Fantastic Four 12 (March 1963) offered something rare at the time — a superhero battle that enabled readers to root for either side.
Gen. “Thunderbolt” Ross sent the Fantastic Four after his arch-nemesis the Hulk, but we readers knew what the FF did not — that the Hulk was really the sympathetic figure of well-meaning, tortured, tragic Bruce Banner. The sixth and final issue of the Hulk’s title would be published the next month.
This kind of conflict had been anticipated within the Fantastic Four title by the volatile characters’ battles with each other. And really, this was part of a company tradition that extended all the way back to 1939, when the Human Torch fought the Sub-Mariner.
“Marvel has been putting out superhero comics again for nearly a year and a half, and the handful of features they’ve created are really taking off,” observed comics historian Don Alsafi. “But now, for the very first time, we see the initial step in the shared-world idea that would soon define much of their appeal. Sure, one of the members of the Fantastic Four has his own spin-off comic — but even with that first bit of expansion, there had been nothing to suggest a shared history or setting between any of these separate strips, just as (for instance) you wouldn't expect any interaction between the stories of Dracula and King Arthur. But when The Incredible Hulk’s Gen. Ross recruits the FF to help him track down and capture his personal Moby Dick, the canny reader could predict the team-up possibilities to come...”
For readers, the main event was the clash between Marvel’s two super-strong superhumans, the Thing and the Hulk (who were in a sense variations on the same man/monster theme). Stan Lee set up a return bout a dozen issues later, sidelining the other members of the team so that a whole issue could be devoted to the Thing/Hulk battle.
Bob Bailey:
ReplyDeleteThis was quite unusual for comics. The Hulk had just had his own magazine canceled. In years past, if a character’s book was canceled, they disappeared. But Hulk kept reappearing throughout the Marvel books until he finally got a strip again in Tales to Astonish and eventually he took over that very magazine!
Vincent Mariani:
ReplyDeleteThe Hulk and Sub-Mariner were essentially "free agents" in the early Marvel days, showing up here and there as popular anti-heroes and powerful foes of the protagonists.
I replied:
Vincent Mariani And therefore, they were extremely useful characters dramatically.
Paul Zuckerman:
ReplyDeleteI much preferred the second battle, which was when I first started to truly appreciate what Marvel was doing. Not because they were just hitting each other -- which is the way I looked at this issue — but because the stakes were high and you could really see the heroes struggling, and especially the fight with the Thing showed it. And then the Avengers showed up the issue later!
But the tying of the characters together to create a joint universe — that was indeed a major event. This book came out the same day as Spider-Man 1, so you see Stan tying a book on its last legs and a new character to the FF, thus establishing that they all lived in one world.
DC's universe did have some sharing, and it was growing. Even before the JLA showed up, Superman and Batman had teamed regularly, and in the previous couple of years, we saw Aquaman, Green Arrow and Congo Bill all show up in Superman stories. But there was still a sense that characters from different editors never crossed or mentioned other characters. This would begin to change, but even so, for years after, you did not have the cohesiveness that Marvel was developing. Aquaman and Lori Lemaris, for example, both came from Atlantis, but no one bothered to explain why his Atlantides had legs and hers did not. Or the numerous and conflicting stories about Martians on Earth. Putting all of their characters into one shared universe contributed immensely to the success of Marvel and one soon came to expect characters popping up in other characters' books. You need an attorney? Call Matt Murdock! You need a doctor? Don Blake was available. You need an incredibly gifted inventor? Call on Tony Stark.
Even before this, though, the inclusion of the Sub-Mariner tied the burgeoning universe to its earlier days, in contrast to the way DC addressed it.
Richard Meyer:
ReplyDeleteI remember an early issue of FF, probably #5, where Johnny is reading a Hulk comic… what he calls a great new comic mag… and mocks Ben for reminding him of that presumably fictional monster. It was a blurb for the comic, but still only a comic, not yet a shared universe, though it had already been established that Sub Mariner was real, not just a comic book.
Of course Stan forgot Banner’s first name in the next Hulk vs Thing story so can’t expect consistency 🙂
Remembering also that the FF appeared in the first issue of Spider-Man. It wasn’t so much the shared universe that Marvel invented. DC already had that but the stories were almost all separate episodes. Marvel invented the continuity, that it was all one story in real time.
I replied:
Early on, DC's shared universe existed when it was convenient, and not when it wasn't. Wonder Woman might repel an alien invasion that threatened the whole world, for example, but for some reason Superman, Batman and the Flash sat it out (just as if they "didn't exist").