His name was… Merlin!
Featuring: Merlin
Release: December 12, 1961
Cover: March 1962
12 cents
Credits: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
5 pages
This is a late entry. But now that Merlin’s been mentioned as the ancient enemy of Tyrannus, I realize he did have a single earlier appearance in the Marvel Age. Again, these famous mythological figures were common fodder for Marvel’s old weird tales. There’s not necessarily a connection between these isolated stories and the characters who appear in the Marvel superhero stories. But it’s not clear there isn’t. And in hindsight, I wish we had covered this way back in the beginning. It came out the same day as Fantastic Four #3.
This was a pretty standard fantasy tale in one of these anthologies. We’ve seen the exact summary before: a dishonorable man gets what’s coming to him through a mystical twist when he picks the wrong victim to mess with. We’ve seen this in an Odin story and a Medusa story.
