WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN THE 1960s , my pre-teen years were almost entirely consumed by comics. In the first half of that magical decade, while so much around me was changing, all I could see was the DC comics of Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz, along with the Beatles and certain favoured tv shows like My Favorite Martian , The Munsters and Space Patrol . As an eight year old, this was the sort of thing that held my rapt attention - DC comics and Ray Walston as My Favourite Martian. Life was much simpler then. In the second half of the Sixties, I'd discover Stan Lee's Marvel Comics, The Monkees and Steed and Mrs Peel in The Avengers . While it was a great time to be growing up, there were also plenty of disadvantages to being a kid. Chief among these was the prevailing attitude that comics were stupid. Once I got to about ten, I discovered Marvel Comics, the Monkees and, a little later, Emma Peel. For a lad at a tough South London primary school, it didn't pay to be d...
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 ...