June 1975: In a Mirror Darkly

Battling bodies careering into and right through arcane architecture — this superhero feature was clearly something different.

“One of the aspects of early Dr. Strange that Marvel Studios’ eponymous movie got right were the eerie clashes between Strange and various astral plane assassins,” observed comics historian Mark Engblom.  “I felt like I was watching a (Steve) Ditko story come to life!”

In his first recorded exploit, Dr. Stephen Strange fought one of those conceptual, extradimensional entities who’d secretly harry our plane of existence throughout his career.

In his second adventure (Strange Tales 111, Aug. 1963, reprinted in Marvel Treasury Edition 6, June 1975), the Master of the Mystic Arts battled one of the mirror-image foes so common to superheroes — in this case, a treacherous, power-hungry sorcerer of equal ability who’d also been trained by the Ancient One. While Strange is pledged to use his power to protect people, his enemy intends to enslave them.

The villain introduced here had a name that fairly rumbled from the lips, “Baron Mordo” (with its suggestions of “morbid,” “morose” and “mordant”). JRR Tolkien also recognized the ominousness of the sound (“Mordor”), and so did Jim Shooter (“Mordru”). 

Comics historian Jeff Rovin wrote, “Among the countless dark powers (Baron Mordo) has at his command are astral projection … altering his physical appearance; mesmerizing others while he’s in corporeal or spiritual form; summoning up a paralytic vapor and creating another vapor which can remove an entire apartment building from this realm and drop it into limbo.

From his European castle, Mordo projects his astral form to Tibet, where he telepathically commands the Ancient One’s servant to poison his meal. Sensing the danger in his Greenwich Village sanctum, Dr. Strange sends his own spirit soaring to the scene, where he engages Mordo in battle while arguing their philosophical differences. Strange defeats Mordo with shrewdness.

“I really liked the balance between the surrealistic mystic environs and the noir-ish street scenes,” recalled comics historian Vincent Mariani.

August 1971: Red Wolf in the Spotlight

“We must applaud Red Wolf for many reasons,” wrote Michael A. Sheyahshe in Native Americans in Comic Books. “The comic contains a character who is the first major Native superhero, one who is a complex character, more human than many other Indigenous characters, and one that even has his own sidekick.”

Created by writer Roy Thomas and artist John Buscema, Red Wolf was William Talltrees, a young man whose Cheyenne family was extorted and murdered by corrupt businessman Cornelius van Lunt. To avenge them, he adopted the legendary persona of Red Wolf, gaining vaguely defined powers from the Native American god Owayodata and a partner, an actual wolf named Lobo. 

“I liked the story,” recalled comics historian Paul Zuckerman of Red Wolf’s September 1970 debut in Avengers 80. “Although Native Americans had already long been treated with more respect in comics, this brought them front and center into the modern world, part of the trend of relevant comics that were popping up then and getting all of the attention from the media.

“They didn't really do much with the character and when Red Wolf got his own series, it wasn't him — it was his ancestor! But it was books like this that piqued my interest in comics again.”

Penned by Gardner Fox and drawn by Syd Shores, the Red Wolf feature that began in Marvel Spotlight 1 (Aug. 1971) was set in the Old West.

“The switch to a Wild West era character was something Stan imposed on us,” Roy Thomas recalled. “I would have preferred to keep the modern hero from the beginning.”

“Red Wolf marked the first time that an American Indian had assumed the role (of mysterious avenger), and it certainly should be remembered at least for breaking ground in a new direction,” Maurice Horn wrote in Comics of the American West.

In the movies at roughly the same time, actor and writer Tom Laughlin introduced his half-Indian ex-Green Beret avenger, Billy Jack.

August 1970: From Siren to Superhero

Already spider-themed, Marvel Comics’ Black Widow naturally became the first of several female counterparts to Marvel’s most popular superhero, the first of several fully feminist Marvel superwomen and finally a Hollywood heroine.

In the first six years of her fictional career, she moved from minor villain to headlining hero. Over the same span, her dramatic journey paralleled the advancement in the status of women across the 20th century.

Created by Stan Lee, Don Rico and Don Heck in Tales of Suspense 52 (April 1964), Natalia Alianovna “Natasha” Romanova was introduced as a Russian communist spy, a foe of the capitalist industrialist superhero Iron Man.

She wasn’t a costumed character but a beautiful “femme fatale,” an archetype created by male writers that represents a woman’s sexual attractiveness to men as a siren threat, a weapon.

Dashiell Hammett’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy, from the 1929 novel The Maltese Falcon, is a classic of the type, seducing several men to their doom. The femme fatale has often amounted to a nightmare view of female independence and confidence.

But Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century, was already a year old when the Black Widow debuted. So, by the end of the decade, the character was transformed from a slinky villain into a playgirl feminist superhero with her own feature in Amazing Adventures (Aug. 1970, drawn by John Buscema and written by Gary Friedrich).

Defecting to the U.S. and trading espionage for superheroics, Natasha had settled on a costume that consisted of a skintight black catsuit and wristband weapons that echoed Diana Rigg’s most popular outfit as Emma Peel in The Avengers (no, not those Avengers).

After her Amazing Adventures feature ended in 1971, the Black Widow started teaming up with Daredevil. In 1975, the characters attracted the interest of Angela Bowie, who planned to play Natasha in a TV project. She was the wife of David Bowie (Yes, that David Bowie).

July 1968: Politics and Power

The month before the new magazine appeared, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of the recently martyred JFK, entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, citing “deep … divisions within our party and country” that made it  “…unmistakably clear that we can change these disastrous, divisive policies only by changing the men who make them.” And President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not seek that same nomination.

The very month the magazine appeared, Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot on the balcony of a Memphis motel. Riots in more than 100 cities nationwide left 39 people dead, more than 2,600 injured and 21,000 arrested over the next week.

Meanwhile, back in the Marvel universe, New York City mayoral candidate Richard Raleigh is alliteratively named, like many Marvel heroes including Peter Parker himself, and appears to share their values.

Apparently an honest, crusading “law-and-order” candidate, the handsome Raleigh is in fact a power-mad schemer who is orchestrating super villain attacks against himself to put his election over the top.

“To me, you’re just another sheep … like all the unthinking masses,” Raleigh sneers at an aide. “One day, all who live will be my slaves!” This was the superhero version of Elia Kazan’s prophetic film A Face in the Crowd, released a decade before.

The new magazine reflected Stan Lee and John Romita’s zest for the zeitgeist. The real-world themes of political hypocrisy and an easily conned American public — even Peter’s friends MJ and Harry and his Aunt May support Raleigh — show that Lee and artist Romita were probably hoping this 35-cent magazine might appeal to a slightly more “grown-up” audience than the comic book.

The Spectacular Spider-Man was a first — the first Marvel magazine and the first such magazine devoted to a superhero — and one “second” (the second Spider-Man title).

Although the magazine was short-lived, the story was retooled for Amazing Spider-Man 116-117 (Jan.-Feb. 1973). By then, Nixon was terminally embroiled in Watergate.

1968 was, in several ways, a peak year for Marvel Comics.

July 1968: The Advantages of Being Frozen

“Over the years we had tried to resurrect him, and he never worked,” Stan Lee recalled. “After World War II ended, he was just a guy in a dumb costume running around. I mean, that’s the way a lot of people perceived him.

“So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to say he had been frozen in the ice for these two decades or whatever it was, and now he’s back?’ I’m always trying to give them a personality hook or a character trait that would make them unique. And I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great?  Here’s a guy who’s been out of it for 20 years, and suddenly everything is changed.’”

That “man out of time” theme was to become the defining dramatic motif in Captain America’s various media incarnations, including his 1968 Bantam paperback novel by science fiction author Ted White — Captain America: The Great Gold Steal.

“Similar to (Otto) Binder in The Avengers Battle The Earth-Wrecker, White also depicts Cap as a man out of his time, struggling to fit into a world drastically different than the one he left behind (the sequence where Cap first sees the New York of the mid-sixties is memorable),” noted the Tain’t the Meat … It’s the Humanity! blog. 

“Probably the biggest difference between White’s interpretation of the character and the Marvel version is Captain America himself. White portrays him as a professional soldier, one matured and tempered by his experiences in battle – the idealistic blue-eyed Boy Scout from the comics is nowhere to be seen.”

“And in a bold move, one very much in keeping with the times, White also has Rogers dosed with a form of LSD that rewires his brain allowing him total control over every aspect of his body, from boosting his adrenalin during a confrontation to increasing anti-bodies to fight off infection. In both body and mind, Rogers truly becomes a superior man.” 

Painting by Mitchell Hooks

June 1968: The Machine and the Magic

Whether by accident or design, Marvel’s mid-1960s dual hero titles were subtly thematic.

You had Tales of Suspense featuring Iron Man and Captain America, two out-and-out superheroes. You had Tales to Astonish featuring the Hulk and the Sub-Mariner, two super-antiheroes. And finally you had Strange Tales featuring Dr. Strange and Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, two characters who operated on the periphery of the superhero world.

Fury and Strange were thematically similar and yet opposite. Both operated in secret to protect humanity, but one employed magic and the other super-science.

By 1966, Marvel characters were increasingly popular, and being recognized as such on college campuses and in the national news.

So why, you may well wonder, did such popular characters have to double up in the same magazine? That was because publisher Martin Goodman had made a colossal mistake, one that had forced him into a 1957 distribution deal with DC-owned Independent News. The catch was that Marvel’s titles would be limited to eight per month.

Beginning in 1964, with demand for Marvel obviously exceeding supply, that number was grudgingly increased, little by little. Nevertheless, Marvel’s popular superheroes were forced to bunk together until 1968.

This ad announces that the two characters get their own titles as part of a major expansion of the Marvel line.

“Marvel’s titles had been selling so well that in 1967 Goodman was able to twist Independent News’s arm into allowing him to release even more, “ Reed Tucker noted in his Marvel-DC book Slugfest. “Suddenly the characters who had previous been forced to share the so-called split books got their own stand-alone titles.”

Other among the flood of new titles at Marvel were Captain America, Captain Marvel, Capt. Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders, the western Ghost Rider, Groovy, Incredible Hulk, Mighty Marvel Western, Not Brand Ecch, Silver Surfer, Spectacular Spider-Man and Sub-Mariner.

Fighting supernatural menaces all day long leaves you wanting a cigarette, apparently.

May 1968: When Villain Turns Hero

Those first few appearances of Marvel’s Captain Marvel in 1967-68, by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas and Gene Colan, were dramatic and innovative.

The Kree invader Captain Mar-Vell was an alien spy and saboteur who, when accidentally compelled to pose as a superhero, found that he was gradually becoming one.

It’s a theme that has been reworked to good effect since, notably in Marvel’s Thunderbolts (when the Masters of Evil posed as a superhero team) and Superior Spider-Man (in which Dr. Octopus took over his archenemy’s identity).

But I’ve heard Stan Lee was unenthusiastic about Marvel Comics stealing the name and Shazam-born thunder of the famous Fawcett hero of the 1940s (it was his publisher’s idea). As the feature fell into other hands, it careened erratically into relative obscurity. What might have been, had Thomas and Colan stayed... 

September 1967: A Plague of Frogs

Daredevil has had a surprising amount of trouble with frog people.

Equipped by the Organizer (a/k/a New York mayoral candidate Abner Jonas) for the role of Frog Man, Francois Le Blanc teamed up with Jonas’ other Ani-Men (Bird Man, Cat Man and Ape Man) to battle Daredevil in Daredevil 10-11 (Oct.-Dec. 1965).

Then, in Daredevil 25 (Feb. 1967), Vincent Patilio adopted the springy identity of the Leap Frog even as Matt Murdock invented a twin brother, Mike, in a desperate ploy to protect his secret identity.

In Daredevil Annual 1 (Sept. 1967), the Leap Frog returned with the “Emissaries of Evil” (which included Electro, the Matador, the Gladiator and the Stilt-Man), but DD’s old foes didn’t fare any better as a team than they had individually.

Now styling themselves as “the Unholy Three,” Ape Man, Cat Man and Bird Man returned without Frog Man in Daredevil 39-40 (April-May 1968). And the Man Without Fear didn’t miss the green gangster.

“Only the Frog Man is left — but he hasn’t the brains to lead these other three,” Daredevil observed. “And since he wasn’t with them, he … must still be in the pokey!”

Unlike Frog Man, however, the Leap Frog was smart enough to invent the battery-powered high-tech spring boots that propelled his criminal career. 

Those boots were inherited by his son Eugene in Marvel Team-Up 121 (June 1982), and he used them to try to clear the family name as the Fabulous Frog-Man. 

Surviving largely by luck, Eugene is sometimes referred to as “Kermit.”

“Must be sad needing to follow in your daddy’s flippers in an ugly Frog Man costume,” Joseph Lenius said.

September 1967: Joining the Club

In Marvel Comics, some weapon — a shield, a hammer, webbing or claws — often served as a kind of totem for a superhero.

The weapon usually had a dual purpose: providing the hero with power and symbolizing his identity and mission. For example, Captain America, essentially a protector, carried a shield; Wolverine, essentially an aggressor, had claws.

And Daredevil, who was secretly blind, had a cane that snapped into a billy club — a tool to compensate for disability instantly transformed into a means of punishing the guilty.

Both the cane and the billy club provided freedom of movement to the superhero, as well.

“(T)he true value of Daredevil’s billy club is that it allows him to incorporate an essential item of the blind person into his superhero persona,” observed Alex S. Romagnoli and Gian S. Pagnucci in their book Enter the Superheroes: American Values, Culture and the Canon of Superhero Literature. “The billy club becomes a symbol for rising above one’s limitations. This is what we come to expect of technology in the 21^st century: that it can work miracles. We want devices that help us to navigate our world. Perhaps not a billy club that can let a blind person swing through the air, but certainly digital maps on cell phones that we can call upon when we are lost.”

Comics historian Vincent Mariani remarked, “I always felt that with the revival of Captain America and introduction of Daredevil in early 1964, Marvel achieved as perfect a cast of characters as possible. With Captain America, a link to Timely comics' Golden Age (begun with anti-hero Sub-Mariner a few years earlier) was cemented. And with Daredevil, a unique loner type of hero would be an apt compliment for the ‘offbeat’ Spider-Man and Doctor Strange.

“As time passed, and with increasing success, more and more characters were added in an inevitable expansion. But that early ‘universe’ of heroes, at that point in time, seemed far more manageably iconic.”

June 1967: The Luck of the Drawing

I suppose DC thought if one Joker was successful, why not put a whole deck of criminal cards into play?

But the Royal Flush Gang struck me as a rare misdeal by writer Gardner Fox and artist Mike Sekowsky. People dressed up like playing cards never seemed like they should be much of a menace when pitted against the immensely formidable Justice League of America.

This playing-card pack was the creation of the portly Prof. Amos Fortune, who had attacked the Justice Leaguers’ “luck glands” (?) in Justice League of America 6 (August–September 1961). Fortune turned his childhood criminal cronies into the Royal Flush Gang in Justice League 43 (March 1966), and played the same cards again in Justice League 54 (June 1967).

The latter issue actually has an intriguing setup, with Hal Jordan mugged, hospitalized, comatose and close to death. Only his invisible power ring (which had a standing order to automatically protect him from mortal harm) was keeping him from death — temporarily.

Also on the plus side was Sid Greene inking Sekowsky, a team that produced what I regard as some of the best-looking issues of the JLA in the 1960s.

By then, you could see from DC’s promotional page that the company was hearing Stan Lee hot on its heels, coming up fast from behind. The whole “what’s up Tiger Lily” tone of their pitch for this issue is a somewhat strained imitation of Lee’s breezy, cheeky editorial voice.

The Martian Manhunter was then slowly being eased out of the DC universe. His solo feature would soon be discontinued (House of Mystery 173, May–June 1968). And the Manhunter would appear only twice more in new JLA adventures before issue 71, when Denny O’Neil would banish him to outer space with other surviving Martians. 

The JLA always seemed a bit deflated for me after J’onn J’onzz left. In retrospect, it was one of those milestones marking the end of the Silver Age.

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.

April 1967: Sorcery in Saigon

By 1967, putting a positive spin on the Vietnam War would have required a miracle.

Enter Super Green Beret and his magical powers.

DC’s superheroes generally stayed out of politics, but Stan Lee, wanting to keep his a little more grounded in the real world, ran to anticommunist themes in the early Marvel adventures.

I could understand how a successful capitalist and munitions manufacturer like Tony Stark might loathe communism, but it surprised me when even a Norse thunder god had jingoistic political opinions.

By 1967, Lee had backed away from that. Even Captain America, who was thawed out in 1964, made only a couple of forays to Vietnam, and then forgot about it.

With body counts rising and the military draft in force, Vietnam War protests were in full swing by the time the short-lived Lightning Comics’ short-lived Super Green Beret appeared on the newsstands, then swamped with superheroes because of the success of both Marvel and the Batman TV show.

But the Lightning effort lacked any spark, and its timing was off. In October 1967, 100,000 protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and 30,000 of them marched on the Pentagon.

Long-time Captain Marvel writer Otto Binder echoed the then-defunct hero’s origin in Tod Holton, Super Green Beret. An actual beret substituted for the magic word “Shazam,” providing the feature’s suspense, such as it was. Teenager Todd Holton would lose his powers whenever he lost the hat.

Tod’s uncle, Roger Wilson, was an actual Green Beret who’d saved a mysterious far-eastern monk and been rewarded with a magical beret that would confer super powers on “…one who is young and noble by nature.”

His powers were more than impressive, and included telepathy, teleportation, invulnerability, super strength, time travel and the ability to transform objects. He could even walk on water.

So Super Green Beret was virtually omnipotent and yet as innocent as a child — a pretty apt metaphor for America’s self image.

February 1967: Those Ghostly Memories

So Ghost Rider is a supernatural motorcyclist who made a deal with the devil to save his father, and got a flaming skull-head for his trouble?

Well, no. 

Originally, Ghost Rider was an Old West lawman turned trickster dressed in spectral white. 

The Magazine Enterprises character was created for editor Vincent Sullivan in Tim Holt 11 (Nov. 1949), combining the superhero trappings then fading in popularity with the horror elements that would dominate comics over the next few years.

Ghost Rider’s dramatic design — a caped white figure with a full face mask, a pale wonder horse and lots of ghostly tricks — proved popular enough to propel the character into a respectable four-year run. 

Marvel Comics decided to revamp and revive the hero in 1967. 

Roy Thomas recalled, “The idea to revive ME’s Ghost Rider was Stan’s — or, though I wasn’t told, it could have been Martin Goodman’s, since he was big on picking up the occasional ‘abandoned trademark,’ as he had wanted to do earlier with Gleason’s Daredevil. This time, though, I do know that Stan loved Dick Ayers’ Ghost Rider.”

Thomas said he too had been a fan of the character since he’d seen the origin story in an issue of Tim Holt. Rex Fury had previously starred in a backup feature in Tim Holt as the Calico Kid. But in the 11th issue, artist Ayers and writer Ray Krank upped the ante by turning him into a 19th century mystery man superhero.

Thomas and Gary Friedrich joined with Ayers to bring Ghost Rider to Marvel. 

This time he was one Carter Slade, tricked up in a costume identical to the original and fighting bandits instead of monsters. 

“While we could apparently legally use the name and outfit of Ghost Rider, other things were still officially under copyright so he couldn’t have the same identity,” Thomas said. “Somehow, though, the rest of Ghost Rider’s modus operandi — pretending to be a ghost, etc. — was not off-limits.” 

For more info on Ghost Rider, check out the Marvel in the Silver Age blog.

December 1966: Erasers and Mistakes

In 1966 and 1967, Batman comics were caught in the middle of a creative tug of war.

On one hand, the editors were trying to attract readers with spooky covers like Fright of the Scarecrow! (Batman 189, Feb 1967), Mystery of the Missing Manhunters (Batman 184, Sept. 1966) and Death Knocks Three Times! (Batman 180, May 1966).

On the other hand, they were pandering to the success of the Adam West TV show with campy covers like Batman’s Baffling Turnabout (Batman 193, August 1966), in which the Masked Manhunter seemingly refuses to fight crime because he’s too busy watching himself on television.

And then there was that guy who had a pencil eraser for a head (Batman 188, Dec. 1966)

“To paraphrase Robin, ‘How camp can you get?’” wrote reader Stephen Harell of Kansas City. “I knew and appreciated the difference between the campy caricatures of B&R on the TV screen and the ‘real’ B&R of your usually fine magazine … until you threw us ‘The Eraser Who Tried to Rub Out Batman!’ The story was aptly named. Any more stories like that, and it may rub out Batman!”

Actually, the Eraser — complete with a rubber head mask, a vertically striped yellow suit and pointed “pencil lead” shoes — wasn’t quite as absurd as the cover implied. 

Written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Sheldon Moldoff, the story introduced a criminal mastermind who erased all evidence at crime scenes. 

Disguising himself as an organ grinder, Batman discovers that the Eraser is really Lenny Fiasco — his old college roommate!

Oddly enough, over at Marvel Comics, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had earlier created their own villainous Eraser — this one an alien who sent people into another dimension until Giant-Man stopped him (Tales to Astonish 49, Nov. 1963).

When writers and editors start coming up with plot ideas based on the things they see lying on the desk in front of them, they probably need to take a breather.

July 1966: The Mystery of the Black Panther

In the 1930s through the 1950s, the actual American power structure was reflected in fantasy by the American “superpower” structure.

Female superheroes remained rare curiosities, and nonwhite superheroes were unheard of (unless they were green).

“(T)hemes of difference, alienation and mutantism make superhero stories an excellent genre for exploring the concept of ‘the other,’ the person who is different and never quite gets accepted by society,” noted Alex S. Romagnoli and Gian S. Pagnucci in their book Enter the Superheroes: American Values, Culture and the Canon of Superhero Literature.

But the creators were almost entirely white males, and that had an impact on representation. And whatever the creators might have preferred, magazine publishers weren’t about to introduce elements of racial diversity that might threaten sales — not until the mid-1960s, when writer/editor Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby introduced the world’s first black superhero, the Black Panther (Fantastic Four 52, July 1966).

In this house ad, Lee built anticipation for the new character by keeping what was “sensational” about him completely under wraps. The old mystery sell.

“Previews in other titles that month suggest Marvel couldn’t decide how much of him to show — or how to characterize him,” observed Sean Howe in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. “Once Marvel committed to a policy of representing black characters, however, change came quickly.”

“The Panther’s first appearance happened during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and Marvel’s editorial staff were probably watching the newscasts that showed black Americans getting brutalized by police as they sought to change the prejudicial law of the land,” wrote Evan Narcisse.

“Given the times that he was created in, it’s very plausible that the Black Panther was Lee and/or Kirby’s way of saying that a black person was as capable of being a hero as their white characters. Even more daring, the Panther seemed to be more cunning and intelligent than some other heroes.”

March 1966: Home is the Hunter

Many of Spider-Man’s early foes were animal-themed costumed adventurers, like him. And one of them was a thrill-seeking, macho master of such beasts.

“In all fairness, Amazing Spider-Man 34 isn’t a bad comic by any stretch,” observed the Marvel in the Silver Age blog. “It has some great developments — Peter (Parker) trying to strike up a conversation with Gwen Stacy for the first time and getting knocked back, and the plotline with Betty Brant exiting Peter's life —  but it can only compare poorly with the issues that immediately preceded it (the Master Planner plot). It does, however, bring back an old foe.”

Introduced in Amazing Spider-Man 15 (Aug. 1964), Kraven the Hunter was the orphaned son of Russian aristocrats. Living in Africa for 10 years, Kraven acquired superhuman strength and speed from an herbal potion he stole from a witch doctor in the Belgian Congo. Kraven was inveigled into stalking the superhero by one of Spidey’s first enemies, the Chameleon. Capturing Spider-Man represented a kind of ultimate challenge for the jaded swashbuckler.

“The villains Peter fights in the course of (Steve) Ditko’s Spider-Man stories are almost entirely older men who are inventors or scientists: the Vulture, the Tinkerer, Doctor Doom, the Lizard, the Beetle, and on and on,” observed Douglas Wolk in All the Marvels. “In particular, Doctor Octopus, a hilariously nasty old scientist named Otto Octavius, whose eight-limb motif echoes the spider design, represents the most horrible version of what the Peter Parker we saw in Amazing Fantasy 15 could have become: embittered, lonely, angry, condescending, really creepy about women. Kraven the Hunter isn’t a scientist, but he’s the jock-father sort, macho in a way Peter can’t be, and very much a pro-wrestling type in presentation.”

Kraven’s jungle milieu provided variety for the play of Ditko’s imagination.

“The jungle animals that surrounded Kraven the Hunter as he battled Spider-Man fascinated me,” recalled Jack C. Harris. “(T)hese beasts came to life under Steve’s pencil and pen.”

August 1965: Marvel's Man from ACRONYM

Having a tightly interconnected comic book universe afforded Stan Lee and company a certain economy of motion.

Let’s say secret agents have become immensely popular, thanks to James Bond 007. Okay, you’ve already got a World War II combat hero handy in the Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos title (which began in May 1963), and, in Fantastic Four 21 (Dec. 1963), you’ve already updated him to the 1960s as a CIA agent fighting the Hate Monger (an enemy he knew well, as it turned out).

So why not turn Nick Fury into the head of some new, super-secret super-organization like UNCLE, CONTROL or ZOWIE? Call this one SHIELD (Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division).

Premiering in Strange Tales 135 (August 1965), this gruff, barking guy with an eye patch seemed particularly unsubtle for a spy, and we were already swamped with spies by then — James Bond, Derek Flint, Matt Helm, Napoleon Solo, John Drake, Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott, Amos Burke, Maxwell Smart. Even Archie Andrews became a secret agent, for pity’s sake.

The spies of popular fiction offered sex, violence and gadgets, and with the sex and violence necessarily muted by the Comics Code, that meant the gadgets had to be amped up through the roof in SHIELD — flying cars, invisibility suits, death rays, Life Model Decoys, even a flying aircraft carrier (most of them provided by Marvel’s resident tech genius Tony Stark, naturally).

The gadgets served the same purpose for Fury as the spells of Dr. Strange, SHIELD’s companion in Strange Tales, and they offered the same dramatic problem. When you can always pull a deus ex machina out of your ass to resolve whatever peril you’re in, suspense becomes elusive.

More than one enduring element of the Marvel universe sprang from this series — most notably Hydra, the evil cabal that’s now probably even more famous than SPECTRE, the spy organization that inspired it, and seemingly as immortal as its mythological namesake.

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.