May 1974: Legacy and the Living Weapon

Iron Fist, a superhero created by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane for Marvel Premiere 15 (May 1974), was the result of pop cultural cross-pollination.

The Marvel Age of Comics was already more than a decade old, and to freshen it up the Bullpen tried superhero titles reflecting popular trends. 

Thanks to a relaxed Comics Code, more vivid horror stories could then be published, so Ghost Rider was born in Marvel Spotlight 5 (Aug. 1972).

Martial arts had been popularized by the David Carradine TV series Kung Fu in 1972 and the Bruce Lee movie Enter the Dragon in 1973. Add the superhero trappings of a lost-child Tarzan origin, a secret identity, a colorful costume and the ability to focus chi into a punch of overwhelming power, and you have Iron Fist.

The character was presented in his Netflix series as a kind of billionaire super-Buddhist. And that may well ring a bell.

Comics readers might remark on the similarity of Danny Rand to Adrian Veidt, the superhero Ozymandias created by by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons for their 1986 Watchmen graphic novel.

Well, yes, and there’s a reason for that.

Iron Fist was in part an homage to Amazing-Man, Bill Everett’s original variation on the Superman theme introduced in Amazing-Man Comics 5 (Sept. 1939). That Tibetan-trained super-being also inspired Pete Morisi to create Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt for Charlton Comics in 1966. And Moore and Gibbons used Thunderbolt as the template for Ozymandias.

The history of superhero comics is a wonderfully multi-faceted and multivariate thing.

August 1965: Subby Moves into a Duplex

Marvel’s seagoing superman of the 1940s became a useful utility character early in the 1960s, serving as hero or villain as the occasion required — just as the Hulk did a little later.

In his Silver Age resurrection (Fantastic Four 4, May 1962), the Sub-Mariner became the super-team’s enemy, but in his second appearance (Fantastic Four 6, Sept. 1962), he started out as an opponent but turned into an ally to save the day. 

Prince Namor was intriguingly unpredictable, even as he had been in the late 1930s (though, thanks to the Comics Code, he was no longer casually murdering police officers).

However, by the time a feature spot opened up for the character in Tales to Astonish 70, the very busy Stan Lee had settled into a sort of one-note characterization for the Sub-Mariner, a grandiloquent arrogance. Compared to other Marvel superheroes, I found him a bit of a humorless “noble” bore. 

 “I was as thrilled as anybody when the Sub-Mariner was finally given his own series in Tales to Astonish,” recalled Roy Thomas. “‘Adam Austin’ drew an illustrative Namor which had little in common with the (Bill) Everett version, but I liked it. Later that year, when I went to work for Stan Lee, I learned that ‘Adam Austin’ was really one Gene Colan, hiding under a fake name because he also drew romance comics for DC and didn’t want them to know he was moonlighting.”

Perhaps coincidentally, when the Sub-Mariner replaced Giant-Man in the duplex title Tales to Astonish, the magazine acquired a theme: super-antiheroes.

Both Prince Namor and the Hulk, the star of the magazine’s other feature, were rough-hewn, sharp-edged heroes who often rescued humanity only reluctantly or inadvertently. 

Meanwhile, Strange Tales, featuring Dr. Strange and Nick Fury, spotlighted niche characters more marginally connected to superheroes. And Tales of Suspense, featuring Iron Man and Captain America, was the duplex comic offering two out-and-out superheroes.

February 1965: Hooray for Wally Wood

How happy was Stan Lee to have Wally Wood drawing Daredevil? Happy enough to pen a full-page ad singing his praises.

By 1964, Marvel Comics was feeling the pinch of growing pains. Daredevil was a great superhero concept hampered by spotty execution, and Wood’s work helped correct that deficiency.

Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four had the advantage of a single, consistent visual style, but Daredevil didn’t. Golden Age great Bill Everett left after the first issue, and Joe Orlando filled in for three issues. But beginning with the fifth issue, Wood was able to lend his appealing sense of austere power to the feature.

“Wallace Wood’s full-fledged debut as superhero artist came in 1964, with a well-ballyhooed arrival as an artist on Daredevil, and he also found additional jobs inking The Avengers, Tales of Suspense and spot work on Fantastic Four,” noted Jon B. Cooke in TwoMorrows’ THUNDER Agents Companion. 

“But in short order, after only seven issues as artist of the Man Without Fear, Woody would depart the Marvel Comics Group in ’65. Perhaps it was because the often-obstinate artist butted heads with demanding editor/ art director/ writer Stan Lee, or maybe it was an irresistible offer made by Tower Publishing’s Harry Shorten and Samm Schwartz (eager to jump into the superhero game), enabling him to scratch an itch to form his own comic book line-up.”

Daredevil, a latecomer to the Marvel playground, even had to make do with leftovers in the super-villain department. He ran into Spider-Man’s enemy Electro in his second issue, and here in the sixth issue he found himself tackling a “Fellowship of Fear” that included Spidey’s foe the Ox and the Human Torch’s enemy the Eel.

In the next issue, Wood would redesign the Man Without Fear’s costume from an acrobatic yellow to a devilish red, and craft one of the best superhero stories of the 1960s — Daredevil’s clash with the Sub-Mariner, a foe he couldn’t possibly beat (and didn’t).

April 1964: A Cheer for the Man Without Fear

When Daredevil debuted in April 1964, he represented the last of that first great wave of Marvel superheroes that we readers already knew we couldn’t get enough of.

The Fantastic Four had kicked off the parade 29 months before.

At age 9, I immediately liked him — even that yellow costume that everybody else seemed to hate (I love that sunny color). I hoped that Matt Murdock would eventually regain his sight, not realizing how integral his disability was to the drama Stan Lee had in mind.

We’d had blind, or rather quasi-blind, super-heroes before in the Black Bat and Dr. Mid-Nite. And Daredevil’s Golden Age namesake had been mute. But with his other senses heightened, Daredevil’s blindness became central to the storyline. It represented another application of a favorite Lee trick, using an obstacle as an advantage.

The disability shadowed Daredevil’s relationship with Karen Page, bringing a note of tragic stoicism to the feature. It helped preserve the secret of his identity, because no one would believe Matt Murdock could be a superhero. It provided a satisfying underdog counterpoint to contrast with and underline the heroics Daredevil performed.

Daredevil’s blindness-related super powers, carefully thought out, were dramatically more subtle than the more common wall-smashing variety, but particularly effective.

His sensory abilities enabled him to hear distant trouble, overhear secret conversations, dodge and deflect projectiles and punches and, appropriately enough for a moral crusader, detect lies. And they remained a hidden asset, invisible to the public.

Daredevil arrived late in more ways than one. Lee tapped Bill Everett, creator of the Sub-Mariner, to draw the first issue. But Everett got behind on the project, and to fill in Lee had to scramble for a new title.

He called it The Avengers.

Collage by Gil R. Palmer

August 1940: Who Says Water’s Weak?

Bill Everett certainly wasn’t afraid of the water.

Having pioneered an enduringly popular manic superman in the Sub-Mariner, the writer/artist worked every variation on his water shtik. 

Namor (who first appeared in Motion Picture Funnies Weekly, April 1939) was an amphibious superhero from undersea. The Fin (Marvel Mystery Comics 7, April 1941) was an amphibious superhero from the surface. And Hydroman (Reg’lar Fellers Heroic Comics 1, Aug. 1940) was superheroic water.

“In the early years of Superman’s commercial success, publishers rushed to have competing characters on the stands — and they made characters who would seize on virtually any excuse to become superheroes,” noted comics historian Don Markstein.

Hydroman was a counterintuitive concept, not a man of steel but a man of water.  Certainly there’s strength in steel, but there can also be strength in fluidity — as demonstrated not only by Hydroman but also by such later heroes as Plastic Man, Mr. Fantastic and the Elongated Man.

“Be like water making its way through cracks,” Bruce Lee once advised.

Bob Blake could switch back and forth from his liquid form, thanks to a formula injected into his bloodstream by his friend, chemist Harry Thurston (“Thirst-ton?”). 

In Hydroman’s first adventure, a gunman learns that bullets don’t affect water, and gets drowned for his trouble.

The Eastern Color Printing feature continued until Heroic 29 (March 1945), when Hydroman fought his last battle against the stage magician Ruby Khan. The superhero prevailed, despite Khan’s attempts to turn him into steam and to startle him with bunnies from his top hat (?).

Hydroman was revived by AC Comics and Dynamite Comics, and even has a villainous counterpart in the Marvel universe, “Hydro-Man,” who was introduced in The Amazing Spider-Man 212 (Jan. 1981).

Put a Latin spin on the Greek-derived name “Hydroman” and you come up with “Aquaman,” a character introduced by DC a year later in More Fun Comics 73 (Nov. 1941).

July 1940: The Battle of the Elements

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. 

By that time, the Torch had joined the New York City Police Department — an artificial being trying to fit in and overcompensating, I always figured. Meanwhile, the Sub-Mariner was on another of his periodic rampages against humanity.

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.