By Carl Burgos, Bill Everett, Paul Gustavson, Ben Thompson & others (Marvel)
ISBN: 0-7851-1624-9
Whereas a vast percentage of DC’s Golden Age archive is still readily readable today, a great deal of Marvel Comics’ Timely and Atlas output is, for most modern tastes, dated and quite often painfully strident – maybe even offensive to 21st century eyes and sensibilities.
Nevertheless, I’d rather have the raw historical form rather than any bowdlerised or censored reworking and even in their most jingoistic and populist excesses there are usually individual nuggets of gold amidst the shocking or – horror of horrors – badly crafted yarns from the House of Ideas’ antediluvian antecedents.
Moreover, there’s quite a lot to be said for putting the material in lavish and expensive hardbound volumes for those early comic adventures and I must admit that when they were good the individual efforts were very good indeed.
Marvel took quite some time before producing expensive deluxe volumes featuring their earliest comic adventures and this collection of the first four issues of the anthology title which started it all for Timely/Marvel/Red Circle/Atlas (before eventually settling on Marvel Comics), despite re-presenting some of the most revered adventures of the Golden Age, clearly shows why.
Perhaps I’m being overly harsh and hyper-critical: I have to admit that there’s a lot of material here that I spent much of my early life lusting after. I am however a complete comics nut with broad tastes and flexible standards. There are shameful horrors and truly pitiful examples of the medium lurking in my dusty comics boxes. I am not a new, casual or particularly discriminating punter.
Hi – I’m Win and I actually adore old comics…
After a rather shaky start in 1936, the invention of Superman paved the way for explosive expansion and saved the fledgling comicbook industry. By 1939 the new kids on the block were in a frantic flurry of creative frenzy and every publisher was trying to make and own the Next Big Thing. The Goodman pulp fiction outfit leapt into the new marketplace and scored big with their initial offering Marvel Comics: released late in the year before inexplicably switching to the marginally less euphonious Marvel Mystery Comics with the second issue.
During the early days ofAmerica’s Golden Age, novel ideas, raw ambition and sheer exuberance could take you far and, as most alternative means of entertainment escapism for kids were severely limited, it just wasn’t that hard to make a go of it as a comicbook publisher. Combine that with a creative work-force which kept being drafted, and it’s clear to see why low and declining standards of story and art didn’t greatly affect month-to-month sales during the years of World War II.
However once hostilities ceased a cascade-decline in super-hero strips began almost as soon as GI boots hit US soil again. Those innocent kids had seen a lot and wanted something more than brashness, naivety and breakneck pace from their funnybooks now…
Both The Human Torch and Sub-Mariner quickly won immediate favour with the burgeoning, fickle readership but the rest of the stories were soon acknowledged to be pure filler material and thus subject to immediate replacement. Still, two out of seven was pretty good: Action and Detective Comics only had the one super-star apiece…
Another holdover from the pre-comics phase of the company was a predilection to treat the instalments as serial chapters; always promising more and better if you’d just come back next month…
Before the years was out the “Big Two†would clash; frequently and repeatedly battling like elemental gods in the skies above the city…
Goodman seemed to favour and push Ka-Zar and The Angel: characters that devolved from his own stable of pulp genre stars. Sadly neither the generic jungle adventures of the company’s premiere Tarzan knockoff or the thud-and-blunder “Crime-busting Rogue†potboilers – which owed so much to Charteris’ iconic Saint – just didn’t appeal to kids as much as the graphic histrionics of the anarchic Fire and Water anti-heroes when transformed into comic strips…
An editorial policy of rapid expansion was quickly adopted: release a new book filled with whatever the art and script monkeys of the comics “shop†(freelance creative types who packaged material on spec for publishing houses: Martin Goodman bought all his product from Lloyd Jacquet’s Funnies Inc.) dreamed up, keep the popular hits and disregard everything else.
Timely Comics – or Red Circle- as the company occasionally called itself, had a huge turnover of characters who only made one or two appearances before vanishing, never to be seen again until variously modern revivals or recreations produced new improved versions of characters such as Angel, Ka-Zar or Electro.
After a knowledgeable and informative – although perhaps tad apologist – introduction by Golden Age Guru Roy Thomas, the hot-dogging begins with the landmark Marvel Comics #1 which sported a cover by pulp illustrator Frank R. Paul introducing to the gasping populace Carl Burgos’ landmark conception of ‘The Human Torch’ …
The Fiery Fury led off the parade of wonderment, bursting into life as a malfunctioning humanoid devised by Professor Phineas Horton. Igniting into an uncontrollable blazing fireball whenever exposed to air, the artificial innocent was consigned to entombment in concrete but escaped to accidentally imperil the metropolis until it/he fell into the hands of a gangster named Sardo.
When the crook’s attempts to use the android as a terror weapon dramatically backfired the hapless newborn was left a misunderstood fugitive – like a modern day Frankenstein’s monster. Even his creator only saw the creation as a means of making filthy money…
The opening episode of ‘The Angel’, by Paul Gustavson, owed a criminally large debt to the 1938 Louis Hayward film The Saint in New York. Although dressed like a superhero, the do-gooder was a blend of Charteris’s iconic well-intentioned scoundrel and The Lone Wolf (Louis Vance’s urbane two-fisted hero who was the subject of 8 books and 24 b-movies between 1917 and 1949), but the four-colour paladin’s foes soon tended towards only the spooky, the ghoulish and the just plain demented.
He also seemed able to cast a giant shadows in the shape of an angel. Not the greatest aid to cleaning up the scum of the Earth but he seemed to manage in this initial enterprise where he is asked to clean up New York: then suffering from the deadly depredations of a crime syndicate dubbed ‘the Six Big Men’…
Appalling reproduced in this volume, ‘The Sub-Mariner’ by Bill Everett, was actually an expanded reprint of a beautiful black and white strip from Motion Picture Funnies. Prince Namor was the scion of an aquatic race that lived under the South Pole. These advanced folk had been decimated by American mineral exploration a generation previously, and the Sub-Mariner’s mother Fen had been dispatched to spy upon the invaders. She had gotten too close, falling pregnant by one of the interlopers, and twenty years later her son was an amphibious mutant superman determined to exact revenge on the air-breathers – which he promptly began by attacking New York City…
Cowboy Jim Gardley was framed by ruthless cattle-baron Cal Brunder and found the only way to secure a measure of justice was to become ‘The Masked Raider’, dispensing six-gun law. Al Anders’ Lone Ranger riff was competent but uninspired, lasting until the twelfth issue of Marvel Mystery.
Offering a complete thrill, ‘Jungle Terror’, by Tohm Dixon, followed gentlemen explorers Ken Masters and Tim Roberts (visually based on Caniff’s Pat Ryan and Terry Lee) battling savages in the Amazon to find cursed diamonds before a brief prose vignette – a staple of early comics – recounted a racing car drama of ‘Burning Rubber’ by Ray Gill, before the aforementioned ‘Adventures of Ka-Zar the Great’ saw Ben Thompson adroitly adapt Bob Byrd’s pulp novel King of Fang and Claw to strip form. In the first part South African diamond miner John Rand and his wife crashed their plane into the Belgian Congo where their son David grew up amidst jungle splendour and became brother to the King of Lions Zar. An idyllic life was only marred years later when murderous explorer Paul De Kraft killed old John, leaving young David to seek vengeance as the mighty brother of lions…
Behind a Claire Moe Angel cover, the abruptly re-titled Marvel Mystery Comics #2 (December 1939) again offered ‘The Human Torch’ by Burgos, wherein the fiery fugitive had attained a degree of sophistication and control before stumbling onto a murderous racing car racket where gangster Blackie Ross ensured his drivers always won by strafing other contestants from an airplane, until the big-hearted, outraged Torch stepped in…
Gustavson then despatched ‘The Angel’ to Hong Kong to save museum researcher Jane Framan from falling victim to a curse.
This time the dangers of the Lost Temple of Alano proved to be caused by greedy men not magical spirits, whilst ‘The Sub-Mariner’ himself was the threat in Everett’s second chapter as the Marine Marvel went berserk in a city powerhouse before showing his true colours by chivalrously saving a pretty girl caught in a conflagration.
‘The Masked Raider’ by Anders broke up an entire lost town of outlaws, after which the debuting ‘American Ace’ by Paul Lauretta (clearly patterned on Roy Crane’s soldier of fortune Wash Tubbs) found Yankee aviator Perry Wade flying straight into danger when the woman who caused the Great War returned to start WWII by attacking innocent European nations with her hidden armies…
‘The Angel’ then starred in an implausible, jingoistic prose yarn by David C. Cooke illustrated by Moe, single-handedly downing a strafing ‘Death-Bird Squadron’ before Thompson introduced fresh perils – including a marauding malicious ape named Chaka to plague young David in more ‘Adventures of Ka-Zar the Great’.
Marvel Mystery Comics #3 (January 1940 and sporting an Angel cover by Alex Schomburg) saw ‘The Human Torch’ slowly evolving into a recognisable superhero series as he battled a ruthless entrepreneur trying to secure the formula for a super-explosive so that he could sell it to Martians, whilst ‘The Angel’ battled a bloodthirsty death-cult sacrificing young women, before ‘The Sub-Mariner’ took a huge leap in quality after policewoman Betty Dean entrapped and then successfully reasoned with the intractably belligerent sub-sea invader.
With global war looming ever closer, opinions and themes were constantly shifting andEverettreacted brilliantly by turning Namor into a protector of all civilians at sea: spectacularly preying on any war-like nation sinking innocent shipping. Naturally, even before America officially joined the fray, that meant mostly Nazis got their subs and destroyers demolished at the antihero’s sinewy hands…
When gold and oil where discovered under ranch land, ‘The Masked Raider’ stepped in to stop greedy killers from driving off the settlers in a timeless tale of western justice, but current events overtook the ‘American Ace’, who faded out after this tale of Blitzkrieg bombings, in a picturesque Ruritanian nation. Even Cooke & Everett’s text thriller ‘Siegfried Suicide’ was naming and shaming the Axis directly now in a yarn where a lone yank saved a bunch of French soldiers from German atrocity, but under African skies the ‘Adventures of Ka-Zar the Great’ saw the boy hero rescue his animal friends from a well-meaning zoo hunter in a yarn which revealed hints of a Jungle Book style congress of animals…
The final inclusion in this volume – Marvel Mystery Comics #4, February 1940 – has a Schomburg cover depicting Sub-Mariner smashing a Nazi U-Boat leading into another Burgos epic for ‘The Human Torch’ wherein the android gains a secret identity as Jim Hammond and returns to New York to battle a criminal genius terrorising the city with warriors cloaked in deadly, sub-zero ‘Green Flame’.
‘The Angel’ too was in the Big Apple, grappling with a small-time hood who had manipulated a monstrous hyper-thyroid case named ‘Butch the Giant’ – impervious to pain and able to punch through brick walls – into being his slavish meal ticket, whilst ‘The Sub-Mariner Goes to War’ saw the passionate Prince return to his Polar people and rally them and their advanced technology into a taskforce to enforce his Pax Namor upon the surface world’s assorted war mongers…
Even by its own low standards, ‘The Masked Raider’ tale of claim-jumping was far from exemplary, but prose crime puzzler ‘Warning Enough’ (by Cooke & H. Ramsey) was a rather enthralling change of pace tale.
‘Electro, the Marvel of the Age’ by Steve Dahlman, introduced the brilliant Professor Philo Zog who constructed a wonder robot and then formed a secret society of undercover operatives who sought out uncanny crimes and great injustices for the automaton to fix. The first case involved retrieving a kidnapped child actress…
Another debut was ‘Ferret, Mystery Detective’ by Stockbridge Winslow & Irwin Hasen, which saw the eponymous crime writer and his faithful assistants solve the case of a corpse dropped on the authors doorstep, before the increasingly impressive ‘Adventures of Ka-Zar the Great’ saw the return of the despised De Kraft and the beginning (but not the end: that’s frustratingly left to the next issue and volume) of the jungle lord’s just vengeance…
Despite all the problems I’ve whinged about, I’m constantly delighted with this substantial chronicle, warts and all, but I can fully understand why anyone other than a life-long comics or Marvel fan would baulk at the steep price-tag in these days of grim austerity, with a wealth of better quality and more highly regarded comics collections available. Nevertheless, value is one thing and worth another and the sheer vibrant, ingenious rollercoaster rush and vitality of the material, even more than its historical merit, is just so overwhelming that if you like this sort of thing you’ll love this sort of thing. Although the stories might be of variable quality and probably not to the tastes of modern fans, for devotees of super-heroes, aficionados of historical works and true Marvel Zombies there’s still lots to offer here.
As always, in the end, it’s up to you…
© 1939, 1940, 2004 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.