Monster Masterworks

Monster Masterworks

By Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Dick Ayers & Bill Everett (Marvel)
ISBN: 0-8713-5592-2

To dyed-in-the-wool comic-book fanboys there’s a much beloved period in history when a frankly daft and woefully formulaic trend produced utter, joyous magic. We look back on it now and see only the magnificent art, or talk with loving derision of the crazy (often onomatopoeic) names, but deep down we can’t shake the exuberant thrill inside or the frisson of emotion that occurs when we see or even think of them.

Before Jack Kirby and Stan Lee brought superheroes back to Marvel Comics, the company was on its last legs. Trapped in a woefully disadvantageous distribution deal, the company’s output was limited to some sixteen titles. But there was hope. The outside world was gripped in an atomic B-movie monster craze, and Lee, Kirby and Steve Ditko capitalised on it in the anthology mystery titles Journey into Mystery, Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense.

In brief novelettes, dauntless and canny humans outsmarted a succession of bizarre aliens, mad scientists, an occasional ghost or sorcerer (this was, after all, the heyday of the Comics Code Authority and the supernatural was BAD) and a horde of outrageous beasties in a torrent of wonders best described by the catchphrase “monsters-in-their-underpants”.

Simplistic, moralistic, pictorially experimental yet reassuringly predictable in narrative, these Outer Limits-style yarns are sheer fun with no redeeming social context.

This volume (culled from the 1970’s reprints of those 1950s classics) features such by-gone menaces as ‘Groot, the Monster from Planet X!’, ‘The Glop!’, ‘Taboo, the Thing from the Murky Swamp!’, ‘The Blip!’, The Creature from Krogar!’, ‘X – the Thing that Lived!’, ‘Kraa the Unhuman!’, ‘Zzutak – the Thing that Shouldn’t Exist!’, ‘Titan!’, ‘Gigantus!’, Fin Fang Foom and an inhuman host of others, that just cry out to be defeated, and by golly, they brilliantly are, without a single superhero in sight!

Humans – one, Monsters – didn’t.

© 1968-1973, 1989 2007 Marvel Characters Inc. All Rights Reserved.