Marvel Mystery 9 prefigured three elements that would be revived to define the Marvel Age of Comics in the 1960s — the crossover, the anti-social hero and the battle between heroes.
Both the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner debuted at the birth of Marvel Comics (Oct. 1939), which was both the title in which they initially appeared and eventually the brand name that would storm the world.
Both were monster men as much as supermen — the Torch a confused android who burned whatever he touched, and Prince Namor an angry loose cannon about as likely to murder innocent people as to save them.
And within nine months, they’d clashed in a spectacular, crowd-pleasing three-issue crossover of their features.
Though they were natural enemies, that didn’t prevent Subby and the Torch from teaming up later on against some real monsters — the Nazis.
Bill Everett, creator of the Sub-Mariner, told Roy Thomas that he thought he and Torch creator Carl Burgos had dreamed up the crossover storyline.
“Just the fact that the two opposite elements had had their own stories — now what would happen if we ever got them together as rivals to fight each other?” Everett recalled.
Whenever I look at some of Everett’s earliest Marvel tales about the Sub-Mariner, from 1939-40, I am reminded what a perverse protagonist this character was — murdering people in fits of pique, helping others in manic spasms, wrecking Manhattan infrastructure like Kong.
Everett managed the difficult feat of an original take on the much-imitated Superman template – an anti-hero Superman, an amoral, arrogant Superman.
A period Hollywood film about Namor as written could easily be a blockbuster — a sad comment on the moral tone of our society, one that demands a Superman who breaks people’s necks.
Bob Doncaster said: I found a trade paperback reprinting this epic battle along with a couple other stories for $5 at a con. Worth every penny.
ReplyDeleteJose Luis Medina said; The Sub-Mariner is or was my favorite Marvel character but only as a hero-villain like Everett presented him in the earliest issues and how Kirby, Wood and Lee did in the 60s.
ReplyDeleteJohn Novak wrote:
ReplyDeleteHis art certainly evolved over the years. But I do like this wild-haired, more demonic-looking Namor!
John Battin wrote:
ReplyDeleteSubby was 50% Atlantean prince, 50% Brooklynite, 100% ass kicker.
Earl Leon Liles wrote:
ReplyDeleteThe latter-to-post-Depression/WWII era manifested in many ways. After WWII, the violence and horror were dominant, and it was absolutely intertwined with the American male psyche
John Gallagher wrote:
ReplyDeleteI think they eventually came up with the idea that, due to Namor's hybrid nature, if he spends too long either underwater or on the surface he goes a bit nutty. But I prefer the idea that he's just a bit mentaly unstable all the time.
Bill Melater wrote:
ReplyDeleteI thought he had the personality of the seas he ruled over, calm and kind one minute, angry and destructive the next.
Ken Johnston wrote:
ReplyDeleteThey anti-climactically finished the story in the next issue in ONE PAGE. Odd, but they were still figuring things out back then, I guess.
Bill Steele wrote:
ReplyDeleteThank you so much, I have never seen that before!
Danny Barer wrote:
ReplyDeleteI recall encountering Jules Feiffer’s book in the library, and horrifiedly reading the story in which Namor causes ships to collide and throws tourists out of the Statue of Liberty’s torch. Damn!
Henry Kujawa wrote:
ReplyDeleteThere are in fact a growing number of movies & TV shows with comics characters who are EVEN NASTIER than the early Namor was. I just saw a review of THE PEACEMAKER tv series. It's jaw-dropping.
Personally, if I were in charge of a SUB-MARINER film, I'd set it in its original time period, so that, eventually, we could see him taking on THE NAZIS.
A sequel, set in the early 50s, would be an obvious place to do a story about an alien invasion. 🙂
Henry Kujawa wrote:
ReplyDeleteI'm too broke to afford any of those Masterworks collections now, so it really annoyed me when they decided to reprint the entire anthology series, MARVEL MYSTERY COMICS, instead of a single-character series containing every SUB-MARINER story from any and every book he appeared in (as DC was doing with the Golden Age WONDER WOMAN-- it took them ages to figure that out after the chaos they had with SUPERMAN and BATMAN Archives).
Especially when you consider the first year of SUB-MARINER was like a 12-part serial. if they reprinted 4 issues of MMC in each book, then you had to buy 3 Masterworks to read that ONE story. Those B******s!!!!! (Pardon me if I just DON'T give a S*** about the rest of the MMC contents... and yes, that includes "The Human Torch". I'll take the "Johnny Storm" series over the Carl Burgos original anyday.)