Comic Books – Page 55 – Coke & Comics

PRELUDE: Sub-Mariner Comics #1

The World’s First Deep-Sea Blitzkrieg!

Featuring: Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner
Release: March 1, 1941
Cover: Spring 1941
10 cents
By: Bill Everett
20 pages

My goal with this blog is to read through all the superhero comics that make up the Marvel Universe starting with Fantastic Four #1 in 1961. But there’s an oddity to that goal: the company had been making superhero comics since 1939. Of course, they stopped making superhero comics in 1949, to very briefly revive the idea in 1953. So 1961 isn’t exactly the beginning, but it sort of is. Most of the superheroes we know will follow in the wake of the Fantastic Four. We’ve already met Hulk, Ant-Man & Wasp, Thor Spider-Man, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Sgt. Fury… and more will come.

But some of our heroes predate 1961. Johnny Storm is not the first Human Torch. There was another and we’ve peeked at his stories. But the FF comics have yet to mention the existence of a previous Torch, so those stories are not crucial to the task at hand. We’ll very soon be meeting one more important character from 1941, but I’ll not jump ahead. The big thing we’re missing so far is the story of Sub-Mariner, who appeared in about 300 comics prior to 1961. Reading all of them would consume a huge amount of effort when I really want to push forward. But the gap is also nagging me.

So I’m going to read a small smattering of them. Try to get a sense of who Namor is and what he’s about. We’ve already read his earliest appearance as well as his first epic battle with Human Torch.

When the Fantastic Four met Namor in Fantastic Four #6, I wrote: “All posts regarding Fantastic Four comics featuring Namor are henceforth dedicated to my mother.” I may as well broaden that dedication to all Namor comics and include the next few we cover.

Strange Tales Annual 2

On the Trail of the Amazing Spider-Man!

Featuring: Human Torch
Release: June 11, 1963
Cover: 1963
25 cents
Written by: Stan Lee
Drawn by: Jack Kirby
Inking: Steve Ditko
18 pages

Jack Kirby drew the cover for Spider-Man’s very first appearance. Besides that, this will be his first chance to draw the web-slinger. Fortunately, Spider-Man’s own Steve Ditko is on hand providing finishes to help keep the character on-model.

Nonetheless, they forgot his chest logo on the cover. I find it very weird to look at. And Kirby keeps drawing Spider-Man with his legs really awkwardly spread.

I think Ditko poses Spidey a little more organically.

This is our first “annual”. Mostly we’re reading monthly or bi-monthly comics. But ongoing series occasionally fit in one special issue per year they call an “annual”. This is Strange Tales annual 2, so it’s obviously not the first, but it’s the first since Strange Tales became a regular superhero feature. The first Fantastic Four annual will also be debuting shortly.

This issue is more than double the usual price at 25 cents, coming in at 72 pages. Normally, an issue of Strange Tales is about 23 story pages, featuring 3 stories, a Human Torch tale and two others. Soon, Dr. Strange will start regularly sharing the book. This annual features a whopping 11 stories. However, all except this Human Torch story are reprints of older stories. The previous annual was entirely reprints.

This is the first full story dedicated to Spider-Man and Human Torch meeting. They’ve met twice before, but only briefly, in Amazing Spider-Man #1 and #3. I’m excited as I consider this one of Marvel’s great superhero friendships.

Strange Tales #112

The Living Bomb!

Featuring: Human Torch
Release: June 11, 1963
Cover: September 1963
12 cents
Story plot: Stan Lee
Script: Joe Carter
Art: Dick Ayers
13 pages

Script is by Joe Carter. Carter… Hmmm… I’ve read a lot of comics, but not sure I know the name. Let’s google. Ah, it’s a pen name. No biggie. So is “Stan Lee”. His real name is apparently Jerry Siegel. Ah, apparently he wrote some comics under his own name. Let’s check his bibliography and see if anything sounds familiar.

Wonder what this Joe Carter guy has worked on before? Probably something super.

This seems to be his first Marvel work, but he’d done some stuff for DC (and probably wants to hide that he’s freelancing for Marvel). Often collaborated with Joe Shuster. He co-created Dr. Occult. That’s cool. Oh, and Slam Bradley. I like Slam. And some new members for the Legion of Superheroes like Bouncing Boy and Matter-Eater Lad. That’s quite the resume for this “Jerry Siegel” fella. Almost seems like slumming to work on a lowly Human Torch story for a creator of Slam Bradley. You’d think he’d be rolling in dough from royalties for all the characters he helped create for DC. He created a bunch more characters too, but I think those are the most notable ones.

Fantastic Four #18

A Skrull Walks Among Us!

Featuring: Fantastic Four
Release: June 11, 1963
Cover: September 1963
12 cents
Written by: Stan Lee
Drawn by: Jack Kirby
Inking: Dick Ayers
21 pages

It’s perhaps cheating that I’ve seen so many later renderings of Super-Skrull, but hindsight being the new year, that’s not a great image of Super-Skrull on the cover. It suggests only that he has Human Torch powers. No hint that he has the powers of the entire Fantastic Four (well, no visual hint. I guess the text tells you). He should be rocky and flaming and stretching and invisible. My two cents. Though he’s also never rocky in the issue, just strong. But he should be rocky.

At this point, the earth has been invaded by about a dozen alien races this year. All of whom have given up and withdrawn entire fleets at the slightest hint of possible resistance. The Skrulls are the first to return, to try again after their ignoble defeat.

Their plan is to make an agent powerful enough to stop the Fantastic Four, reasoning it was the FF who defeated them before. But the Fantastic Four did not defeat the Skrulls, at least not with their powers. The Skrulls were scared off by pictures of monsters in comic books. So really, they should make an agent powerful enough to fight all the monsters that scared them away.

Amazing Spider-Man #4

Nothing can stop… the Sandman!

Featuring: Spider-Man
Release: June 11, 1963
Cover: September 1963
12 cents
By: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
21 pages

Previous	#85	Next
Tales of Suspense #45	Reading order	Fantastic Four #18
Amazing Spider-Man #3	Amazing Spider-Man	Amazing Spider-Man #5

You teen-agers are all alike– You think the world owes you a living! Now go out and get me some shots of Spider-Man, and don’t come back till you do!

The covers so far have mostly been single images. Here, the cover is itself a comic. It’s not a common artistic choice, perhaps because it forces the images to be smaller. But it effectively shows off the range of Sandman’s powers.

Lee and Ditko share the credits for this issue with a simple “By”, rather than breaking up who did the story and who did the art.

In 4 issues, this series has introduced:

Chameleon
Vulture
Tinkerer
Dr. Octopus
Sandman

That’s 5 enduring villains, and at least 3 iconic ones.

Reading the Marvel Universe in the new year

Welcome back. Happy new year. Happy new decade.

This blog is primarily dedicated to reading Marvel’s entire comic book universe, starting in 1961 with Fantastic Four #1.

The menu can direct you to some of the key posts to help understand this venture, but it’s worth pausing to reacquaint ourselves.

Perhaps most important page is the Resources page. This attempts to enumerate the many websites upon which I depend to gain enough information about comic books to even attempt such a feat as this blog.

I have a post entitled Why Read the Marvel Universe?, which is a good place to begin. It attempts to explain what the Marvel Universe means to me and why I think this project is worth doing.

As we meet a new significant character, I update Our Cast So Far.

If you want to get right to the meat of it, the Reading Order post contains links to every comic we’ve discussed, and hints about what’s coming next.

We begin in 1961, and I hope to get into the 1980s one day. Anything pre-1961 or post-1991 is certainly out of the scope of this blog, but I occasionally find comics from these eras worth touching on as they relate to other comics. For example, Johnny Storm becomes the modern Human Torch in 1961, but occasionally peeking at the adventures of the original Human Torch gives some context. Sub-Mariner is a character who debuted in 1939, but returned after a 7-year hiatus to have more adventures in the modern Marvel Universe. The “PRELUDE” posts cover these pre-1961 stories I find relevant. If we look ahead at any post-1991 comics, we label them “POSTLUDE”, as with our peek at the 1993 comic, Marvels #0, which gives a new perspective on the origin of the original Human Torch.

We paused this effort just about a month ago, with Tales of Suspense #45, our 89th entry, featuring Iron Man in battle with Jack Frost.

I took some personal time to travel for the holidays and to be extremely jet-lagged upon my return to work. And with the year and decade wrapping up, I made my first blog posts on other topics, discussing my favorite comics of the decade, as well as my take on the decade’s best science fiction films.

But now I’m ready to get back to work. So please join me as we look in on the 90th story from the Marvel Universe, in which the Amazing Spider-Man meets the Sandman!

2010-2019: A decade in comics

Lots of great “Best of Decade” lists popping up across the internet. This is just a little personal blog, so I figured I could make a bit of a personal list. Here are 25 comics from the past decade that I’m glad to have read and think you should consider reading too.

Without repeating writers or worrying too much about what “this decade” is, I made myself a list of a top 50ish, then whittled it down to 25. We’ll present those 25 in approximate chronological order of first release and mention some other good works by the same creators from the decade.

Twelfth Day of Classic Comics Christmas

Dr. Doom and Magneto

See my initial post for the context. Suffice to say that I will be sharing my entries to the Classic Comics Forum tradition, “Twelve Days of Classic Comics Christmas“. This is a cross-post of my twelfth entry, representing #1 on my list of favorite comic book Crossovers.

Today is the final day. Thank you for reading along.

1. Dr. Doom and Magneto
“A World for the Winning”
from Super-Villain Team-Up #14 (Marvel, 1977)

by Bill Mantlo, Bob Hall, Don Perlin, and Duffy Vohland

[This isn’t quite a complete story; it concludes in the Champions, but the contest I’m playing along with was specifically not about teams, so we’re focusing on the first chapter. All that said…] this was a clear #1 for me.

These are my favorite super-villains. And Dr. Doom has conquered the world. Like, it’s over. He’s won. His only enemy left is boredom. And out of that boredom, he gives Magneto a chance, a small chance, to free the world.

This story would get reused and reworked for Marvel Graphic Novel #27, “Emperor Doom”, also by Bob Hall. And the bare premise of a super-villain in psychic control of an entire world has shown up here and there, since. Most recently in Tom King’s Batman.

But this is the one. Doom’s finest hour. The best story for Marvel’s best villain.

Eleventh Day of Classic Comics Christmas

Spider-Man and Gargoyle

See my initial post for the context. Suffice to say that I will be sharing my entries to the Classic Comics Forum tradition, “ Twelve Days of Classic Comics Christmas“. This is a cross-post of my eleventh entry, representing #2 on my list of favorite comic book Crossovers.

2. Spider-Man and Gargoyle
“Time, run like a freight train…”
from Marvel Team-Up #119 (Marvel, 1982)

by J.M. DeMatteis, Kerry Gammill, and Mike Esposito

The general consensus is that the high point of Marvel Team-Up is the work of Claremont and Byrne. A position I don’t disagree with. But it’s often overlooked that there is another great run, that of DeMatteis and Gammill.

They may not have the slickness of Byrne, but they make up for it with strong character work and stories that break out of the established Marvel Team-Up formula. Most of the series had allowed very little time for Spider-Man to be Peter Parker. As they have like 20 pages for him to meet up with some other hero, get up to speed on a threat and deal with that threat together. Throw in an initial misunderstanding or fight between the heroes and you see why you’re out of pages.

But DeMatteis wanted time to show Spidey out of uniform and to develop the supporting cast. Now, the “main” books were already developing most of the supporting cast, so DeMatteis took what he was allowed to play with: the people at Aunt May’s nursing home. He developed the character of Nathan Lubensky, Aunt May’s love interest and reflected on aging in our society.

The apex of this reflection came in two issues #119-120. Issue 120 teams Spider-Man with an aging Dominic Fortune. I wasn’t sure [the event moderator] would buy them together as a two-parter based on tenuous thematic links, so I decided to focus this entry on the best issue of the run.

This story spins out of Defenders #109 and focuses on the new friendship between Spider-Man and Gargoyle. Gargoyle is notable for being a rare old-man superhero, and Spider-Man is notable for being a particular young not-sidekick superhero. Now, Spider-Man has aged since his early teenage appearances, but he’s still only recently out of college, so probably about 23 or so.

An attempted mugging leads Spider-Man and Gargoyle down parallel tracks, which try to tackle the difficult question of when it’s time to fight to keep living and when to accept it’s time to go.

The title of the comic seems to reference an Eric Andersen song. I don’t really know Eric Andersen outside of looking up the title to this song.

“Time, run like a freight train, won’t you take me down the line; there’s so much I can never say of the ruins left behind.”

Tenth Day of Classic Comics Christmas

Usagi and Zato-Ino

See my initial post for the context. Suffice to say that I will be sharing my entries to the Classic Comics Forum tradition, “ Twelve Days of Classic Comics Christmas“. This is a cross-post of my tenth entry, representing #3 on my list of favorite comic book Crossovers.

3. Usagi Yojimbo and Zato-Ino (inspired by Zatoichi)
“Blind Swords-Pig!”
from Critters #7 (Fantagraphics, 1987)

by Stan Sakai

While Spider-Man has dominated my list this year, I had to make some room for the best non-Spidey comic book series in history. What originally came to mind is Usagi/Ninja Turtles, as that fits neatly in the theme. But then I thought about [the contest moderator] using Captain Strong as a Popeye stand-in, and remembered Usagi Yojimbo is filled with such stand-in characters. Surely his meetings with Lone Wolf and Kid would qualify as well then.

And that thought process brings us here. Zatoichi is the famed blind swordsman of Japanese cinema. Did you know there have been around 30 Zatoichi films? I think I’ve seen one of them. There was even a film, Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo. (With Usagi’s character drawing from a mix of Yojimbo with the Miyamoto Musashi of the Samurai trilogy).

But this isn’t Miyamoto Musashi. It’s Miyamoto Usagi. “Usagi” being the Japanese word for “rabbit”. So of course he doesn’t meet Zatoichi, the blind swordsman; he meets Zato-Ino, the blind swords-pig.

One of the series’ (many) great characters in one of the series’ (many) great tales.

Ino sees the flaws in everybody except himself. And is always ready to believe the worst of people and lash out at the world. Usagi is the first person to try to understand him and connect with him, but Ino is too hateful and spurns Usagi’s advances. It’s a tragic tale of a man (err, pig) who thinks he is seeking a peace the world denies him, when, in truth, it is he himself who stands in the way of his own peace.