Amazing Spiderman #1

George M. Cohan once observed that plotting a three-act play was relatively simple. In Act 1, you get the hero up in a tree. In Act 2, you throw stones at him. In Act 3, you get the hero down from the tree.

Many comic stories follow this simple formula. Where Spiderman was different, was that Stan and Steve never got him down from the tree; they just kept throwing the stones at him.

This issue offers a classic example. After a quick summary of the events in Amazing Fantasy #15, we see that Uncle Ben's death has put Peter and Aunt May in a rough situation:

Peter considers taking up crime to pay the bills, but he knows it would break his aunt's heart if he were ever arrested. So he gets the bright idea of going into show business. Problem solved? Nope, because there's another stone waiting:

Spidey indeed finds it impossible to cash his check. And things get even tougher with the first appearance of his longest-running nemesis:

The inspiration for J. Jonah Jameson is probably found in the works of Ayn Rand. In the book The Fountainhead, Howard Roark runs afoul of a character named Ellsworth Toohey, who sees it as his duty (as a socialist) to tear down heroic individuals in favor of the ordinary working man. Ditko was famously a Rand fan, and echoes of her philosophy often appeared in Spiderman and in the Question series, as I discussed here.

Jameson's son is an astronaut (note: astronauts were huge celebrities in 1963), and is being launched into space shortly after Spiderman is basically drubbed out of the entertainment biz. But his space capsule develops a problem and he appears to be doomed until Spiderman steps in:

He commandeers a plane and a pilot from a nearby base and:

He rescues Jameson's son and emerges a hero to all, right? Well, yes to the former, but Stan and Steve haven't finished off their pile of stones:

Jameson has trumped up a patently ridiculous charge that Spidey had caused the problems with the capsule in the first place, so that he could look like the savior. So our friendly neighborhood Spiderman remains treed:


In the backup story, Spiderman tries to join the Fantastic Four, figuring that he ought to command a good salary with them. But:

The remainder of the story features Spiderman's first battle with the Chameleon, a quick-change artist. At one point, the Chameleon impersonates Spiderman himself. Peter captures him but the Chameleon gets away and does another makeover. We see the first appearance of Spider-Sense here:

The Spider-Sense is an ingenious gimmick that would become an important weapon in Spiderman's arsenal. But when he catches the phony cop, the Chameleon claims loudly that Spiderman is really the Chameleon in disguise again. This results in Peter fleeing, angry and hurt:

Like I said, the stones never stopped coming.

Fantastic Four Fridays: Ant-Man and Doom

Another mediocre cover. Yes, the general image of Doom holding the FF in his hand is pretty dramatic, but the details are boring. The Thing is shaking his fist at Doom and that's about the most interesting reaction. Sue's doing the "hands in the air" surprise thing, and Johnny, having forgotten, he can fly is climbing up Doom's index and middle finger. Reed just looks askance at the Metal Monarch. And who's conveniently holding that magnifying glass so we can see Ant-Man?

As the story opens, Johnny is startled to find his teammates much diminished:

So he welds the duct closed and the other members of the FF regain their normal size. It turns out that all of them had experienced the same thing briefly a day or so before, but were worried that the other members would think them nutty if they revealed their experience. Because, you know, it's too fantastic even for the Fantastic Four.

Reed brainstorms and comes to the conclusion that maybe Ant-Man could help them. But how do they get in touch with him? Well, little do they know that ants in the room send out a message that Hank Pym receives and responds to:

He gives them a reducing liquid and an enlarging liquid to use to discover who's changing their sizes. Reid even wonders for a moment:

Of course, we have the benefit of having seen the cover, and those who had been around for FF #10 remember how it ended with Dr. Doom apparently shrinking away to nothingness.

But the story meanders on for another couple of pages. Reed tries another formula to change the Thing back into Ben Grimm, Johnny shows the kids how he can sear a hot dog with his flame-balls, Sue tries some perfume to deaden the scent of dogs (who are apparently the only things that can sense her presence). Then a voice warns them all to flee because Dr. Doom is on the loose again. So they take the shrinking solution, and descend down into the miniature world:

Well, it's certainly convenient that the FF happened to end up that close to Doom. But when they try to attack him, he shrinks them further. Then follows the madman recap of how he came to the micro world, gained the trust of the King and his daughter, then shrank them down and took control. And now he's going to turn the FF over to the Tok people from another world. The Toks will press the FF into service in their army. Well, all except one of them:

That's a pretty harsh assessment of Sue's value as a member of a fighting force; surely they could show her slipping past guards and opening the gates to a major invasion?

Anyway, the FF are imprisoned along with the King and his daughter, whom Johnny has his eye on. The prison is under an acidic sea, so they can't just bust out. But Sue (!) has an idea:

So they construct a small pod out of the material used to construct the walls, then bust loose. Meanwhile, Ant-Man has shrunk down to join them, but is also imprisoned by Doom. Sue once again comes through:

Doom, realizing that the FF free endangers him, flees back to the normal world. Johnny has a tender parting with the princess:

That plot thread was never picked up in the Silver Age, although Pearla did return much later.

And we learn that this story (although reasonably self-contained) will be continued in the next issue.

Comments: Although the story takes a long time to get going, and although there are no real battle scenes with Doom, I do like the sudden emergence of Sue as a valuable member of the team; perhaps the bit about making her a scullery maid lit a fire under her. The coloring is somewhat inconsistent; Pearla's hair is gold and brown earlier, and then green at the end.

Fantastic Four Fridays: Thinking Is Overrated

An extremely mediocre cover, even worse than last month's. The FF's HQ is nowhere near ground level, and anyway wouldn't that hole in the wall mean that the passersby would be subjected to whatever ray is hitting the FF?

We get a similar opening to FF #1, with Reed signaling the FF to meet at the Baxter Building. We get the familiar run-through of the powers of the FF, and another mention of the Yancy Street Gang and their ongoing feud with the Thing. It's a cute little bit, although remember at this point Ben was still being sold as a WWII fighter pilot, and thus in his late 30s at the youngest. Is it likely he'd have a feud with what appear to be teenagers?

We learn that Reed is indeed a scientific genius:

But this time perhaps he's met his match. The Mad Thinker is a planner par excellence, and with awesome computing power to match:

Of course, if you know anything about computers then and now, you'll recognize that those banks of computers probably don't have 1/100th the capacity of a 1995-era Pentium, making these claims highly unlikely:

But that's modern-day me talking. The 1960s me thought that the concept of the Mad Thinker was very cool, as indeed it was. He had figured out every detail (even to the status of the water mains, apparently), and so he could not be caught by surprise and defeated.

One of the crooks he invited to his pow-wow walks out after hearing the pitch, but as the Mad Thinker had predicted to the others, he is quickly picked up by the cops, revealing that his effective predictions of the future really do work out.

His plot begins to manifest itself as each of the members of the FF is separated from the others. Reed gets a chief researcher offer from a major industrial firm, while Johnny is asked to help a family circus as an attraction. Ben is being wooed by wrestling promoters, who seal the deal with him by mentioning he'll get to battle the hero of the Yancy Streeters. Sue is offered a deal in Hollywood.

But (somewhat predictably) they all find that working for the man is dull and unrewarding compared to their old lives as the FF. But as they converge on the Baxter Building, they discover it has been taken over by the Mad Thinker and his persons of hench, including the android mentioned on the cover.

Which is another thing; super-genius Reed wracks his brains to invent a unicellular organism, and the Thinkmadster, given access to his notes, creates a gigantic and complex super-powered creature?

There follows a battle between the FF just to reach the Thinker, who's 34 floors up from the ground level. While they're making their way up the elevator shaft, there's this bit:

"Reed, does this hallucination make me look fat?"

But when they reach him as he had predicted:

However, in the end his plot fails because the FF had arranged with the mailman to ring a special bell at precisely four o'clock, which would turn off all their weapons. The Thinker had failed to plan for this eventuality, which he called the X-factor.

Comments: Terrific story, interesting and different villain. I loved the sequences where the FF discovered that their dream jobs turned out to be pretty mundane compared to their superhero roles. They were well-done and amusing.

Negatives? Not much aside from that dull cover and the other stuff I mentioned in the review. A very entertaining comic, and one where you could tell that Stan and Jack were starting to hit their stride with the characters. There are several advertisements within the mag for next month's installment, featuring Dr Doom and the Ant-Man.

Fantastic Four Fridays: Puppet Subby

There are so many things wrong with that cover, starting with the fact that I really don't need to see the Sub-Mariner's butt so prominently featured. Note that Sue, who's a little closer to us than Subby, looks about three feet tall.

As the story begins, the FF is returning from their trip to the moon, as shown in FF #13. They're mobbed by the public and the media, giving Stan and Jack their usual opportunity to show us their powers on the fly:

After they get back to the Baxter Building, Reed catches Sue mooning over the Sub-Mariner.

And it turns out that she's not the only one thinking about Prince Namor. The Puppet Master, who apparently died at the end of FF #8 is still alive and is planning to use Subby as his weapon against the FF. Namor summons Sue to meet him via a "Mentofish" which can communicate via telepathy with any person on Earth.

Here's a little clue, Sue. If you're sneaking around on your fiance to see somebody, odds are you really do care for that somebody.

When she meets him at the docks, he gains control of her with a hypnofish, and sends her to his undersea lair. Of course, it's really the Puppet Master pulling the strings:

A classic "evil genius" moment if ever there was one.

An apparition of the Sub-Mariner appears in FF HQ to inform them of Sue's capture. Reed, Ben and Johnny head off in search of Prince Namor, with the convenient-for-plot-purposes addition of Alicia. Subby captures them with the aid of yet another improbable form of sea life:



Mentofish, hypnofish, and chloroclams; Namor's got them all! And another to help him handle the Torch:

Meanwhile, Sue is being menaced by a giant octopus, which gives Reed the clue that Namor is being controlled by another. Ben attacks the beast and hurls it off into the depths, where it encounters... you guessed it:

But he discovers that the octopus is mindless, and thus immune to his control. It apparently kills him, releasing Namor from his mental control.

Comments: A sub-par issue. I never cared much for the Puppet Master, and the Sub-Mariner's convenient sea creatures get less and less believable as the story goes on.

Fantastic Four Fridays: Crossover Central

One of the keys to Marvel's success in the Silver Age was the relentless use of crossover stories to introduce the readers of one Marvel mag to characters in other titles. This story marks the very beginning of that trend.

Ben and Alicia are leaving a performance at the symphony, when Ben's appearance attracts the attention of some soldiers, who suspect he's the Hulk:

After the confusion is resolved, Ben learns that Thunderbolt Ross (the Hulk's nemesis) is requesting the aid of the FF to capture old Greenskin. There's a cute little sight gag:

After the boys brag about how they'd defeat the Hulk, we get another taste of Sue's inferiority complex:

The Hulk is suspected of destroying a secret project in the Southwest. But Bruce Banner believes that the actual culprit is the Wrecker. It turns out that the secret project was an early version of "Star Wars"; a plan to safeguard cities from nuclear attack:

Banner's assistant, Karl Kort, drops his wallet, which conveniently contains a membership card in a "subversive communist front organization". Thus the Wrecker's identity is revealed to Rick Jones. Before he can tell the others, Kort kidnaps him. He leaves a note for Banner telling him to get rid of the FF or he'll never see Rick alive again. So Bruce decides to turn himself into the Hulk again. Remember, this is during the era where Stan and Jack were still experimenting with the Hulk's transformations; at one point it was voluntary, at another it was brought on by nightfall. It was only later that they hit on the idea that stress caused Banner to change.

A little later all three groups are in an underground cave. The first meeting of the FF and the Hulk:

Note as well that the Hulk's vocabulary is a little more extensive than the "Hulk smash!" character of the later 1960s.

There are several pages of the FF mixing it up with the Hulk, when suddenly a beam weapon incapacitates the behemoth. The Thing, angry that his battle was cut short, discovers the culprit: a giant robot controlled by the Wrecker. He makes short work of the robot and the team confronts Karl Kort, who has one last card to play:

But as you can probably guess from that panel, Sue proves useful for more than just morale-boosting. The Hulk gets away.

Comments: Obviously a hugely significant issue in terms of a preview of things to come in the Marvel line. One oddity; the crossover came too late to save the Hulk's own magazine, which saw its final issue come out that same month (March 1963). Incidentally, there was another FF crossover in Amazing Spiderman #1, which also had a 3/63 cover date.

Fantastic Four Fridays: To Dream the Impossible Man...

After awhile, I'm sure that comic fans winced whenever they saw the word "offbeat" on a Marvel cover, as it seemed to indicate, "We ran out of ideas this month so we decided to try being funny."

As the story begins, we see more of the fourth-wall breaking that first appeared in FF #10. The new Fantastic Four issue is coming out and there's a line out the door of the newsstand as folks clamor for the latest story featuring their heroes. Kids play at being the various members of the team:


When the FF get to the Baxter Building, they find tons of fan mail, including a jack-in-the-box punch for the Thing from the Yancy Street Gang (their second mention). Later, Reed comes up with another serum to try to turn him back into Ben Grimm:

Not to ruin the suspense or anything, but it wasn't permanent. Via a flashback, we learn that Reed and Ben had been roommates in college. And afterwards:

Of course, back then (1962) you could argue that this made Reed and Ben merely in their late-30s; nowadays they would have to be geezers to have fought in WWII. We also learn that Sue was Reed's girl next door, although of course that's getting into some pretty murky territory. If Sue's as old as Reed, how can she have a teen-aged brother? Anyway, they go on to reminisce about their origin as the Fantastic Four, and then mention the adventures they've had. But Sue wails a bit that the others have had adventures, while she's been something of a fifth wheel:

It's a reflection of a debate that had been going on in the FF letters page about how useless Sue's invisibility power was. Which is certainly true; hence the force-field ability that she began to develop not long afterwards. But it's rather amusing to Reed and Ben defending her as a valuable member of the team to the readers.

And then it turns out that it's Sue's birthday, and Reed, Ben and Johnny have baked her a cake. Ben turns into the Thing again, and Sue realizes that her problems with the FF's readers are trivial compared to him turning into a pile of orange rocks. And the story ends on that note.

Comments: Certainly an oddball tale, but it does show that Stan and Jack were paying attention to the readers and trying to promote Sue as a more valuable member of the team than we might otherwise assume. IIRC, this is the only FF issue that features two different self-contained stories.

The second story is the cover one, and it's quite "offbeat". The Impossible Man comes from the planet Poppup in the Tenth Galaxy. He possesses amazing powers, including flight, teleportation, the ability to turn his body into steel, etc. He shows up at a hobo jungle and asks for some food. They tell him he has to get some money, so:

After robbing the bank, he grabs a meal at a restaurant where the FF encounter him. They discover his extraordinary powers. After some battling:

So he's sort of the Marvel equivalent of Mr Mxyzptlk or Bat-Mite. But Reed figures out how to get rid of him:

And that turns out to be the solution; the one thing the Impossible Man can't handle is being ignored.

Comments: Not Marvel's finest hour, by any means. The Impossible Man did not return for many years.

Fantastic Four Fridays: Apes on the Moon!

I'm skipping ahead a few issues to get in a post for "Ape Week" as suggested by Silver Age Gold, although I will go back and do issues 11 and 12 in the next two weeks. Note that although this story features apes prominently, they do not appear on the cover.

As the story begins, there is an explosion in Reed's laboratory. He has discovered a new source of energy that will enable Americans to reach the moon ahead of the Soviets. I need hardly mention that the "space race" was in full swing by this time, with President Kennedy proposing a goal of reaching the moon before the end of the decade. Reed's source:

The latter incident refers to the famed Tunguska event of 1908, although the current theory is that it was a comet that hit the earth, and not a meteor. Reed traveled to Meteor Crater in Arizona and obtained a bit of the meteor's fragments, which contained his super-fuel. Reed resolves to make the trip alone, but you know how that idea went, and eventually he had to agree to take the whole team.

Meanwhile, we learn that the "Reds" are also working on the project. And they have some non-human workers:

He also has a babboon and an orangutan on his team. Kragoff knows that the FF derived their powers from cosmic radiation, and thus he intends to gain powers from his trip to the moon. The two missions blast off simultaneously.

The gorilla gains super-strength and the orangutan has magnetic powers, while the baboon can mimic anything (including inanimate objects). The Torch, who has flown over to inspect the communist ship (using a special suit that provides oxygen), observes the human/ape crew and their new powers.

The FF land in the "mysterious blue area" of the moon. This turns out to be the remnants of some past civilization, although there is a newer crystal dwelling that seems inhabited. It also conveniently has a breathable atmosphere, meaning that the FF won't have to wear bulky spacesuits.

Reed, Sue and Johnny head off towards the crystal dwelling, while Ben lumbers behind them. He encounters the three apes and Kragoff, who is now going by the moniker the Red Ghost. The name is apt as he is able to turn invisible and dematerialize. But as they are battling, a stranger shows up:

He explains that his home world is one vast computer, and that other Watchers such as he are spread throughout the galaxy, recording information (and presumably sending it back to the computer). They reportedly only watch, and never interfere, although subsequent appearances by the Watcher raise questions on that score. Since the FF and the Red Ghost and his apes are determined to battle, the Watcher sends them to another area where they will not involve his residence.

The Red Ghost strikes first, freezing Reed and:

Kragoff takes off with Sue. We also learn that perhaps his and the apes' powers are greater than those of the FF because they did not try to shield themselves from the cosmic radiation, and therefore were exposed to it for longer. Reed decides he will have to use brainpower and stays behind to examine the scientific equipment while Ben and Johnny attempt a frontal attack. Meanwhile, Sue has freed the apes from the prison where the Red Ghost is keeping them when they are not in use.

Reed creates a paralysis ray which holds the Red Ghost still. The Watcher proclaims the FF the winners in the battle, and mentions that he will still be watching, but from further away than the moon. But the apes manage to free the Red Ghost; will they now team up against our heroes? Nope:

Comments: A highly entertaining story. For the most part the FF stayed away from battling the communists, unlike some of the other Marvel characters (especially Iron Man). The ending is well-seeded with earlier scenes of Kragoff's brutality towards his apes.