WC: STRANGE TALES #124

As we’ve spoken about before, STRANGE TALES had become something of an afterthought in the Marvel line, a title where new prospective writers and artists could be tried out with limited risk. But after 22 issues of this, sales on the book seem to have slid enough for editor Stan Lee to look to make a change, as he often did when presented with such a situation. In this case, he decided to add the Thing, who had turned out to be the most popular member of the Fantastic Four, as a regular co-star in the Human Torch strip. This made it a sort of junior Fantastic Four vehicle, albeit one where it never seemed as though anybody involved was putting forth a whole lot of creativity. And really, the factor that was missing the most was Jack Kirby, who made each issue of FANTASTIC FOUR with the same characters an event not-to-be-missed. That wasn’t really the case with STRANGE TALES.

After a momentary hope that the Torch’s creator Carl Burgos was going to return to the fold to shepherd the Torch strip, Lee was forced to put it back into the hands of Dick Ayers when Burgos proved either unsuitable or intractable. Ayers was a solid artist, but he didn’t possess the visual imagination and skill of Jack Kirby, and so his pages are a bit more stiff and lifeless. and with Ayers handling the majority of the storytelling in the art (the book was produced in the Marvel method, where Lee and Ayers would discuss a story and then Ayers would draw the whole thing up without any written plot or outline) there was only so much lifting Lee could do in the dialogue. This strange bit on the first page where the Thing lifts up a wall of the Torch’s house without demolishing the place feels like a good example of the disconnect. The action doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, but at this point, all Lee can really do is to roll with it.

The story in this issue attempts to redesign and rehabilitate the image of one of the great lame-o villains of the early Marvel days: Paste-Pot Pete. Attired in an artist’s get-up complete with a beret, this paste-gun-wielding criminal had fought the Torch on a couple of occasions already in what should have been a mismatch for the ages. Here, Pete’s old design is discarded in favor of a new one, one that appears to have been inspired by an old Jack Kirby one-off science fiction story from the pre-Marvel days. His look was only half of the problem with Pete, the other half was his dopey name. But it’d take a few more stories until he’d give that up and rechristen himself the Trapster. Anyway, this bozo is out of prison for having assisted the Avengers in their recent struggle against Baron Zemo. And despite the fact that he’s never been able to conquer his for the Torch even with partners, here Pete decides that his best course of action would be to attack the Thing first, and use him to lure the Torch into a trap. The poor sucker.

But this is an action-adventure story, and it wouldn’t be much fun if the Thing simply reduced Pete to a grease stain on Page Six. So instead, Pete does wind up getting the upper hand on the FF’s powerhouse, eventually pasting him into immobility on a wall in his headquarters. He’s then able to send a signal to the Torch, whom he’s able to incapacitate as well with his “asbestos paste”. Asbestos was treated as a kind of miracle fireproof substance in these days, the Torch’s equivalent to Kryptonite. And so both heroes are now stuck to the wall, with Pete preparing to finish them off. There are probably a dozen ways the FF members can liberate themselves and put Pete on the ropes here, but the Thing goes for the simplest one: destroying the wall he’s attached to rather than the paste that’s holding him. And now, because we’re getting short on pages, the tables have turned.

The prospect of facing an unfettered thing is really not a pleasant one to Paste-Pot Pete, despite his new attire, and he swiftly surrenders. And in the wrap-up, the Torch squares accounts with his girlfriend Dorrie Evans, whom he had to race away from in order to answer Ben’s distress call. It’s all pretty by-the-numbers stuff, and lacking the essential qualities that made FANTASTIC FOUR such a compelling read. Put simply, it’s dumb. The Torch and Thing stories would continue to be dumb all the way to the end of their run, veering into almost a self-parody of the Marvel style. This was definitely not any sort of high water mark for either character.

Fortunately, STRANGE TALES still had a series that held strong appeal, even if the story in this particular issue wasn’t one of its strongest. Doctor Strange had been improving by leaps and bounds over the months, driven mainly by the exotic artwork of Steve Ditko, who managed to make the spells and mystical environments feel plausible. Unfortunately, on this issue and a few others, Ditko’s pencils were inked by George Roussos (operating under his pen name of George Bell so that his employers at DC wouldn’t realize that he was moonlighting). Roussos had been known as “Inky” back in his BATMAN days, and his heavy brush line sacrificed a lot of the subtlety of Ditko’s work on this story. It isn’t a great combination.

A pause, as usual, for this stellar house ad plugging two Marvel Annuals of the day, the first AMAZING SPIDER-MAN one (entirely drawn by Ditko, and likely the reason why Roussos had to be drafted into service to ink this Doctor Strange job) and MARVEL TALES #1 which featured the origin stories of six of the newfangled Marvel heroes in the manner of DC’s SECRET ORIGINS ANNUAL some years earlier. These were both some particularly good Annuals of the sort that gave the Annual format its cache in days to come.

The gist of this story is that Doctor Strange finds an enchanted woman wandering around the streets of Greenwich Village. In an attempt to learn her identity and break the spell that keeps her mesmerized, he sends his astral form back in time to where she came from, where he battles a sinister sorcerer, Zota. but even in his spirit form, Dr. Strange is more than a match for this piker, and he returns to the present to reveal the woman’s identity and send her home: she is Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile! This was probably a more dramatic revelation at the time, when the CLEOPATRA film starring Elizabeth Taylor was the most expensive film ever shot, and in the newspapers constantly. Sixty years later, though, it’s a bit of an anticlimax.

And one more house ad before we wrap, this one showing what was going on in FANTASTIC FOUR at the same time this Torch-and-Thing story came out. It also promotes the latest Marvel hero series, DAREDEVIL, which got off to a rocky start, and would only be stabilized when Wally Wood took over the art and plotting on it with issue #5.