The Girl in the Black Hood!
Release: March 8, 1962
Cover: June 1962
12 cents
Credits: Don Heck (uncredited)
5 pages
The story doesn’t have credits. The artist is Don Heck, and the writing is likely Stan Lee and Larry Lieber.
It’s a fact of many of these weird shorts that they hinge almost entirely on the punchline, the final panel reveal. It’s thus hard to talk about them without spoiling the entire story. This story is built around the mystery of the girl in the black hood. But the final panel reveal is that the girl in the black hood is in fact… Medusa of legend! Sorry for the spoiler.
Many mythical characters have made their way into Marvel Comics. Marvel draws from whatever they can, really. This is probably intended as an isolated story, without any connection to previous or later times Marvel has drawn on the same myth. But if we’re understanding these comics as a shared universe, it’s worth seeing if the different appearances of Medusa can be reconciled. We will see her again in an issue of Thor, and after that issue we will look back in a Prelude post on the first Medusa appearance, battling Captain America. We will also see other versions of the Medusa legend which clearly do not line up with this comic.
May Dusa is a famous photographer (a “girl photographer” the comic calls her). May Dusa… that’s an odd name… I wonder… All pictures of her are taken when she is taking a picture herself, under the camera’s hood. So people have seen her figure, but not her face. A criminal decides to rob her, and, curious, insists she remove the hood. He gets what he asked for.
You’ll notice a good number of the stories we’ve read so far have been drawn by Jack Kirby, the artist on Fantastic Four and most of these shorts we have read. This is our first encounter with Don Heck. Kirby tended to overshadow many of the artists around him, so Heck is not quite as famous. But he’s a legend in his own right. He’d been drawing comics about 13 years at this point, the previous 8 with the company that would become Marvel. His horror stories are very atmospheric and his characters expressive. We’ll be seeing a lot of him as we get into the superhero age and the stories of a certain armor-clad hero.
Rating: ★★½ (out of 5), 46/100
Significance: ★☆☆☆☆
Characters:
- May Dusa, Medusa
Minor Characters:
- Mr. Jones
Story notes:
- CMRO refers to Mr. Jones as Casper Jones. But I can’t see that the issue provides a first name, and I don’t expect we’ll ever see him again.
- CMRO marks this as Story D, likely because it is counting the “Venus” prose story. I’m numbering my stories by the comic stories.
- Other stories in the issue: “Quicksand!”; “The Bully Boy!”; “I am a Martian!”; and, the text story “Venus!”
#11 story in reading order
Next: Amazing Adult Fantasy #14, Story B
Previous: Amazing Adult Fantasy #13, Story B
