Articles with the Tag Stan Lee

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 08: Iron Man Vol. 1

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cover of Essential Iron Man vol 1


Essential Iron Man Vol. 1
Stan Lee, Don Heck and friends
Reprints: Tales of Suspense #39-72 (March 1963 – June 1968)
Get this for: Don Heck at his best — three stars

Having done Captain America’s run in Tales of Suspense yesterday, it’s no more than fair to feature the guy Cap was sharing the title with today: Iron Man. Iron Man got his start in #39; this volume brings us roughly halfway through his run, to issue #72. Interestingly, Iron Man was one of the few Silver Age greats in which neither Ditko nor Kirby had much of a hand developing him. Instead Don Heck is the principal artist throughout this part of his Tales of Suspense run. Heck might not be quite as good as those two, but his suave, streamlined style works quite well here.

You do get the feeling however that Iron Man, no matter what he became later, was a second tier title to Stan Lee at least. His writing misses the sparkle it has on Fantastic Four, Spider-Man or even Captain America. Evidence of this is also the use of scripters, with Lee only doing the plotting. It results in a run of stories remarkably less complex than the top tier Marvel Silver Age titles.

Most of the stories revolve either around rivals of Tony Stark using their own inventions to become supervillains in order to put him out of business or a communist saboteur doing the same. Apart from the Mandarin there are no recurring villains here; even classic Iron Man villains like the Melter only appear once. Soap opera wise there’s not much going on either, apart from the love triangle between tony, his secretary Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan, his chauffeur. They’re not bad stories, just a bit samey after a while.

On the art front, Don Heck starts out decent and gets better over the volume, establishing a look for Iron Man and his armoured villains like the Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man that would be used by every artist after. Heck is a somewhat underrated artist, but if you do want to see him at his best, this is it.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 07: Captain America Vol. 01

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cover of Essential Captain America vol 1


Essential Captain America Vol. 1
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Gil Kane and friends
Reprints: Tales of Suspense #59-99, Captain America #100-102 (November 1964 – June 1968)
Get this for: Classic Captain America — five stars

Believe it or not, Captain America is my favourite Marvel superhero, largely due to Mark Gruenwald’s long run. What I like about Captain America is how leftist a patriot he is, a Roosevelt democrat and man of the people, punching out Hitler a year before America entered the war, always representing more the ideals of America than its government, in as far as a four colour hero can represent anything when he spents most of his time fighting leftover nazis, grotesque monstrosities wanting to rule the world and other sci-fi menaces…. Captain America is one of those characters who, like Spider-Man or the Thing always make a story better, almost as if writers try extra hard when they are working with them.

Essential Captain America Vol. 1 reprints Captain America’s complete run in Tales of Suspense, plus the first three issues of his own title. None of this I have read before and I therefore had no idea what was in store. Silver Age Marvel comics can be a bit hit and miss, especially the split titles like Tales of Suspense so I wasn’t expecting too much, but this was excellent. It’s clear Stan Lee has an affinity for Cap, as does Jack Kirby, who provides the majority of the art here, with only short spells by John Romita, Jack Sparling and Gil Kane interrupting his run. Inkers on the other hand change much more, from Chic Stone to Frank Giacoia to Dick Ayers to George Tuska to Joe Sinnott to Syd Shores, each making their own interpretation of Kirby’s pencils.

Artwise, what makes this volume extraordinary is the evolution in Kirby’s art. At the start of the volume he has already moved on from the clean, slightly slick understated look it had in e.g. early Fantastic Four comics, with more exagerration in movement and typical Kirby poses. By the end it’s full on Kirby, weird ultracomplex machinery, impossible anatomy, hunched poses, odd viewpoints, Kirby Krackle and all. Inbetween you can see one style mutating into the other. At each point along the way the same boundless energy slams from the page. Captain America is an action orientated strip even more so than the usual silver Age Marvel title and Kirby delights in showing Cap dodging bullets, slamming into villains and sprinting across the page to defuse a bomb in time.

The first issue is a case in point, in which Lee and Kirby introduce Cap to a new audience. Cap is minding his own business at Avengers Mansion, when a gang of toughs decide that this is the one night thye can rob the place with impunity, Cap being just a “glorified acrobat”. What follows is a quick demonstration in how tough, fast and strong he is. It’s great stuff.

Storywise Captain America took some time to find its feet, the first couple of stories being rather pedestrian, before Lee puts Cap back into World War II for ten issues, then moving back to the present for the first of several Red Skull storylines, this one featuring the menace of the Sleepers, rather silly looking giant robot menaces schaduled to wake up on Der Tag, tweny years after the end of WWII. Which rubbed my face in the strange fact that more time has now passed since these stories were first published than had passed between WWII and them. Captain America as a revived World War II hero was a much different idea when the people creating his stories had lived through it themselves than it is now. Back then the idea that Cap could regularly run into people who had remembered him from seeing him in action in France or Germany back during “the Big One” was quite natural, while by now Marvel’s floating timeline has progressed so far that you could’ve had the same effect by making him a veteran of the First Gulf War!

One of the things I feared starting this volume was that every other story in here would feature either Baron Zemo or Red Skull as the villain, which fortunately is not the case. Zemo only appears twice, while the Red Skull is used more, but each time he appears is special. Other villains include Batroc Ze Leaper, the Tumbler, the Adaptoid and Super-Adaptoid as well as the menace of Them, not to mention A.I.M. and MODOK. Cap’s allies include Nick Fury (and quite a few shared storylines with his own title in Strange Tales), the mysterious and lovely SHIELD Agent 13, Rick Jones and the Black Panther.

Great fast paced action, clever plotting and even some subtle (and not so subtle) characterisation — all that and Kirby at his peak, what more do you want?

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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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 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.