BACK IN THE 1960s , when I was a lad of about ten, our cinema entertainment didn't include an Avengers or an X-Men franchise ... heck, we didn't even have a Fantastic Four franchise. But I'll tell you what we did have in the way of superheroes on the screen - nothing. That's right, zilch. As I've recounted in an earlier post on this blog, the biggest cause for excitement for me in 1965 was the imminent arrival of Batman at my local ABC Minors Saturday morning pictures. Not in person, of course, just in the form of the 1943 Batman movie serial. "Careful what you say, fellas ... you never know who may be listening. Now let's get this stolen money divided up ..." As excited as I was, this was tempered with some disappointment that the episodes were in black and white and were obviously very old. But it was Batman. Fighting bad guys. In a costume. When you've never seen real life superheroes doing what they do on screen, this was pretty brilliant...
THERE WAS NO PLAN FOR THE INHUMANS , at least not at first. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had introduced Madam Medusa - unheralded - as a member of the Fantastic Four foe group The Frightful Four. And for eight issues of the Fantastic Four comic - 36 (Mar 1965) to 43 (Oct 1965), Medusa haughtied her way through the stories, coldly collaborating with The Wizard and his team to bring about the defeat and/or demise of the Storm family. Tea and antipathy - The Frightful Four's dislike of each other is obvious from the start. So why does Medusa hang out with a group of people she despises. In the end, Stan and Jack never really explained that. While the other Frightfuls each had a clear motive for doing what they did - mostly being previous foes of Johnny (The Human Torch) Storm in numerous Strange Tales adventures - there was no such reasoning behind Medusa's enmity towards the FF. She was literally a character with no motivation. More importantly, Stan's scripts never even hinted ...