BHOC: BRING ON THE BAD GUYS

As I talked about yesterday, for Christmas 1978 I was given the four existing volumes in the Marvel Origins trade paperback collection that up to that point existed. I had read SON OF ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS at my local library, but I was happy to have my own copy to go back to and review. But once ORIGINS had been consumed, I made my way into the next book I hadn’t yet read, which was this one. And I have to say, that title is a thing of beauty, at once corny and memorable, a perfect encapsulation of the early Marvel style. I was also especially knocked out by this volume’s painted John Romita cover. All of the covers in this series looked good, but this was the one that was the most spectacular.

BRING ON THE BAD GUYS was once again a compendium of early Marvel stories, but this particular volume had a bit more range to it, as the subject matter didn’t confine itself to first issues. Consequently, it showed off the assorted strips in a more finished, more fully conceived form. The opening segment spotlighted the greatest of all Marvel villains, Doctor Doom. I had already read his first appearance in the FANTASTIC FOUR POCKET BOOKS edition that reprinted the first six issues of FANTASTIC FOUR, but it was nice to see it at full size. Additionally, the later “Origin of Doctor Doom” was also collected here, straight from FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #2 in 1964. Jack Kirby’s work shined here, especially as inked by the uncredited Joe Sinnott in the first story. The second tale was perhaps more polished from Kirby’s standpoint, but inker Chic Stone approached it with an attractive, thick-lined open style that didn’t showcase the same finesse as Sinnott.

Next up was the two-part Doctor Strange story from STRANGE TALES that introduced the otherworldly menace of Dormammu. I had a problem with this story right from the jump. The plot goes: contacted by his old enemy Dormammu, the Ancient One dispatches Doctor Strange to Dormammu’s Dark Dimension in the hopes of staving off an invasion. This, Doc does–and when he returns to the Ancient One’s citadel, his master rewards him for his heroism by giving him a new cloak and an even more powerful amulet. Now, this was part of an attempt to change up the character visually to make him look more like a typical super hero and hopefully increase his popularity. But right from the start, my question was: if Dormammu was this unstoppable threat that had even crippled up the Ancient One in their last encounter, wouldn’t you give your pupil the much better gear before sending him off to face almost certain death? Or did the Ancient One not want to risk the cloak and amulet should Strange get killed? I don’t know–but it bugged me.

Third up was Thor, and a character who’s become a lot more popular over the past decade or so thanks to his appearance in film and on television: Loki. This was the early, classic depiction of the God of Evil, though, who wasn’t even slightly nuanced. He was overtly a schemer and a no-goodnick, and he was such a prevalent problem that at certain points you wondered by All-Father Odin kept letting him back into the house. This chapter opens with a trio of Tales of Asgard back-ups that lay out Loki’s origins and beginnings, as inked by Vince Colletta. And they are rough. I know there are some who like Colletta’s inking over Kirby, especially on THOR, but I’m not one of them. Fortunately, the full-length story that follows was delineated by Frank Giacoia, probably Kirby’s most faithful inker in the Marvel Age, though he didn’t work over him all that often.

Next, we were into a trio of stories spotlighting the beginnings of the Red Skull from TALES OF SUSPENSE. The issue before these stories, Kirby and Lee had reintroduced the character by adapting his first story from the 1940s in CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS #1.

Lee & Kirby & Simon: Captain America Before and After 3

But there were facets of the character that the pair wanted to change and update. And so they immediately declare that the Red Skull featured in that story was an impostor, and bring on stage the more formidable genuine article. The inking was handled by Chic Stone and Frank Giacoia in turn, resulting in some lovely pages–even though the Skull himself falls away as a concern by the final chapter. He and Captain America would clash many more times over the years.

The next story was a Spider-Man epic featuring the origin of the Green Goblin, the web-slinger’s most mysterious foe in those early days. He’d been running around in the strip for several years, his true identity and purpose concealed from the readers, who made a guessing game out of trying to figure out his identity. But it wasn’t really a fair challenge, as the Goblin’s son Harry Osborn wouldn’t be introduced until well after the Goblin had become a well-established figure, and Norman Osborn himself only turned up two issues before the big reveal (though Steve Ditko had been sneaking a figure who looked like him into the backgrounds of scenes set at Jonah Jameson’s club for months in preparation of the revelation.) This was only the second Spider-Man story drawn by incoming artist John Romita, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at it. Romita would define the wall-crawler’s look during his most popular periods in the 1960s and 1970s, when the series was Marvel’s biggest seller. Even the weak inks of Mike Esposito can’t prevent Romita’s skill from shining through here.

The next piece was a relatively rare collaboration between Lee and artist Gil Kane, an emigree from rival DC/National. After it had gotten off the ground, the Hulk strip notoriously had a difficult time keeping an artist on it, with the result that more pencilers worked on it throughout the 1960s than any other strip. Kane was one of the better ones, and he relished the opportunity to channel some of the dynamism of Jack Kirby into his work, a look that was frowned upon over at his old DC homestead. This two-parter from TALES TO ASTONISH introduces the Abomination, who is essentially a bigger, more monstrous and more powerful version of the title character. Kane swipes a bunch of compositions in these two stories from an early Jack Kirby battle between the Thing and the Hulk. But he makes them his own. There really wasn’t much to the Abomination as a character, but as you’d expect, it’s the intellect of scientist Bruce Banner as much as the rampaging power of his alter ego that finally wins the day.

And the volume ends with an extra-long story starring the Silver Surfer and introducing his arch-foe, the demonic Mephisto. Lee had adopted the Surfer as something of a pet character after Jack Kirby had brought him on stage in an issue of FANTASTIC FOUR, and Lee saw the SURFER series as an opportunity to do something more literate and sophisticated with the medium. In this effort, he was aided by John Buscema, one of the finest draftsmen who ever worked in comics. The story is beautifully rendered, but it gets a bit hung up on Lee’s Summer of Love-influenced pontifications about man’s inhumanity to man and how everybody should just come together in peace and brotherhood. At 11 years old, this wasn’t quite what I wanted from my super hero comics, though the quality of the presentation kept me on board and reading.

So this was another fine collection of vintage Marvel tales, and utterly entertaining. Like the others, it was a book I went back to again and again.