus. It does seem a bit rushed, but with only five pages to play with, there's only so much exposition Stan and Jack can manage. They do, however, devote 15 pages to Triton, to round out the mini-series.In reality, the Triton segment is not the origin of the amphibian Inhuman, but rather the telling of Triton's foray into the world of men to discover how The Inhumans might be received, should their existence become known.

This is where the "Inhumans" series goes off-piste. Triton goes swim-about and stumbles across a film crew remaking Creature from the Black Lagoon. It's not terribly original (Kirby would revisit this idea in a later Fantastic Four) and it's certainly not an origin story. Note that, by this time, Triton had acquired magenta gloves and booties ... which is probably about as appropriate as giving a fish a bicycle.

Fifty years on, it's hard to know why the Inhumans mini-series lasted only seven episodes. I couldn't have been because Stan - or more likely, Jack - didn't know what to do with the characters. It does seem to me though that Stan's brief to Jack was "Origins of the Inhumans" - it says so, right there at the top of the series' splash pages - and Jack had other ideas. We know by this time, Stan and Jack would have only the briefest of discussions about forthcoming plots and Jack would draw out the story for Stan to dialogue. I suspect that when the last couple of episodes of the Triton segment came back, Stan must've thought, "Hang on a second. This isn't the origin of Triton." Did Stan pull the plug on the series at this point? Why didn't we get the origins of Gorgon and Karnak ... and more importantly, Madam Medusa? Who knows? But it would fit with the evidence that, by 1967, Jack was becoming a bit disgruntled with his lot at Marvel. 

I'm sure Vince Colletta has his fans, but I wouldn't count myself among them. I always felt the scratchy style didn't mesh well with Kirby's pencils. I'd much rather seen a different, perhaps more classical, inker on Thor ... John Severin, perhaps.

On the plus side, the artwork was gorgeous, enhanced by the always fabulous inks of Joe Sinnott. In fact, Sinnott's embellishment makes a sharp contrast to Vince Colletta's inking on the Thor art in the very same comics. But for the moment, Marvel's dreams of an Inhumans stand-alone series was over ... again.

The Inhumans would turn up in Sub-Mariner 2 & 3 (June-July 1968), but not drawn (or co-plotted) by Jack Kirby. This tale was told by Roy Thomas, John Buscema and Frank Giacoia - and rather good it looks, too.

However ... this wasn't to leave The Inhumans in limbo. Far from it. The month after Thor 152 (May 1968), Triton would guest-star in Sub-Mariner 2 & 3, drawn by John Buscema and Frank Giacoia. Roy Thomas' story has Sub-Mariner and Triton - a team-up made in heaven if ever there was one - combine their might to tackle The Plant Man. Even though the villain is strictly b-team, the Buscema art is glorious. Sub-Mariner was never a comic I followed back in the 1960s, but I did make a point of picking up issues 1 - 8. I kind of lost interest when Marie Severin took over as penciller ...

I like Romita's version of Medusa well enough, but I think she's just a bit too polished here and not quite scowl-y enough. And what's with the green costume (that we never saw again)?

Stan would also include an Inhuman - Medusa, this time - in Amazing Spider-Man 62 (Jul 1968), the following month. It's not really much more than a guest walk-on. The story's a bit of fluff, really. Medusa visits the big city to see whether the humans are still afraid of her and her people. Medusa then gets caught up with an unscrupulous purveyor of beauty products who tries to use her as a poster girl for his hairspray (really!). It all turns a little ugly when Medusa won't play along and is manipulated into a fight with Spider-Man. Lovely art by John Romita, though.

I like Gene Colan's take on Medusa's costume better than John Romita's ... I wonder what Stan was thinking here. Try out two different costumes and see which the fans liked better?

Curiously, Stan would star Medusa in a solo strip the same month in Marvel Super-Heroes 15, this time drawn by the eminently more suitable Gene Colan - but Vince Colletta on inks, Stan? Really? The story itself is once more a little insubstantial. Medusa visits the world of humans - this time in search of a rare isotope, Quadranium 99, that may be able to restore Black Bolt's voice. In an almost unfeasible coincidence, she runs into the remaining members of the Frightful Four who offer to help her in her quest. Suspecting treachery, Medusa plays along, yet fails to retain the isotope, barely escapes The Wizard and his cronies and has to be rescued by Black Bolt. Not Medusa's finest hour. Love the artwork though - Colan's pencils are so strong that even Colletta couldn't mess them up too much.

Marie Severin's artwork was always just a smidge too cartoon-y for me, so I sort of avoided the books she drew for Marvel during the 1960s. But she did a pretty credible job here. Perhaps the Syd Shores inking helps. Other than that, we don't really get to see too much of the workings of Inhuman society in this story.

It would be a few months before we'd see The Inhumans again, but back they came in The Incredible Hulk Annual 1 (Oct 1968), this time drawn by Marie Severin. At the time, Severin was the also the penciller on The Hulk's own monthly book, though while Marie was working on the Annual's mammoth 51 page story, Herb Trimpe was just beginning his pencilling run on the title. Gary Friedrich's story has The Hulk mixed up with some Inhuman exiles who had plotted to overthrow Black Bolt. Ultimately, this brings the Hulk into conflict with the monarch of the Inhumans. There's a big fight, then the Hulk stumps off, grumbling.

The art is great, but you can see the fatigue in Jack Kirby's plotting and pacing here. It's possible that Stan is to blame for trotting out the old reliable Inhumans plot where Maximus takes over the throne, then then gets spanked by Black Bolt. ... but it is beginning to wear a bit thin.

By the time we see The Inhumans again, they've returned to their familiar roles as guest-stars in Fantastic Four 82 & 83 (Jan 1969). Unfortunately, there's nothing new to see here. It's as though The Inhumans have only the one plotline. The most novel development is that Crystal had joined the FF the month before, covering while Sue takes some maternity leave from the team.

And that was it for The Inhumans in the Silver Age ... Maximus and his evil hench-inhumans did show up in Incredible Hulk 119 & 120 (Sep - Oct 1969), but that's not an appearance of The Inhuman Inhumans, so it doesn't count.

By the time Black Bolt and his family got their own series again, in Amazing Adventures 1 (Aug 1970), it was too little, too late. By that time, Jack Kirby was thoroughly hacked off with Marvel. He'd stopped creating new characters a couple of years earlier and most of his plots were - by this time - just re-hashing what had already gone before. Even Jack knew that he should have left Marvel a lot sooner than he did. But he didn't, and what we got was a lacklustre 40 pages of story, written and drawn by Jack Kirby, and edited by Stan Lee.

By 1970, you could tell that Jack's heart just wan't in his Marvel work. The pencilling is pretty much as good as it ever was - though Kirby certainly drew better when the artboard was twice up - and the Chic Stone inks also help here. But the stories are nothing to get excited about.

Though Jack was credited as writer, the script didn't really read a whole lot different from other Marvel Comics of the Silver Age. It leads me to wonder if Jack was really writing this stuff, or whether it was an honorary credit, with Stan doing his usual re-writing of Jack's words to smooth out the rough edges and add much-needed characterisation. This might explain why Kirby's dialogue on the Fourth World books just a few months later seemed so stilted and awkward by comparison.

There would be another attempt to get an Inhumans solo book off the ground during the mid-1970s, but it lasted just 12 issues. I don't remember it especially well and I don't have copies, so despite Doug Moench scripts and (early) George Perez art, it didn't make much impression on me.

All-in-all, I think The Inhumans was a terrific concept crying out for a strong story treatment, something neither Stan nor Jack seemed able to provide. It's possible that later creators made a better job of making compelling Inhumans stories, but that's beyond the scope of this blog.

Data from the Audit Bureau of Circulation reveals that Marvel overtook DC in total sales in 1967, much earlier than I would have thought. Other sources have suggested different points for Marvel's ascendency, but it's hard to argue with independently audited sales figures. Click on chart to enlarge.

For my money, what the characters needed was a decent run in their own book by Stan and Jack, starting in 1965 as planned. But Jack Liebowitz robbed us of that in a futile attempt to stop the advance of Marvel Comics. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, Marvel overtook DC in sales in 1967.


Next: More covers to conjure with