- drrockso20
- May 6, 2013
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Has Not Actually Done Cocaine
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so I restarted once again my Marvel chronological reading project once more and I figure to give me more motivation I'll post some basic thoughts* on each issue here, with this first post covering the first five issues in the order I'm following;
Fantastic Four #1: a classic for reasons gone into by many people, even if it is a janky mess clearly edited and sown together from a bunch of originally unrelated unused stories
Fantastic Four #2: another classic story and also still very janky, not to mention at least one big plot hole and some very questionable ethics on Reed's part
Tales to Astonish #27: the introduction of Hank Pym though at this point he's just a generic comic book mad scientist, the other stories in this issue include one about a magic mirror, a really silly story about a talking horse, and "Dead Planet" a story about an otherwise invincible alien warrior having to combat loneliness, honestly it's the best story in the issue a real Hidden Gem of early Silver Age Marvel
Fantastic Four #3: honestly the only real reason to read this issue is to see the debut of the FF's costumes, the Fantasti-Car, and their headquarters, otherwise this is a really bleh issue(Miracle Man might just be the lamest opponent the Fantastic Four fight in the Silver Age that I'm aware of) that shows that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were still ironing out the kinks for this series
Fantastic Four #4: probably the first issue of FF that's fully good on it's own merits and not just for historical reasons, with the reintroduction of the Sub-Mariner and the cast's personalities are beginning to solidify(well Sue is still pretty one dimensional), also Giganto is a classic example of a Kirby Monster, and I love the goofy little "The Hulk Is Coming" and "Who Is The Hulk??" thing they stick at the bottom of certain pages in here
I'll post more later
*when I first started this a couple years ago in a thread over on another site I did much more in-depth analysis for each issue but doing that took ages to do(and got derailed thanks to some personal problems at the time), so for the time being I'm going to stick to these shorter reviews, maybe once I hit the end of say 1963 I'll go back and do full length ones for all the issues past FF#3(as I've already written up FF#1-3 and TtA#27 over in that other thread)
onto the next set of issues;
Tales to Astonish #29: the titular story for this issue "When the Space Beasts Attack!!" is a fun little twist on the alien invasion plotline, the rest of this issue's stories are also pretty fun overall(the other three stories all revolve around assholes getting their just desserts in ironic and lethal ways)
Tales to Astonish #30: another fun issue, we had three stories involving assholes getting their just desserts again(including the introduction of "Quogg" who might be one of Marvel's nuttiest monsters ever), as well as a cute story about a woman getting rewarded for helping an alien
The Incredible Hulk #1: the debut of one of Marvel's most enduring characters(though it took a little while for that to really stick) and the first Silver Age debut to really stick the landing on it's own merits, though it does have some quirks(Hulk's original personality is weird and physically he's not really all that impressive yet either)
Tales to Astonish #32: this one was kinda mediocre overall, not much else to say about it
The Incredible Hulk #2: this one is also kinda iffy(there's a reason people make jokes about the Toad Men whenever anyone can be bothered to remember they exist), though the way Hulk is drawn in this issue is interesting and he's finally green now, also it's kinda funny how this marks two issues now where Hulk doesn't really contribute to the climax of the plot, it's Banner who saves the day
continuing yet again with my Marvel readthrough, some big stuff this time around;
Amazing Adult Fantasy #14: some fun little stories in this issue, including the first appearance of the Marvel brand of Mutants
Fantastic Four #5: the debut of Doctor Doom and overall a very solid comic, the whole time travel adventure to find Blackbeard's Treasure is wonderfully goofy(and we see more of the continuity begin to be built up as they make a callback to Namor from the prior issue)
Amazing Fantasy #15: Spider-Man's debut is still as classic as always, even if Ditko's art is a bit sloppy and/or stiff in some panels, and yeah Peter Parker does kinda give off some "School Shooter" vibes in the first couple of pages whenever he's around people his own age, also there's at least one aspect that later retellings change that definitely works better than it did here, in most adaptations the burglar pretty much immediately goes off and kills Uncle Ben after Peter let's him get away, here they had several days stretch between the two encounters which just feels kinda contrived for some reason, also funny thing is Amazing Fantasy is still an anthology comic in this issue so we have a couple more stories after this though they're overall kinda mediocre little things
Journey Into Mystery #83: Thor's debut is probably the most overall solid of the major debuts so far, not as unique or interesting as most of the others but lacking any major flaws too, unfortunately the copy of this issue I have on hand only has the Thor story so I have no idea what else was in this issue
Journey Into Mystery #84: unfortunately Thor's second story is overall REALLY bad, only good thing about it is that as both Thor and Donald Blake he makes some creative uses of his powers, also the debut of Jane Foster and well it's not really a strong showing for her
and now for the next set of comics;
Incredible Hulk #3: this one is pretty ho-hum, you can tell Lee & Kirby were kinda drawing blanks on what to do with Hulk so they essentially write out both Banner and Hulk as characters to have Hulk become a mostly mindless puppet of Rick Jones, but unfortunately Rick at this point has all the personality of a bucket of paste so it doesn't really help matters
Fantastic Four #6: this issue has a lot of firsts in it, we have the first villain team-up of modern Marvel, the debuts of Unstable Molecules, the Yancy Street Gang, and the first of many seeming demises of Doctor Doom, also man if these stories were being told today people would be calling Namor a "himbo" for sure
Tales to Astonish #35: the return of Hank Pym and the debut of Ant-Man, another pretty solid story
Journey Into Mystery #85: the debut of Loki(and technically a bunch of other Asgardians as well as Asgard itself) is a fun little story full of both him and Thor doing some ridiculous feats of magic, not sure what the heck is up with them trying to setup a love triangle between Thor, Loki, and Jane Foster though, guess they just thought repeating the Namor one from FF would make Jane Foster not a complete bore of a character and failed miserably in the process
Fantastic Four #7: pretty much a filler issue but one that does it's job
back for yet more early Marvel comics, this one is going to be a bit painful;
Strange Tales #101: so here we have the first of the Human Torch's solo comics(as the cover says "By Permission of The Fantastic Four Magazine") and well to say these comics are generally bad is a huge understatement, for whatever reason they move the action out of NYC to some fictional small town and try to retcon in Johnny Storm having to maintain a secret identity(though they at least acknowledged that previously he had friends who did know his identity) and it just doesn't work, like nothing on paper should indicate why these comics are so bad and no one element is especially awful it just all collides together into a steaming pile of mediocrity and weirdness
Tales to Astonish #36: Hank Pym's second adventure as Ant Man is a fairly average story with moments of cleverness, I'll definitely be glad for when they stop hitting the "Communist Agent" well so often for villains though
Journey Into Mystery #86: a fun little time travel tale for Thor to experience, meanwhile Donald Blake only appears for three panels at the very end of the story, it's amazing how obvious that they had no idea what to do with Thor's alter ego
Strange Tales #102: this one is actually pretty decent for a solo Human Torch story, if mostly because The Wizard made for an interesting foe, unlike the previous issue the copy I have on hand has the other stories in this issue, but honestly they're nothing special
Incredible Hulk #4: the tagline on the cover says "Fantasy As You Like It" and man is that a lie, this issue like pretty much this whole run(except issue 1) has been an exhibition of mediocrity, it becomes really obvious why Hulk's first comic only lasted six issues before getting canned
once more into the breach with the next block of early Marvel comics;
Fantastic Four #8: the Puppet Master might just be the creepiest villain of the Silver Age and he also is one of the biggest assholes of the era(and considering that list includes literal Hitler that's really saying something), meanwhile Alicia Masters has a very strong debut as Marvel's purest soul, showing love even to someone as monstrous and hateful as her step-father(seriously he yells at her about her calling him father instead of step-father), overall a very strong issue
Tales to Astonish #37: an okay little story but nothing special either
Strange Tales #103: this one was an okay if kinda weird little dimensional jaunt for the Human Torch, again nothing special
Fantastic Four #9: an excellent issue overall, the Fantastic Four going broke because of the Stock Market and then going to Hollywood to regain their fortune is a wonderfully silly premise and there's some great moments of both action and character building in this one, only negative is an awkward section where the Human Torch fights against an African Tribe that has not aged well one iota
Journey Into Mystery #87: ugh this issue blew chunks, not only do we have another tired Red Menace plot it also highlights just how bad of a secret identity Donald Blake is, and how shallow Jane Foster as a love interest is
more Marvel Comics time;
Tales to Astonish #38: the debut of Egghead, actually a really fun story as the majority of it takes place from his perspective rather than Ant Man's
Incredible Hulk #5: so besides the fact that the second story in this issue is racist as hell there's also the fact that the Hulk as a character just does not work at all, at this point he's just an abrasive rear end in a top hat and not a funny or interesting one either
Journey Into Mystery #88: Loki returns in this story that's fun but nothing super special
Strange Tales #104: the introduction of possibly the doofiest villain of the entire Silver Age; Paste Pot Pete, in spite of that the story treats him as a serious foe for Human Torch to deal with and he's surprisingly competent for a villain of this era too, Human Torch manages to stop his plans but he manages to get away to freedom, setting him up as a recurrent foe of Johnny Storm, actually pretty decent story overall, the other two stories in this issue(for once the non-Human Torch stories were present in the scan I found) were kinda goofy and not too great
Fantastic Four #10: while Marvel has done some meta bits before this issue(see Reed using pinups of monsters from the monster comics in #2 to scare the Skrull Armada or Johnny reading a Hulk comic a couple issues ago) but this issue went heavy duty on it by having Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and the Marvel Comics offices appear directly in the story and play a major role in it, once again an excellent issue
just realized that it's been the better part of two months since I last did one of these posts, so back to my project of semi-chronologically reading through all of Marvel from Fantastic Four #1 onward with another five or so issue dump of my inane opinions;
Tales to Astonish #39: so this one is a weird one even by early Marvel standards, the Scarlet Beetle is one of the oddest villains of the era and yet another one defeated by vaguely unethical means(in his case the radiation that mutated him and granted him human intelligence is removed turning him back into a regular mindless beetle), also notably this is the first Ant-Man story where we see that his "growth gas" can grow things beyond their normal size, overall this story is continuing the trend where Ant-Man tend to be more interesting for the villains than for Ant-Man himself
Strange Tales #105: the Wizard makes his return in this "solo" Human Torch story(in truth Invisible Girl plays a big role in this one too) and you can tell Jack Kirby was having a wonderful time drawing this guy's goofy mug(some great potential avatars in this issue), overall a fun if relatively middle of the road story(Johnny is really starting to pull off some goofy tricks with his fire in these stories)
Journey Into Mystery #89: lord this issue has a ridiculously generic cover for an early Silver Age comic, just Thor making a pose, also this story has a very goofy start where in order to distract people so he can switch back to Donald Blake without getting noticed he dresses up a mannequin like himself and sends it flying over Manhattan, overall that's probably the most notable thing that happens in this issue, otherwise a fairly humdrum story about Thor taking on some mobsters
Fantastic Four #11: this issue starts off with some downright astoundingly shameless shilling of the very comic itself and a downright adorable scene with the FF hanging out with some young fans, and then we have the FF open some fan mail(and Thing gets pranked once again by the Yancy Street Gang) and then after testing out a new formula to turn Ben human again(which in it's favor does last more than a couple panels) we get some backstory on how Ben and Reed met in college and their activities during WW2(Ben as a Fighter Ace in the Pacific and Reed as an OSS agent in Occupied Europe) as well as some drama regarding Reed & Sue's romance due to doubt sown by Namor over the past few issues, as well as yet another recap of the FF's origins followed by a semi-Fourth Wall breaking bit where Reed & Ben confront reader accusations about Sue being useless(it doesn't really work but you can give them a couple points for trying) and then Ben goes back to being the Thing and we move on to the main story after celebrating Sue's birthday, which introduces The Impossible Man, which is interesting in that while he's definitely a destructive rear end in a top hat, a lot of the trouble happens because everyone else acts like an rear end in a top hat to him first, and indeed he's beaten by everyone on Earth engaging in a whole different form of assholery entirely, overall a fun issue
Tales to Astonish #40: not a bad story but really not much of anything to discuss about it beyond the novelty of Ant-Man faking a burst appendix as part of his plan to beat the villain of this story
so overall a decent crop of stories to make my return to this series of mine, though FF#11 is the only real standout story
been a while so might as well do another one of these, this one is going to be a bit special as it's going to be slightly bigger than my previous ones(six issues/seven stories instead of the usual 5 issues) as I'm very close to hitting the 50th story in the CMRO list, also we're going to be seeing two special debuts this time around, first as a bonus the covers for the first 40 issues I've read for this project so far covering the first 43 stories(as the CMRO list covers) in it;
starting with this specific post from now on I'll be including the covers for each issue as I reach them, so lets get on with it
Strange Tales #106: so remember how I was saying when I covered earlier Human Torch solo stories that Johnny Storm suddenly having to do Secret Identity shenanigans felt weird and contrived, well turns out Stan Lee must have realized this too as this story reveals pretty much immediately(in what's a rather blatant retcon) that everyone in Glenville already knows Johnny is the Torch and that the only reason no one brought it up to him was that since he never talked about being the Torch(due to trying to maintain a secret identity for no real reason) was that everyone assumed he wanted his privacy about it, otherwise the story is nothing special though honestly it's not really a Human Torch solo story it's truthfully just a Fantastic Four story with a heavy focus on Johnny, it does reveal the interesting idea that Johnny is good at making costumes as he makes a new temporary costume as part of the story(and at the end of the story throws it in the trash in spite of it being an Unstable Molecules costume like his normal FF one, which feels like the sort of thing that would be fun to have a callback to), also The Acrobat definitely feels like a less interesting prototype for Batroc The Leaper down the road
Strange Tales #107: this story opens on a fun little meta note as it has Reed & Ben visiting Glenville briefly to have Sue type up notes of one of their adventures for the Fantastic Four comic, which doing so without Johnny's input reopens some soreness he had from the last issue(last time it was over the money the team earns, this time about him being equally represented in the team's decisions), this leads to him deciding to hunt down and beat Namor all by himself, I do wonder how much longer it will take before they ditch Johnny having a time limit on how long he stays aflame though as it's kinda annoying honestly(and leads to a very silly moment where he has to rest on a ship and the crew make him swab the deck cause they don't believe he's the Torch since his powers are out), notably when he does find Namor, Namor's actually reluctant to fight Johnny, if only because he wants to give Sue his fishbone, only agreeing to it after Johnny agitates him with some fire, thus leading to a creative and pretty wacky fight(since at this point Namor still has the ability to mimic fish traits, so we get to see the incredibly ridiculous image of Namor inflating himself like a puffer fish), definitely the best of the Solo Human Torch stories so far, also this issue for once had a copy I could find that had other stories in it besides the Human Torch one, first story is an interesting one primarily for the final twist in it, the next one is another one of those fun "rear end in a top hat gets what he deserves in the big twist", and lastly as this copy includes the original ads, there's one of those old fashioned ads for a giant set of Plastic Army Men(well in this case Knights rather than Army Men) and I always love seeing those kind of ads(they're probably one of the few mail order ads in these old Silver Age comics that wasn't a complete ripoff)
Fantastic Four #12: one of the big milestones of Modern Marvel has arrived, the first crossover between two of it's leading stars(Namor doesn't count since he doesn't have a book or feature of his own at this point) with the Fantastic Four meeting The Incredible Hulk(which is ironic since not too long ago we had Johnny reading a Hulk comic book), the story opens with Ben taking Alica Masters out on a date to listen to music at a Symphony(while Alicia is a fan of Classical Music we find out that Ben prefers Jazz), thanks to a misunderstanding Ben gets jumped by a bunch of army guys due to them mistaking him for The Hulk, which understandably puts Ben in a pretty sour mood, soon enough General "Thunderbolt" Ross visits the FF to recruit them in stopping the Hulk who apparently has been sabotaging missile bases, there's a very poorly aged bit where just seeing some footage of the Hulk is enough to frighten Sue into momentarily losing control of her powers(as well as right after the rest of the FF all talk about how they'll fight the Hulk Sue mentions she probably won't be of much use and Ross says her role is the important one of keeping morale high by being a pretty face and Reed agrees with him), we then get Johnny's mechanical skills hyped up by showing off the Fantasticar which has been remodeled away from it's original "Flying Bathtub" design(which in another meta bit they specifically mention how fan letters complained about that and how Johnny agreed with them about it) to a much more sleek and toyetic new design(complete with a whole page specifically to show off how cool the new design is) and soon we have the FF meeting with Bruce Banner(whose drawn with old timey comic book "black hair that's actually dark blue" rather than his normal brown on the first page with him on it), soon enough Rick Jones has been kidnapped by the real candidate "The Wrecker"(not the more famous one with the magic crowbar, he's much later down the line) who sends the Hulk a note telling him to get rid of the FF if he ever wants to see Rick again, and soon enough we've got Hulk and Thing in their first meeting and first fight, after a nice exciting fight it gets interrupted by a robot of The Wrecker zapping Hulk before Thing wrecks it and soon the FF catch the Wrecker, and thus the first encounter between the FF and Hulk ends in a draw, a fun and action packed issue
Journey Into Mystery #90: so I've talked before about how Thor's stories in this comic are held back by Donald Blake being bland and Jane Foster being shallow, well sad thing is this story almost could have fixed it, at the beginning of it Donald Blake actually briefly gets the resolve to tell Jane both his feelings for her and his secret of being Thor, only to literally get cockblocked by Odin telling him that he can't reveal the truth about being Thor to mortals, which immediately knocks the winds out of Blake's sails and dooms Thor's civilian aspect to be a boring and pointless artifact of the genre rather than anything interesting, as for the rest of the story well it's essentially a larger scale version of the first Skrull story over in Fantastic Four, the Xartan's have the exact sort of shapeshifting, indeed even more impressive as they can do stuff like turn into ice or even go invisible naturally, and in the end just like the Skrulls they get beaten and subjected to what's frankly a horrifically unethical fate(they are made to turn into trees and since trees can't think neither can they), not the worst Thor story so far but not a particularly great one either
The Incredible Hulk #6: man this one is a weird one to end Hulk's first solo book on, between Ditko doing the art, the already odd plot the last couple issues(and Hulk's FF appearance) have of Banner/Hulk intentionally transforming back and forth using a ray being made even more odd by having it cause weird side effects(like Banner turning into Hulk but his face stays Banner so he has to put on a Hulk mask that's just lying around) to the Metal Master being a silly villain even by Marvel Silver Age standards(complete with Hulk beating him with a "wooden gun ploy" like with Magneto in that one Fantastic Four cartoon), to them really just not being able to decide whether Hulk is gruff good guy or an outright villain, to the sheer ridiculousness that is the concept of the Teen Brigade, overall a mediocre end to what's been overall a fairly mediocre book
Tales of Suspense #39: Iron Man's debut is a very solid story even if it does dip into "Yellow Peril" a touch with it's depiction of North Vietnam, and while the way Transistor technology is depicted here is completely ridiculous even by Silver Age Comic Book Science standards it does result in some clever gadgets on the part of Tony Stark's first Iron Man suit(indeed from my recollection it's going to be a while before any Iron Man suit regularly has the energy weapons that are now considered part and parcel of Iron Man as a concept), overall a very strong debut for one of Marvel's most important characters, now Tales of Suspense #39 had another story that's considered canon a Viking story called "Gundar", however the copy of this issue I had on hand only has the Iron Man story in it, so I'm briefly having to jump ahead to 1973 when it got reprinted in Creatures On The Loose #22 in order to read it, "Gundar" isn't a super special story and since it's never gotten directly called back in any form it seems like it's only considered canon by CMRO because it has a cameo by Odin which is kinda silly
and now the covers for this batch of 6 issues;
     
also I just realized we're partway into May but are still in the Winter thread, guess we'll just continue with it till June since using a Spring thread for only part of a month would be silly
so last year I had restarted a project where I'd be reading through the main Marvel 616 continuity in order from Fantastic Four #1 onward(the first 50 stories are recapped above) and posting my thoughts on them, thanks to various RL stuff(a move and all the headaches that ensues, various family things, me getting a new job, getting distracted for much of the past four months between said new job and my new laptop) that had gone into a hiatus, well I figure I might as well get back to it since the thread is otherwise quite dead right now, so here's my next five issues;
Tales to Astonish #41: this one is a pretty fun one to start things with, a variation on the classic "villain kidnaps a bunch of scientists to build him something evil with science" plot with the villain being a warlord from another dimension and Ant-Man having to figure out how to communicate with the "ants" of that world in order to defeat him, interestingly this might be the first story in 616 continuity(in the CMRO order I'm using for this that is) where the hero intentionally kills the villain of the story rather than it being an accident or "not technically killing them but might as well be", though to be fair to Ant-Man it was either that or be crushed with a hammer so one can argue it was self defense, a very strong showing for Ant-Man overall and a good way to kick things off
The Amazing Spider-Man #1: the debut of Spidey's own book, and I'll say this much, man is the writing so artificial in this first issue in setting up the whole "Peter Parker is constantly broke and trying to make money while being hated by everyone as Spider-Man" status quo(which I've honestly always hated, I'm of the opinion that Parker Industries was pretty much the only good thing to come out of the Superior Spider-Man era and Marvel were a bunch of cowards to get rid of it) that it drags the first story in it down to a surprising extent(funny thing is this is actually my first time actually reading this issue), like the whole story is just a complete downer and pretty dull in both writing and art to boot, the second story isn't really much better honestly(plus we see the first time Stan Lee makes the "Peter Palmer" goof), though we do see Spidey start to come up with some new tricks with his webbing, but again the second story just ends on a complete downer, in retrospect it's kind of obvious why most people focus on Amazing Fantasy #15 over this one as it's a much better story overall, like even though some of the other stories I've covered are technically worse(like say most of the Hulk stuff so far), this might be the issue I dislike the most so far on a personal level
Journey Into Mystery #91: the parts dealing with Donald Blake & Jane Foster are still a festering plot tumor that I will be more than glad to see gone eventually, but the rest of the issue is pretty fun, Sandu made for a great enemy of Thor's(shame he won't appear again for the better part of 50 years) that got beaten in an interesting manner, a good palate cleanser
Strange Tales #108: this one was overall pretty a pretty fun Human Torch story as it's villain Wilhelm Van Vile is an entertaining ham with a good gimmick(having access to magic paints that bring what he draws to life, but he himself is a mediocre artist), though the ending is a tad nonsensical(like you can tell Stan Lee had no idea how to properly end the story), the other story in this issue that was included in the order I had to dig around for a reprint from 1970 to find, nothing fancy just a story about Merlin
The Amazing Spider-Man #2: this story(at least the first one with Vulture) I actually had read before but like a decade ago so worth reading again, and yeah it's a massive improvement over the first issue in both art and writing even if the parts where Peter interacts with people his own age is still rather bleh(though in the second story Peter does give a decent burn back to Flash Thompson), the second story is just weird though, him having a "thwart an alien invasion" story this early is something that feels somewhat out of place for someone like Spider-Man, though on it's own merits it's otherwise a decent story
and the covers for this set of issues;
    
overall a good set of issues, even if I was unpleasantly surprised by how mediocre Amazing Spider-Man #1 was
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Jan 4, 2022 01:50
