CAPTAIN AMERICA was one of the first Marvel Comics heroes I discovered back in the hazy days of 1965. I'm not sure what it was that fascinated me about the character - his star-spangled costume, his embodiment of the American Dream, the fact that he was not Super but just an ordinary man. Even in the mid-Sixties, we were exposed to a great deal of American culture here in the UK, through movies, television and our reading matter. My feeling was that home-grown comic papers like Beano and Beezer were for small children, but the brash and colourful US imports were for older kids like myself. And of course, they were more expensive which, like designer goods today, made them more aspirational. These early Marvels would have first been on sale in the UK in mid-1965, around the time of my eleventh birthday. Compared to the straight-arrow Justice League of America the Marvel characters seemed wilder and just a little more dangerous. I've covered my earliest encounters with the fle...
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 ...