Featuring: Avengers
Release: August 11, 1964
Cover: October 1964
12 cents
Sensationally written by: Stan Lee
Superbly illustrated by: Don Heck
Selectively inked by: Dick Ayers
Sufficienty lettered by: Art Simek
21 pages
| Previous | #256 | Next |
|---|---|---|
| Tales of Suspense #59, Story B | Reading order | Sgt. Fury #11 |
| Avengers #8 | Avengers | Avengers #10 |
To ring in the new year, we get the debut of a promising new character with a solid design aesthetic: Wonder Man.
I have questioned characters whose logos are just letters, but at least the “W” here is nicely stylized.
That title is probably the last time he is ever referred to as “the Wonder Man”.
Simon Williams is on trial for embezzlement. He blames Tony Stark for his downfall; he had become desperate after Stark’s inventions had made some of his patents obsolete. The Masters of Evil bail him out and offer him incredible powers.
At least, I presume these are the Masters of Evil. I don’t think they’ve actually called themselves that; Zemo’s team from issue 6 did.
An invention of Zemo’s bombards Wonder Man with ionic rays to grant him incredible powers. The first test of those powers is a bullet to the chest.
Notice what the narration in panel 2 did. It fills in the gap between 2 panels. Nothing about the art makes it very clear that’s Executioner’s hand. We don’t see him going for a gun in the previous panel or holding it in the next one. There is a failure of story flow in the art that Stan is using narration to correct for.
Wonder Man’s powers include strength and invulnerability. He has some similarity to Superman. He is given belt rockets with his costume so he can fly. As we’ve seen, Stan won’t let anybody fly without a mechanism that allows for it.
His powers come with a cost. He must receive a weekly serum from Zemo or he will die. So it is that Zemo can control him.
They come up with an unnecessarily convoluted plan where he pretends to be a hero to join the Avengers. He then kidnaps Wasp to lure the Avengers into a trap. If the only goal was to kidnap the Wasp, there were probably easier ways. Weirdly, the comic skips this all. We see the Avengers agree to let him join, then we jump ahead straight to the Wasp being his prisoner. A sign of the generally sloppy storytelling in this issue.
The Avengers Classic series (where we these scans come from) all feature a classic Avengers story alongside a new short story that ties into it. This time, they used the short to fill in an obvious plot gap, and actually show how Wonder Man abused their trust to capture Wasp.
Iron Man notes Pepper and Happy don’t trust him because of Stark’s disappearance– a reference to Tales of Suspense #59. Note the first scene of the issue takes place weeks ago, so the events of Tales of Suspense #59 likely fit in the middle of this issue. Continuity is becoming increasingly tight.
For the first 8 issues, Avengers was drawn by Jack Kirby. He has stepped away to be replaced by Don Heck. It’s not clear if Heck is up to it. Drawing a whole team of superheroes takes more effort than just one, and Heck’s strengths so far have lain with depicting the characters outside of their superhero roles.
This artwork looks nothing like Heck/Ayers. Extraneous lines more reminiscent of Colletta. A general unfinished quality to it. I wonder to what extent this issue was rushed.
Heck is called upon to depict the 6th/7th dimensions. He does his best, but he’s no Ditko.
Look to this oddly short and crudely drawn battle where Wonder Man convinces the Avengers he is a superhero.
The narration box seems to be correcting for the artwork, explaining what it fails to convey. The scripter does something similar later on. Apparently feeling Executioner should have been depicted in the retreat panel, dialogue is added to explain Executioner’s absence.
Lots of awful panel-to-panel transitions and weird composition choices that hide everybody’s face. Is that one panel just a close-up of Executioner’s crotch?
To give Heck some credit, there is a novel page layout with these panels with circular borders.
It’s a shame. Shoddy storytelling mars the potential of the character and the strong ending for the comic, in which Wonder Man betrays Zemo to help the Avengers, knowing it will cost him his life.
Note that some of the art for the reprint I’m scanning from is reconstructed, so it may not give a perfect sense of how things should look.
The original Wonder Man
Wonder Man does not have the most original of names. There is an obvious nomenclatural similarity to the famous Wonder Woman of the Distinguished Competition. The name even more closely resembles an even older character, the original Wonder Man, created in 1939 by Will Eisner.
This seems like as good an excuse as any to talk a bit about the original Wonder Man. It’s a pretty interesting story, I think.
Will Eisner is the godfather of American comics, and often considered America’s single most important comic artist. His revolutionary series about a masked crimefighter, The Spirt, was influential in establishing the visual language of comics. He continued to experiment with the form and push the limits of comics storytelling, with later stories preferring to focus on more grounded everyday tales, often focused on a Jewish tenement on Dropsie Avenue. His work Comics and Sequential Art, is an early and respected guide to what comics are and how they work. Today, the most prestigious award in American comics bears his name.
Before creating the Spirit, Eisner created Wonder Man for Fox Feature Syndicate. Fred Carson was an inventor who got a magic ring that made him strong and invulnerable. Brenda Hastings scorned the meek Fred, but fell instantly in love with the superheroic Wonder Man.
National Comics, which eventually grew into DC Comics, sued Fox and got an injunction which made sure there was no second issue of Wonder Man, claiming Wonder Man was a copy of Superman… which he obviously was.
An excellent historical fiction novel by Michael Chabon is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Their fictional story–two Depression-era Jewish boys who create a popular superhero–echoes the stories of many actual comics creators, and they interact with real comic book history.
The novel is where I first learned about the Wonder Man trial. As depicted in the book, Will Eisner is called to testify about the circumstances that led to him creating Wonder Man, and he said the instructions he was given were, “Make me a Superman.”
It’s the most famous line in comic book legal history. Chabon didn’t make up the line. He found it in any number of sources, particularly Eisner’s own accounts of the trial. In Don Markstein’s Toonpedia article on Wonder Man, written in 2005, you will see he summarizes the testimony as: “Eisner told the truth”.
In 2010, comics historian Ken Quattro published the original transcripts of the trial, which showed that the previously accepted accounts of the trial were based mostly on Eisner’s recollections and entirely fictional. The line “Make me a Superman” does not appear in the court records. Nor was Eisner’s testimony particularly rooted in truth. His actual testimony focused entirely on the differences between Wonder Man and Superman, insisting one was in no way a copy of the other, at no time suggesting there was any intent by anybody to use Superman as a model for the character.
My favorite accounting of all of this is Poisoned Chalice by Pádraig Ó Méalóid. The focus of the book is on the character of Marvelman and the 80 years of complicated legal fights surrounding the character. For context, he goes into related legal struggles, including those involving Superman and Wonder Man.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆, 35/100
Significance: ★★★★☆
The scans are taken from a reprint in Avengers Classic #9 (2008).
You can find this story in Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers vol. 1 or Avengers Epic Collection vol.1: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Or on Kindle.
Characters:
- Thor/Dr. Don Blake
- Captain America
- Iron Man/Anthony “Tony” Stark
- Giant-Man/Henry Pym
- Wasp/Jan Van Dyne
- Zemo
- Enchantress
- Executioner
- Simon Williams/Wonder Man
- Happy Hogan
- Pepper Potts
- Jane Foster
Story notes:
- Captain America hallucinates Zemo and wants to fight.
- Enchantress casts spell to return Masters of Evil to our dimension.
- Weeks pass between opening scene and main story.
- Simon Williams arrested for embezzlement, pleads guilty, blames Stark, bailed out by Enchantress.
- Williams’ patents made worthless by recent Stark inventions.
- Fred Astaire reference.
- Zemo bombards Williams with ionic rays to give him super-powers.
- Executioner jealous of Wonder Man.
- Wonder Man flies with miniature belt rockets.
- Enchantress casts spell to make Captain America believe Wonder Man.
- Ionic rays will kill Wonder Man within a week; must take weekly antidote from Zemo; he betrays Zemo and dies.
| Previous | #256 | Next |
|---|---|---|
| Tales of Suspense #59, Story B | Reading order | Sgt. Fury #11 |
| Avengers #8 | Avengers | Avengers #10 |
