BHOC: MARVEL COLLECTORS’ ITEM CLASSICS #19

Here’s another book that I picked up on my post-grade school graduation trip to Bush’s Hobbies in Ronkonkoma. I had been slowly filling in a complete run of MARVEL COLLECTORS’ ITEM CLASSICS, the title that eventually changed its name to MARVEL’S GREATEST COMICS and in which the earliest FANTASTIC FOUR stories were reprinted. I wanted to read the stories, and this was a far more affordable way to do so than trying to purchase the actual originals. Plus, it also gave me exposure to classic stories featuring other characters, in this particular issue Iron Man, Doctor Strange and the Watcher. Strangely, I wasn’t as active in picking up the early issues of MARVEL TALES, which was in a similar squarebound format and which contained the earliest adventures of Spider-Man, Thor, the Human Torch and others. The fantastic Four were still my go-to series for Marvel, so that’s where my interests centered.

The opening story in this issue came from FANTASTIC FOUR #27 and was the last issue of that series inked by George Bell (operating under the pseudonym of George Bell to throw off his DC editors who might not like him moonlighting for the competition.) Roussos had history going back to the earliest days of Batman, but his inking on these early FF stories was really rough. He did manage to capture something of the raw energy that penciler Jack Kirby was putting down, but his rendering also tended to make pages look a bit muddy and crude. In later years, George would come on staff at Marvel as the firm’s designated cover colorist. Otherwise, this was a fun romp by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, one that showed them gaining greater confidence and command over the characters they’d created and the evolving world in which they existed.

The story is one of significance, bringing to a close the Reed-Sue-Namor romantic triangle that had been running since the Sub-Mariner was revived. Here, Namor spirits Sue away intent on trying to woo her, which leads Reed to storm off on a solo rescue mission to get her back. Ben and Johnny seek out the help of Doctor strange in order to themselves give chase. Much of the story is dedicated to an all-out battle between the Sub-Mariner and Mister Fantastic, well-choreographed by Kirby of course and showcasing that Reed has a lot more fight in him than some give him credit for. At the story’s close, Sue makes her choice perfectly clear–she’s with Reed, not Namor (which hasn’t kept assorted writers over the years from revisiting the Sue/Namor relationship) This paved the way for the eventual wedding of Reed and sue a little bit more than a year later.

The next story featured Iron Man and was in the middle of an extended multi-part sequence in which Tony Stark was forced to remain in his armor full time to keep his injured heart beating, causing his friends to think that the Armored Avenger has perhaps done away with his employer Stark. This was a tricky sequence for me to follow, both because MARVEL COLLECTORS’ ITEM CLASSICS didn’t reprint all of the chapters in the proper sequence. So it often felt as though I was missing bits, even when I had two contiguous parts. Anyway, by this time, writer Stan Lee had worked out that it was the continuing soap opera elements that helped keep readers coming back, and so he steered into those aspects of the series in a big way. After an initial year-to-18-months in which Iron Man kind of languished as a character, all of a sudden interest in his series started to grow.

In these efforts, Stan was aided greatly by artist Don Heck, who wound up doing a lot of the plotting as the pair worked “Marvel style.” Heck’s artwork wasn’t as dynamic or exciting as that of Jack Kirby, but he was great at drama and he drew good-looking ladies, so he was able to give Iron Man’s world an attractive sheen. In this story, Iron Man’s old foe the Mandarin takes advantage of the supposed illness of Tony Stark to strike at the industrialist with a deadly ray that destroys the apartment that he was staying in. Fortunately, Iron Man was elsewhere when the ray hit, but now everybody thinks that Stark is really and truly dead. With bigger fish to fry, Iron Man heads behind the Iron Curtain for a showdown with his would-be killer, only to be undone by the Mandarin’s colossal-sized minion. he awakens attached to a giant wheel–a cliffhanger that I remembered dimly from the MARVEL SUPER-HEROES animated cartoon series, which I’d seen some years earlier. In reprinting this story, nobody bothered to change the final blurb, which plugged a Captain America story for the issue of TALES OF SUSPENSE that was the source of this reprint but which wasn’t included in this issue. didn’t mind that, though–I always preferred my reprints untampered with.

The third story in this issue was a Tale of the Watcher from the short-lived series that used him effectively as a horror host, introducing and narrating one-off fantasy stories of the sort that used to be ubiquitous throughout Marvel’s line. it was both written and illustrated by Larry Lieber, Stan’s younger brother, who worked in and around the Bullpen for a number of decades. It’s about a space explorer who searches the stars desperately for another civilization as advanced as that of humanity. But all he finds is a race of primitives. But had he looked closer, he might have found the ancient plaque that marked the creation of that world’s first Cobalt Anti-Matter Bomb, a weapon so devastating that it wiped out that civilization, reducing them once more to simple primitives. The explorer, having missed this, returns to Earth and gives up his quest, and agrees to go to work for his brother’s Used Aero-Car company. It’s a bit of a blah slog without much of a point or a twist, but hey, they can’t all be classics.

The final story, and the best-looking in this issue, was illustrated by Steve Ditko. It was a self-contained Doctor Strange adventure, one that followed up on the classic Dormammu two-parter that had ended with Strange receiving among other things a new red Cloak of Levitation that made him look a little bit more like a proper super hero. I had previously read this story earlier in the first DOCTOR STRANGE Pocket Books edition.

BHOC: DOCTOR STRANGE POCKET BOOKS #1

But it was still nice to get to experience it at full size rather than the reduced pages of that paperback. In it, Doc comes to the aid of the apprentice to a malevolent sorcerer known as the Demon, who wants to split with his master having discovered just how evil the guy is. You would think that the name The Demon might have provided a small clue in that regard. Anyway, Doc cleans the Demon’s clock, showing off the power of his new cloak and amulet in the process. There isn’t much more to it than that, apart from Ditko’s always-evocative mystic artwork.