June 1967: The Fiery Frankenstein

I remember a puzzling reference to a 1940s Human Torch in a Mad Magazine parody about retired superheroes. He was said to have found a job lighting cigars for some millionaire.

Wait, you mean there was ANOTHER Human Torch before Johnny Storm?

Indeed, and thanks to Stan Lee’s reprinting of the earliest Marvel stories in 25-cent giants, we fans were able to satisfy our curiosity early on.

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 of popular culture. 

And 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 almost as likely to murder innocent people as to save them.

Comic book character concepts were less rigid in the experimental days of the 1930s. Initially amoral, unpredictable and just plain weird, both the Torch and the Sub-Mariner reflected Universal’s popular monster movies as well as the new hit character Superman.

The Torch’s origin, reprinted in Fantasy Masterpieces 9 (June 1967), was crudely drawn but had a fascination of its own. Carl Burgos gave us a willful child of a Torch, one who declares that the sound of fire alarms amuses him and that the blast of a fire hose tickles. 

Recruited by criminals for an extortion racket, the naïve Torch eventually catches on and burns some of them alive.

Children’s fascination with fire proved sufficient to sell 80,000 copies of Marvel Comics 1, prompting a second print run. Eventually 800,000 copies sold.

When Lee and Jack Kirby revamped the character concept for The Fantastic Four in 1961, the Human Torch became actually human. But the “monster hero” theme would be echoed in one of his teammates, the Thing, and then again in the second Lee/Kirby title of the Marvel Age, The Incredible Hulk.