February 1964: The Men With the Power

In the early 1960s, Steve Ditko created two super-electrified characters, one for Charlton Comics and the other for Marvel Comics. Ironically enough, they were polar opposites.

In Strange Suspense Stories 48 (July 1960), Ditko gave us The Human Powerhouse, an ordinary accountant named George Clinton who finds himself mysteriously charged with electrical power.

Suddenly capable of torching trees and exploding boulders, Clinton somehow senses an approaching menace, “…a flock of gruesome living entities bearing new and terrible diseases to Earth from another galaxy.”

The supercharged accountant unleashes all his electrical power at once, destroying the cosmic threat and restoring some mysterious natural balance. 

The story is another example of Ditko’s recurring “Hidden Protector” theme, in which some obscure person wields uncanny powers but remains unheralded and unrecognized by those whom he shields from harm. 

And in Amazing Spider-Man 9 (Feb. 1964), Ditko and writer Stan Lee gave us The Man Called Electro, a villainous variation on the same theme.

“Even before he becomes Electro, (Max) Dillon is scum,” comics historian Jeff Rovin observed. “A lineman in New York, he refuses to help a fellow electrician trapped on a pole unless the foreman pays him a bonus; only after the man promises to pay him $100 does Dillon go up and help his tangled coworker.  However, while Dillon is lowering the man to safety, lightning strikes.”

Dillon not only survives, but finds that he’s become a living battery who can “…throw powerful bolts as weapons, set up electrical barriers, ride his bolts into the sky and control anything which operates electrically (including time-lock bank vaults),” Rovin noted.

Naturally, he becomes a costumed villain, and not a subtle one — he wears a green bodysuit decorated with lightning bolts and a five-pointed lightning bolt mask. And naturally, his schemes are thwarted by Spider-Man.

Ditko clearly had an affinity for the visual extravagance of people hurling bolts of energy — that was one of the appeals of his Dr. Strange feature.