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Strange Tales: The Human Torch solo stories

IT'S FAIRLY WELL RECORDED  that at the beginning of the 1960s, when Marvel publisher Martin Goodman instructed editor and head writer Stan Lee to kick off a superhero team comic to cash in on the success DC was having with Justice League , he wanted to revive Timely's Golden Age characters The Human Torch, Captain America and The Sub-Mariner. The Human Torch had been the headline character in Marvel's first ever comic, Marvel Comics 1 (Oct 1939). When Stan was ordered to create a new superhero team book in 1961, Goodman wanted to re-use the Timely characters, but Stan went with The Fantastic Four, likely including The Human Torch to appease Goodman. And if Stan had just meekly followed that order, it's doubtful that we would have a Marvel Comics today. At best, the company would probably have ended up as a curious footnote in the history of comics, and not the creative powerhouse it evolved into during the 1960s. As good as Stan's instincts were, he did take a few ...

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From Horrors to Heroes

AS THE DAYS of Marty Goodman's Atlas Comics drew to a close in the late 1950s, the publisher was casting around for the Next Big Thing. Locked in to a draconian distribution contract with arch rivals DC Comics, Goodman was limited to a tight eight titles per month and if he needed to launch a new title, he was forced to cancel an existing one. So, feeling that mystery and science fiction was the coming trend Goodman decided to launch three new comics to complement the existing Journey into Mystery, World of Fantasy and Strange Tales titles. The new books were Strange Worlds , beginning in December 1958 and replacing the cancelled Navy Combat , and Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish , both debuting in January 1959, replacing the cancelled Homer the Happy Ghost and Miss America . Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales had been around since the twilight of the Golden Age and changed in content according to Martin Goodman's take on his customers' tastes. So they bega...

Separated at Birth 2 - another comic covers interlude

HERE'S SOMETHING A LITTLE MORE LIGHT-HEARTED than my more recent posts ... another look at the many tropes, cliches and chestnuts that show up over and over again in the cover designs of our favourite comics. I'd barely scratched the surface of this subject on one of my very early entries in this blog, so I'm giving the subject another outing. I should clarify that Marvel and DC comics took quite a different approach to how they created their covers. DC had always traditionally created their covers first, often using the idea behind a "grabby" cover to drive the plot of the story inside the comic. Both Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz took this approach with the DC books they edited. Marvel, though, did exactly the opposite, creating their covers after the interior art was completed. This meant that Marvel would often create symbolic covers that might not illustrate a scene from the story inside. But you'll see what I'm getting at as we go along ... IDE...

Thor: The Wilderness Years

THE EARLIEST THOR STORIES have always been associated with the grand art of Jack Kirby. But it wasn't actually that way. While the first seven issues of Journey into Mystery that featured the Thunder God were drawn by Kirby, these tales had none of the epic sweep the Silver Age version of the character is remembered for. Thor would battle Commies and gangsters and we'd rarely see more than tantalising glimpses of Odin and the fabled realm of Asgard. Then, all too soon, Kirby was off the title, re-assigned by Editor Stan Lee to other more pressing projects, like the epic first Fantastic Four Annual (Oct 1963), as well as new titles X-Men and The Avengers .  Working over a plot by Stan Lee and a script by Larry Lieber, Al Hartley turned in his only superhero story of the Silver Age, "Trapped by the Carbon Copy Man". The result was less than legendary. Another artist had to be found for Journey into Mystery 90 (Mar 1963, on sale January) ... and for that task, Stan ...