By Otto Binder (Bantam Books)
ISBN: F3569
One thing you could never accuse Stan Lee of was reticence, especially in promoting his burgeoning line of superstars. In the 1960s most adults, including the people who worked there, considered comic-books a ghetto. Some disguised their identities whilst others were “just there until they caught a break.†Stan and Jack had another idea – change the perception.
Whilst Jack passionately pursued his imagination waiting for the quality of the work to be noticed, Stan sought every opportunity to break down the ghetto walls: college lecture tours, animated TV shows (of frankly dubious quality at the start, but always improving), and of course getting their product onto “real†bookshelves in real book shops.
In the 1960s on the back of the “Batmania†craze, many comics publishers repackaged their old comics stories in cheap and cheerful paperbacks, but to my knowledge only monolithic DC and brash upstart Marvel went to the next level and commissioned all-new prose novels starring their costumed superstars. The publisher Bantam Books had been specialising in superhero fiction since 1964 when they began reprinting the 1930s pulp novels of Doc Savage, so they must have seemed the ideal partner in this frankly risky enterprise.
The first of these novels was an unlikely choice, considering the swelling appeal of both Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four, but I imagine that the colourful team of adventurers selected was one that Lee was happy to let another writer work on, and perhaps it was even a way of defending their trademark in all arenas (after all the British TV series The Avengers was screening in America to great success (necessitating Gold Key’s comic book tie-in being titled John Steed and Emma Peel).
Whatever the reason, The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker launched with little fanfare (I don’t even recall an ad in the comic-books themselves, at a time when company policy dictated that changing one’s socks got a full write-up on the “Marvel Bullpen Bulletins Pageâ€) and it didn’t garner a lot of praise…
Which is actually a real shame, as it’s a pretty good yarn extremely well told by pulp and comics veteran Otto Binder, whose Adam Link prose stories inspired Isaac Asimov’s ‘I, Robot’ tales whilst his Captain Marvel, Superman, Captain America and uncounted other comics scripts inspired just about everybody.
The heroic team, consisting of Goliath, the Wasp, Hawkeye, Iron Man and Captain America (but not Quicksilver or the Scarlet Witch who both look so good on that spiffy painted cover) are called upon to battle Karzz, a monstrous alien mastermind from the future who has travelled back in time to eradicate the entire Earth, in a fast-paced thriller that barrels along in fine old style, and doesn’t suffer at all from the lack of pulse-pounding pictures.
This is, of course, only really a treat for the most devout fan, either of the Marvel Universe or the vastly underrated work of one of the true pioneers of two genres. At least it’s not that hard to track down if you’re intrigued and hungry for something a little bit old-school and a little bit different…
© 1967 Marvel Comics Group. All rights reserved.