BHOC: FANTASY MASTERPIECES #8

On that selfsame trip to Bush’s Hobbies following my graduation from grade school, I indulged in my interest in golden age comics by picking up this issue of FANTASY MASTERPIECES, which reprinted the first battle between the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, a story I had read about previously in Jim Steranko’s HISTORY OF COMICS. These reprint back issues weren’t especially in demand, so they were relatively cheap in 1979. And this particular copy was in extraordinary condition. It looked and felt brand-new, like it had never before been opened until I did it. Which makes what eventually happened to it all the more a shame. Later in the year, when my family went to a Christmas get-together with my Father’s family, I brought the book along. At a certain point, I left it on an end table, just close enough to the crib holding a recently-born cousin. And that’s when disaster struck. The child grabbed the book, tearing its cover in half horizontally. This was a huge tragedy for me, but the adults present at least were able to recover the book and both halves of the cover, so I still had all of the bits. But the fact that the copy had been so utterly pristine made this tragedy smart all the more keenly. A good lesson in being careful where you left your stuff.

The 1940 battle between the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner in the pages of MARVEL MYSTERY COMICS #9 was at once a thoroughly innovative and exciting development and at the same time just about the most obvious thing you could do, having a pair of characters who represented fire and water. It was actually a multi-part story, one that started being built up to in issue #7. In that story, the Human Torch, now employed as a policeman, gets words of the rampage of Namor and heads out to confront him, while Betty Dean, the Sub-Mariner’s love interest, warns Namor that the Torch is on his way. In the next issue, the two stories run in parallel, with Namor wrecking the town in the opening and then the Torch showing up to cope with the damage in the second. All of which led up to this, an actual 22-page combined adventure that featured both characters, with their respective creators Carl Burgos and Bill Everett drawing their guys whenever they turned up. John Compton apparently worked with both men on the script.

The story is 22 pages of glorious nonsense as the two characters trade blows and barbs all across Manhattan island. It’s definitely the precursor to the formula that Stan Lee would use in the Marvel age whenever two heroes met up with one another. And it ended in a stalemate, with the Torch trapped in a plastic tube that prevented him from activating his flame–but if Namor tried to get at the Torch, the oxygen would cause him to ignite. This was originally a cliffhanger at the end of MARVEL MYSTERY #9, but for this reprinting, a bunch of panels from the single-page wrap-up in MARVEL MYSTERY #10 were added to the final page, in which Betty Dean shows up to in essence convince Namor that the story is over and that he should withdraw peacefully–which he does. I have to say, this was a pretty cool thing even so many years after the fact, and you can totally see why the powers-that-be at Timely Comics went back to this well with additional Torch/Namor battles again and again over the next couple of years.

From here, the center portion of the book was strictly B-feature time, containing a trio of short mystery/suspense stories reprinted from the period immediately before Marvel got back into doing super heroes. The first one is nicely drawn by the underrated Don Heck and featured Droom, the living lizard. Larry Lieber’s script tells about a small lizard that’s accidentally exposed to a growth serum similar to the one used by Hank Pym as Giant-Man. After the creature rampages around the city for a number of pages, the military is able to lure Droom onto a rocket that they launch off into outer space. Hooray, crisis averted! But of course, the kicker is that Droom drifts through the void until he comes to another planet, Earth, where he becomes the first dinosaur. Dun-Dun-Duuuuun!

At this point, the Bullpen Bulletins page showed up, which was always a fascinating read for me so many years after the fact. The big news at this time was the impending release of the 1966 MARVEL SUPER-HEROES cartoon series, a show that was already old hat to me (though it had come back into syndication in my area in a big way following the success of the live action INCREDIBLE HULK TV show under the new title THE INCREDIBLE HULK AND FRIENDS). This month, it was so important that a listing of all of the TV stations on which the show would be broadcast was run that the Mighty Marvel Checklist was omitted in the list’s stead. The page also continued the ongoing stunt of listing the names of 26 more members of Marvel’s fan club, which was a pretty compelling perk in terms of joining (assuming you could find your name in whatever issue it wound up turning up in.)

The next story reprinted is noteworthy in that it almost became the prototype for another super hero series. Apparently, inspired by what he was hearing from his road men about the sales of DC’s series THE ATOM, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman ordered editor Stan Lee to come up with a knock-off or two. Stan and Jack Kirby did this by repurposing a one-off fantasy story they’d done about a scientist who invented a reducing formula and was trapped thereafter in an ant hill into the super hero Ant-Man. But apparently, there was some talk about doing the same thing with the protagonist of this other story about a guy trapped in a beehive. In this instance, the beekeeper is a mutant who reduces himself and the criminal who tries to rob him so that they can enter a beehive. At story’s end, there’s an intimation that this was all just the byproduct of hypnosis, but it could have been otherwise if a Bee-Man was needed in addition to or instead of an Ant-Man.

The third and last fantasy story was both written and drawn by Larry Lieber, though Stan as usual tool a story plot credit on it. It was about how an alien race of Gorgons who could turn men to stone sent an envoy back to Earth to see if it might be ripe for conquest. But Medusa, the envoy, learns that her power is ineffective against the people she encounters, and she returns home to call off the invasion–little suspecting that her craft had landed on the ground of a school for the blind, and so her would-be victims couldn’t see her. Stan and company did innumerable variations of this basic concept in the mystery titles over the years.

The last story in this issue was a golden age adventure of the Star-Spangled Sentinel of Liberty, Captain America, by his creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Not that anybody could tell that, as Goodman had their credit (as well as Burgos’ and Everett’s on the lead Torch/Namor adventure) stripped out for this reprint. What’s more, the story’s title had to be changed to conform to the Comics Code; originally, it had been titled “Horror Plays the Scales.” It was about an evil Fiddler who was a Nazi agent, using a bogus employment agency to get Nazi stooges into the homes of prominent Senators so that they could plant explosives that would be triggered from afar when the Fiddler played a certain note in his radio broadcasts. If that seems like an overly complicated way of disposing of some Senators, you clearly don’t have the aptitude to become a top Nazi spy. Fortunately, Cap and Bucky are able to put the pieces together and clobber the Fiddler and his goons.