Captives of the Deadly Duo!/When Super-Menaces Unite/When Friends Fall Out!/Trapped!/The End… Or the Beginning? Release: June 12, 1962 Cover: September 1962 12 cents Credits: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby Inker: Dick Ayers 24 pages
I read this in Fantastic Four Omnibus vol. 1. The table of contents credits Dick Ayers as the inker. The original comic just credits Lee and Kirby.
All posts regarding Fantastic Four comics featuring Namor are henceforth dedicated to my mother.
The plot of the story concerns Dr. Doom and Prince Namor the Submariner joining forces. It’s not clear if their duo has a name, and anyway the alliance won’t last long. Dr. Doom refers to them as the Diabolical Duo, which is what the cover calls them. So perhaps that’s official. But the story title calls them the Deadly Duo.
Notably, these are the first recurring nemeses for the FF, uniting the villains of the two previous issues.
The Coming of… Sub-Mariner On the Trail of the Torch/Enter the Sub-Mariner/Let the World Beware!/Sub-Mariner’s Revenge! Release: February 8, 1962 Cover: May 1962 12 cents Credits: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby Inks: Sol Brodsky (uncredited) 23 pages
Famously, Human Torch meets a random amnesiac hobo and decides without permission to burn the hobo’s beard off his face. The hobo looks like a character Torch read about in a comic, which convinces him to toss the hobo into the ocean. I would argue this behavior on the part of the Torch is inappropriate. But nobody on the team is setting a better example.
I read this comic in Marvel Masterpieces Golden Age Marvel Comics vol. 1. My copy of the book is filled with printing errors: pages missing or repeated; and, the copy seems off. The colors and inks seem pretty blurred, compared to scans I’m finding online. The coloring wasn’t great in those days to begin with, so it’s hard to tell without seeing the comic what it actually looks like, as reproductions vary widely. It’s particularly tricky as Everett wanted to make the undersea scenes murky.
This story is the beginning of a serial and doesn’t reach a satisfying conclusion in and of itself. It concerns Namor of the race of Sub-Mariners, recently come of age. He learns from his mother Fen of the ravages done to their people by the experiments of the surface dwellers, (who the comic refers to as the “white men”) and leads a crusade against the surface. His first step is to destroy a lighthouse. We’ll have to tune in next issue to see more.
The surface world will never recover from the destruction of the lighthouse; they may as well surrender now.
It begins in a familiar fashion, from the viewpoints of ordinary sailors, leaving the Sub-Mariner as a mystery in the background. Namor will become the point-of-view character soon, but first we learn who he is in snatches, as the humans do. An undersea diver notices oddities, like evidence that somebody had recently been there, even though they are the only ship in the area. It’s a mystery to investigate, a deadly one as it will turn out. It’s a technique we’ve seen frequently in superhero films (plus many a movie before them). Famously, when Batman first dons the suit in Batman Begins, the movie shifts its point-of-view to that of criminals. They only know something strange is happening, that they see out of the corner of their eye and hear above them– and that their numbers are thinning. This comic gives us a similar scene with divers.
