Featuring: Black Knight Release: January 14, 1955 Cover: May 1955 10 cents By: Stan Lee and Joe Maneely 10 pages
In the next post, we’ll be covering the battle of Giant-Man and the Wasp against a new super-villain, the Black Knight. That character will not be Marvel’s first or last Black Knight. The following iteration will be a superhero, and one of my all-time favorites.
We have already seen a version. A Merlin story in one of the fantasy backups, the ones we’ve mostly skipped, introduced a Black Knight that served Merlin, which turned out to be an empty suit of armor animated by magic. Merlin had created that Black Knight to combat the schemes of Sir Mogard.
We meet here Marvel’s original (with a caveat) Black Knight, Sir Percy of Scandia, recruited by Merlin to combat the schemes of Modred.
In an earlier story in this same issue, we saw Human Torch battle the Painter.
We read one earlier Merlin story in the pages of Tales of Suspense, also by Lee and Ditko. That was a modern tale, whereas this one takes us back to Arthurian days.
This era of these “weird tales” is soon coming to an end, as their pages will be given over entirely to these upstart superhero comics soon. We’ve read the occasional one, usually featuring legendary figures who will also appear in our superhero stories.
Merlin is actually quite the important character to our Marvel tales, featuring prominently in Black Knight and Captain Britain tales, though it’s not clear this issue is meant to have any connection. There was a short-lived 50s series called Black Knight in which Merlin was a major character, which will be quite important to our tale. We’ll read a couple of those stories as Prelude issues when they start to impact the stories we are reading here. They were also set in King Arthur’s court.
This is the tale of the jealous Sir Mogard, who challenges Merlin to a duel. Just as we saw in the last Merlin tale, the villain gets what’s coming to him.
Don’t hear the word “bandy” often; last time I heard it was from Gandalf.
This tale also involves a Black Knight, who in the classic series served Merlin against Modred. The original Black Knight was Sir Percy in disguise. This one turns out to be an empty suit of armor brought to life by Merlin. There will be other Black Knights to come.
