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Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 05: Fantastic Four vol 01

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Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 1
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers and friends
Reprints: Fantastic Four #1-20 and Annual 1 (November 1961 – November 1963)
Get this for: the birth of a legendary comics run — Five stars

One of the first essential volumes published back in October 1998, The Essential Fantastic Four vol. 1 contains stories that should be familiar to any longtime Marvel fanboy or girl. If you haven’t read them in reprints, they have been referred to so much that it feels as if you’ve read them. Myself, I guess I’ve read roughly half of the issues collected here before and knew about most of the others. So I tought I knew what to expect even though it had been years since I’ve last read these stories. I remembered them as slightly on the dull side, typically early Marvel where you can see the potential (as with The Hulk yesterday) but it isn’t quite realised yet.

I was wrong.

Reading these first twenty issues, plus the annual in one sitting made me realise how good Lee and Kirby were right from the start. Even the origin story, repeated ad nauseam over the decades is fresh when you read the original. Lee starts the story with a bang and never lets up, building the tension from the start. Jack Kirby’s art is more subdued than Classic Kirby, more realistic and low key. And even if “Central City” is mentioned here, it’s clear the action takes place in New York. Throughout the stories here there is a sense that they do not take place in a vacuum, but in the world outside your window, fantastic as the adventures, settings and villains are. What it reminds me of is Tintin, or Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge, two other adventure series that have a strong sense of reality about them, even if one stars a never aging boy reporter and the other pantless anthromorphic ducks. Quality wise too these Lee + Kirby stories are on a par with Tintin’s or Barks’ best.

The art is so good here, so fluid and full of grace but always in service to the story. Kirby has great fun depicting the Fantastic Four using their powers: the Thing’s brute force, the Torch playing with fire, the Invisible Girl’s use of her power to gain the upper hand on villains dismissing her as a professional hostage and especially Mr Fantastic’s stretching. His compositions are great as well — just look at the covers, especially issue 12.

Meanwhile Lee’s writing sparkles: there’s no dull plot in the bunch, he has as much fun getting the FF’s characters right as Kirby has in showing the work: the Thing’s gruff exterior hiding a pussycat, Mr Fantastic being one step ahead of his team mates but caring deeply for them, the Torch’s hotheadedness and the Invisible Girl’s worrying. As per usual with Lee, he uses a thousand words where somebody else could’ve done it with ten, but it never grates here as it did with The Incredible Hulk. The dialogue is witty, there are few unnecessary captions or thought balloons and it all flows as naturally as the art does.

And the villains here are great: the Mole Man, Skrulls and Super Skrull, Namor the Submariner, Miracle Man, The Puppet Master, the Mad Thinker, Rama Tut and of course Doctor Doom. Doom appears in five of the twenty stories here yet never bores. Each time he returns he gets better. The Submariner is the same and even the Puppet Master, so incredibly boring when used by almost everybody else is great here.

But you know what the best thing about this volume is? As great as these Fantastic Four stories are, they will only get better!

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 04: Incredible Hulk Vol 1

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cover of Essential Incredible Hulk vol 1


Essential Incredible Hulk Vol. 1
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane and friends
Reprints: Incredible Hulk #1-6 & Tales To Astonish 60-91 (May 1962 – Arpil 1967)
Get this for: historical value rather than entertainment — Three stars

The Incredible Hulk was the second superhero title an still embryonic Marvel Comics would bring out, as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby hoped to make lightning strike twice after the succes of the Fantastic Four. Instead it was cancelled after only six issues and the Hulk would remain without his own series for more than a year, when he got a stint as the backup feature in Tales to Astonish. If you wonder why the Hulk failed to catch on when the Fantastic Four was such a succes, wonder no more: those first six issues are awful. Lee’s not so much writing, as overwriting the series, the plots are pedestrian and the whole gimmick of the series doesn’t work.

The idea behind the Hulk is great, an updated Jeckyl and Hide with the shy brainy scientist morphing into the monster-hero whenever he gets excited, the execution is just lousy. It’s obvious Stan Lee couldn’t quite make his mind up what to do with the Hulk, make him into a real villain or keep him as the same sort of easily angered anti-hero like the Thing, but it’s all a far cry from the fundamentally innocent childlike nature of the “classic” Hulk. The setting doesn’t help either, much too claustrophobic, each issue’s story having to be set around the army’s continuing hunt for the Hulk and Bruce Banner attempts to keep his being the Hulk a secret. And then there are the villains. The Fantastic Four had the Mole Man, the Skrulls, Miracle Man, the Sub-Mariner and Doctor Doom in its first six issues: Hulk has a Russian spy called the Gargoyle, the Toad Men, Ringmaster, Tyrannus and the Metal Master. It’s no contest, is it?

Once the Hulk returns, in Tales to Astonish, things start picking up. For a start, instead of Kirby as the artist, who made the Hulk too monstrous, it’s Steve Ditko, whose more fluid style fits the Hulk better. Kirby does return later, but by then the Hulk’s look has already been established. Still later there’s Gil Kane, who has an angular, elongated style just as effective as Ditko’s, if completely different.

The writing starts picking up as well. Having less space helps, forces Lee to cut some of the fat, while by now he has a much firmer handle on who the Hulk is supposed to be. A monster sure, but one who is kind at heart, just misunderstood by the world around him. There’s also more continuity between the stories, breaking away from the whole “hide from the army” aspect of the earlier series, though that’s still present as well. You got a great villain in the Leader (starting from Tales to Astonish #63), another man mutated by gamma radiation like the Hulk but who has gotten super intelligence rather than superstrength. You also got two other classic villains in this volume: the Boomerang (TTA #81) , later better known as a Spider-Man villain and the Abomination (TTA #90), an even more hideous gamma ray monster than the Hulk even…

There’s also some sloppiness however. At one point the Hulk is transported into “the future”, where he ends up fighting the Executioner who is trying to conquer the world for some reason best known to himself, but after two issues of doing so he drops back into the present, the Executioner forgotten. In a similar way Rick Jones, the Hulk’s teenage sidekick is a prisoner of the army in one issue, a free boy the next with no explenation other than having general Thunderbolt Ross (the Hulk’s nemesis and father of Bruce Banner’s love interest Betty Ross) instructing his men to keep an eye on him…

So: the incredible Hulk stories are boring, the Tales to Astonish ones are fun if sloppy at times, neither is the best Marvel’s Silver Age had to offer. Not quite an essential volume then, if interesting in seeing how the Hulk is developed, not quite the character we all know yet.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 03: Marvel Team-up v1

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Essential Marvel Team-Up Vol. 1
Gerry Conway, Len Wein, Gil Kane, Ross Andru, Sal Buscema and friends
Reprints: Marvel Team-up #1-24 (March 1972 — August 1974)
Get this if: you’re in for some Bronze Age nostalgia — Three stars

Essential Marvel Team-Up Vol 1 is the quintessential Marvel Bronze Age collection. If you want to know what a run of the mill Marvel series was like in the seventies, this is the one for you. It took me right back, it did. Not that I’m that old that I’ve read these stories when they first came out, but I did read a lot of them in Dutch translation, when they were published here a decade and a half later or so…

Though it may be heard to imagine now, I remember Christopher Priest mentioning once in an Usenet thread that the very idea of Marvel Team-Up was controversial at the time it first came out. Spider-Man was supposed to be a loner after all, somebody looked at with suspicion by most other heroes. Just look at any Silver Age crossover to see how standoffish they all were to him. If you then create a title that has him palling around with one hero after another it changes Spider-Man’s character. He can’t be mysterious and slightly creepy if he starts welcoming every new hero to the Marvel Universe…

For me that’s one of the greatest differences between Silver Age and Bronze Age Marvel, that degree of interaction between various characters. In the Silver Age, despite crossovers and guest stars titles followed their own path and you could never confuse a Fantastic Four for the Avengers; in the Bronze Age it all started to mesh together. The soap opera takes over and knits the universe together. Since that’s the Marvel I grew up with, it’s also the Marvel I like the best, midway between the Silver Age and the crossovers excesses of the eighties and nineties.

The writers in this volume are Gerry Conway on #1-12, followed by Len Wein on #13-24, with art mostly by Gil Kane but also featuring Ross Andru on early issues and Sal Buscema and Jim Mooney later on. It’s all inked in the dependable Marvel House Style, but both Kane and Buscema are immediately recognisable. On the whole I found the Wein issues to be slightly better than the Conway ones, even if Conway was more ambitious, having several multi-issues storylines going on.

Most of the stories are fairly simple: Spidey (or the Human Torch in one issue) is going his merry way and runs into the guest star du jour, either helping him fight some mooks or more often getting into a fight with them for some contrieved reason or other. Once any misunderstandings are cleared up, the villain of the story reveals themselves, manages to defeat Spidey and co so that the plot can continue, explains their plan to conquer the world|rob the bank|kill all superheroes before being stopped at the last moment. There’s little characterisation other than in references to what’s been going on in Spider-Man’s own title or subplot in these early issues. It’s heroes meet, fight each other, patch up their differences, get defeated by the real villain, escape their death trap and stop the villain reaching his or her goal. It’s all done professionally, but no great art.

Fun though. And the art, especially by Kane, makes up for a lot of deficiencies in the stories.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 02: Man-Thing v1

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essential Man-Thing Vol. 1


Essential Man-Thing Vol. 1
Steve Gerber, Roy Thomas, Val Mayerik, Mike Ploog and Friends
Reprints: see below
Get this for: Gerber, Gerber, Gerber! — five stars

Right. Day two. Essential Man-Thing Vol 1 collects Savage Tales #1, Astonishing Tales #12-13, Adventure into Fear #10-19, Man-Thing #1-14, Giant-Size Man-Thing #1-2 (don’t snigger) and Monsters Unleashed #5, #8-9. It features writing and art of Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, Tony Isabella, Mike Ploog, Val Mayerik, Gray Morrow and others, but is dominated by one man: Steve Gerber.

Man-Thing made his debut in May 1971, only two months before that other muck encrusted swamp monster, Swamp Thing over at the Distinguished Competition, more a case of tapping into the same zeitgeist as somebody copying somebody else. Whereas old Swampy still had a human intelligence under all that muck, Manny was less fortunate, with the man he was, Ted Sallis, yet another genius-scientist who became the victim of his own weapons, completely submerged, leaving him to react purely by instinct. In the first few stories this leaves Man-Thing to function as a deus ex machina, to pop up at convenient times to drive the plot. Once Gerber takes over the writing this role doesn’t change much.

The real difference is what kind of stories Gerber has Man-Thing resolve. He mixes in horror, absurdity, superheroes and a generous helping of seventies politics and soulsearching. At its worst this becomes an incoherent mess, but at its best this made Man-Thing one of the best things Marvel had during the seventies, something that was genuinely in touch with the times. This was of course also the series that introduced Howard the Duck to a largely befuddled world and you can see part of what Gerber would perfect with Howard already here.

With Man-Thing, what you have are stories that are only slightly more absurd than what you’d get in a normal Marvel series, with villains who are largely buffoons: a corrupt businessman called F. A. Schist (subtle Gerber ain’t), a Cult worshipping Entropy, a Suicided clown replaying his life using Manny and co as his puppets and so on. They’re not that different from the fools you’d see fighting Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four elsewhere, just slightly more amplified. With Manny himself a mute, mindless observer of what’s going on in his own book, only reacting to what people are doing to him, it’s the normal people in his supporting cast who are the real protagonists, especially one Rich Rory, somebody Gerber would uses elsewhere as well.

Absurdity in superhero comics has a bad reputation, because most writers just go for mindless parody. With Man-Thing, you have the absurd (having a warrior prince from another dimension metamorphose out of a peanut butter jar for example) dealt with matter of factly, without the wink-wink nudge-nudge of lesser titles…

Most of the artwork in this volume is by Val Mayerik, somebody I’ve always liked. Unfortunately the lack of colour seems to have zapped some of the vitality of his art here; it all looks a bit pedestrian. But then Mike Ploog takes over and his slightly cartoony yet slick style works quite well in black and white. There’s some great work by other artists as well, including John Buscema and Gray Morrow.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty days 01: Dr Strange v1

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Essential Dr Strange Vol. 1
Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and friends
Reprints Strange Tales #110, #111, #114-168 (August 1963 — May 1968)
Get this for: the complete Ditko-Lee Dr Strange — Five stars

I bought my fiftieth Marvel Essential this week, most of which I’ve bought this year ever since a local remainder shop has been stocking them for less than half of their normal price. It’s been great to be able to buy these huge chunks of Marvel’s Silver Age and Bronze Age history for a price you couldn’t buy two modern comics for. To celebrate I thought I’d do some quick reviews of all of them: Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days. And I’ll start with Doctor Strange.

Essential Doctor Strange vol 1 has the complete run of Doctor Strange in the original Strange Tales, from #111 to #168, including the full run of Steve Ditko. Strange Tales was a split title, with The Human Torch and later Nick Fury, Agent of Shield in the front and Doctor Strange as the backup feature. He started out in a couple of five pages stories, then moved up to eight pagers and by the end of the volume has twelve pages to have his adventures in. A lot happens in these short stories, but there’s much less of the soap opera typical of other Silver Age Marvel titles. In fact, the early Doctor Strange doesn’t feel like a Marvel title at all.

Take the first story. It starts with a man suffering from nightmares recalling hearing about how Doctor Strange could help with situations like this. He goes to visiti him, Strange infiltrates his dreams and it turns out Nightmare is behind the guy’s troubles, attempting to lure Strange. into his own realm. While Strange is held off by Nightmare, his pawn wakes up and realises why he was having terrible dreams: he’s been ripping people off in crooked business deals. He decides to kill Doctor Strange, but luckily the latter manages to use his magical amulet to stop him. It ends with Nightmare making threats to get Strange another time, while the good doctor convinces his patsy to turn himself in: “it will be the only way you can ever sleep again”.

Now this is the sort of strange mystery story you could also picture The Phantom Stranger starring in, somewhat of a throwback of what Marvel was doing just before they got into superheroes. It’s also clear that this is far from Doctor Strange’s first case: he’s well known enough that there are rumours about him and people know where to find him to get his help. No origin is given either, which makes him about the only classic Silver Age Marvel hero not to get their origin in their first story. It’s only in the fourth story that we do get the origin story, of how he once was a great surgeon until a car accident, drunk himself into vagrancy and went looking through the Far East to find a mystical solution for his problems but find himself training as a sorceror under the Ancient One instead… Again, not quite fitting in with the science orientated origins of most of Marvel’s other heroes.

What I liked about this volume was seeing Doc Strange being developed by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, how seemingly throwaway references to e.g. Dormammu gets picked up later, culminating into the sixteen issue epic battle between Strange and Baron Mordo/Dormammu which ends Ditko’s run. At this point we’re still only halfway through the volume, with the last Ditko free third being so much less interesting, much more pedestrian superheroics. If you read through this volume in one sit, it’s clear that whatever Lee’s contribution to things, it was Ditko who was the creative force behind Doc Strange. The art as well, though in the hands of capable artists like Bill Everett, Marie Severin and Dan Adkins is a huge letdown after Ditko.

Dormammu takes on Eternity, courtesy of Steve Ditko

What Ditko did with Doctor Strange was create the way in which every subsequent artist would depict magic, creating a whole visual language so to speak to depict other dimensions, magical spells, psychic duels and so on. And he does so while staying firmly within normal panel layouts, not resorting to trickery like breaking panel borders, or unusual layouts or even that many splash pages. It’s all there in the usual three-two-two or three-three-three layout. But when he does do a rare splash page, it’s a beauty, as you can see above…

In short: a great volume of which the last third is not very essential.