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... 

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.

April 1965: To Fight the Unbeatable Foe

Daredevil knows this is one fight he’s going to lose, and that he’ll probably be killed. But he fights on anyway.

Early Marvel Comics storytelling ascended to a pinnacle in Wally Wood and Stan Lee’s Daredevil 7 (April 1965).

The manic anti-superhero Sub-Mariner had been attacking Manhattan like King Kong on and off since 1939, but during this particular onslaught all the other superheroes were off somewhere else. Only Daredevil stood between Namor and the ordinary citizens who would be harmed.

We readers were aware that Prince Namor’s strength rivaled the Hulk’s, and that, aside from his super-senses, Daredevil was merely a well-trained costumed acrobat. We also knew that a fight between them would be like pitting a colorful sports car against a Sherman tank.

The storytelling is satisfying on several levels, including its defiance of the genre convention that superheroes must always finally win their battles.

Not this time, gang.

Aided by the restrained power inherent in Wood’s art, Daredevil puts up a valiant fight against the Sub-Mariner, delaying Namor from causing more destruction before finally collapsing, battered and beaten, at Namor’s feet.

Desperately, he grabs Namor’s winged ankle and is slowly dragged along behind the inexorable amphibian superman.

“Come back!” Daredevil whispers. “You – you mustn’t fight the others – They’re innocent! Mustn’t be harmed — Mustn’t…”

Namor turns and gazes down at Daredevil.

“I have fought the Fantastic Four, the Avengers and other super-powered humans, but none have been more courageous than he, the most vulnerable of all!”

Touched, Namor abandons his war, flying serenely out to sea.

The story makes a strong ethical point — that, if you are to call yourself a real person, a mensch, there are things for which you must stand up even if you know you will be knocked right back down.

And the world will be better for this,

That one man, scorned and covered with scars

Still strove with his last ounce of courage.

To fight the unbeatable foe.

Collage by Gil R. Palmer

September 1964: Two Small Letters, One Big Difference

Hank Pym was able to become a whole new superhero just by adding two letters to his name.

In Tales to Astonish 49 (Nov. 1963), his 15^th adventure, Ant-Man became Giant-Man.

I remember enjoying the story by writer/editor Stan Lee and artists Jack Kirby and Don Heck at the time. The switch seemed to give the character a whole new range of powers and possibilities, and firmly differentiate him from DC’s Atom, who was busy battling a tiny phantom double that month.

Giant-Man’s next few adventures provided a fresh angle on super-heroics by suggesting, logically, that super powers might involve a learning curve.

Pym proves awkward with abilities that are the opposite of the ones he had mastered as Ant-Man. He finds himself unable, for example, to defeat the mutant Human Top in repeated battles.

Yet the character somehow never achieved the dramatic potential suggested in that debut, and in Tales to Astonish 70 (August 1965), his feature was replaced by the Sub-Mariner’s, which I never much cared for. Despite his status as a milestone hero of comics’ Golden Age, Prince Namor in the 1960s seemed reduced to a tedious single note of haughtiness.

I’ll always wonder if Giant-Man’s feature might have continued — even spawning a solo Giant-Man title in Marvel’s big 1968 expansion— if Jack Kirby had been drawing it.

Ant-Man’s change would have one distant, happy echo. Fifty-three years later, the surprise transition from Ant-Man to Giant-Man would delight film audiences in Captain America: Civil War ($1.153 billion at the box office).

March 1964: The Magic of Fourth Issues

For more than a half century, I’ve loved a particular panel that appears in The Avengers 4 (March 1964), the issue that introduced me to Captain America.

Depicting the icebound superhero’s return to New York after two decades when he was thought to be dead, artist Jack Kirby and writer Stan Lee gave the character gravitas, suggested his heroic stature and modesty and underlined it all with a note of humor. The panel also positioned the character in history for a generation that was unfamiliar with him.

A lot to do in a single panel.

Cap is spotted by an incredulous beat cop.

“No, officer, you’re not mistaken,” replies the somber superhero. “I am Captain America.”

The cop says, “And all these years — all of us — your fans — all your admirers — we thought you were dead! But you’ve come back — just when the world has need of such a man — just like fate planned it this way!”

Holding a handkerchief to his face, the police officer adds, “Forgive me, Cap, willya? I - I seem to have something in my eye.”

“As alluded to in an opening caption, Captain America was first created and drawn by Jack Kirby (alongside Joe Simon) in 1941, and Stan Lee's first writing in a comic was a two-page text story from Captain America Comics 3 — so, as they say, the circle is complete!” noted comics historian Don Alsafi.

The fact that another Golden Age great, the Sub-Mariner, accidentally revived Cap tied things together even more neatly.

There seemed to be something about fourth issues, by the way. Green Arrow joined The Justice League of America in the fourth issue (April-May 1961), and the Sub-Mariner reemerged from the sea to again start terrorizing Manhattan in the fourth issue of The Fantastic Four (May 1962).

Maybe it’s the simple fact that by the fourth issue, the creators’ original conception has been pretty well explored and they think, “Okay, what else we got?”

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.