Lost Crossovers: When Captain Marvel Met the Human Torch–in 1963!

I got asked about this story this week by Marvel editor Wil Moss, who had learned about it for the first time. And while I told him that I hadn’t covered it largely because the story in question had been translated into English and serialized in the pages of TwoMorrows’ magazine ALTER EGO, edited by Roy Thomas, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to shine a bit more of a spotlight on it. So here is the story about how the original Captain Marvel met and teamed up with the original Human Torch in 1963–despite the fact that both characters came from different publishers and that they’d both been out of circulation in the United States for about a decade at that point.

The story in question ran in the 1963 Annual for O GLOBO JUVENIL (“Kids World”), a Brazilian publication that for years had reprinted translated American comic book stories for its local readership. The company had sourced those reprints from a variety of different publishers, leading to characters from different companies sharing space side-by-side in these Brazilian pages. To the eyes of the Brazilian readers, there wasn’t any separation between them–they were all features born from the same publisher.

The Human Torch’s feature began being translated and reprinted in Brazil starting in 1940, with Captain Marvel and his Marvel Family brethren joining them in 1943. Both characters were popular, but eventually the reprint material ran out once the Human Torch had been cancelled in the United States, and the character disappeared.

On the other hand, Captain Marvel’s adventures continues to be published in Brazil up through 1968–the character was simply too popular for he publisher to drop, even when material to reprint ran out. Much as happened in the United Kingdom, where local creator Mick Anglo reinvented Captain Marvel as Marvelman, giving him a British once-over paint job and thereafter producing new stories, creators in Brazil similarly produced their own bootleg Captain Marvel adventures in the style of the American originals. Nobody in the United States was any the wiser, and the lawsuit that had put Fawcett Publications out of the Captain Marvel business didn’t appear to extend internationally.

All of which is what led to this historic team-up between Captain Marvel and the original Human Torch. The artist on this tale was Rodriguez Zelis, though its author’s credit has been lost to the pages of history. I should also probably mention that the story was translated by John G. Pierce and was serialized in ALTER EGO #52-60, which is where I’m sourcing these pages. Hopefully, they won’t mind me sharing them with you here. Individual issues of ALTER EGO as well as subscriptions to the magazine can be found here:

https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=98_55&zenid=mrtj06gqmastrbq96rpgvvljp0

It seems that there was enough nostalgia for the missing Human Torch series that this story in which Captain Marvel sought out the missing hero was commissioned. This was well before team-ups between different super heroes from different strips became commonplace, so it’s a bit of an outlier.

It’s also worth noting that at the time when this story was being produced and released, Marvel had already introduced the new version of the Human Torch, Johnny Storm, in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR. Indeed, that Torch was at the same moment also headlining a solo series of his own in the pages of STRANGE TALES. But the Marvel characters and their stories wouldn’t be reprinted in the Brazilian marketplace until 1967.

The Cobra, the villain who is responsible for holding the Human Torch captive for years, is treated in this tale as though he’s an old foe of the Torch. But no such character appeared in the Timely stories as far as can be ascertained. So he was either created new for this story or else he’d been featured in an earlier Brazilian-created Human Torch tale at some point in the past.

Here’s the unretouched version of this page as it appeared in the original Annual.

Again, here’s the unretouched version of this page.

Again, the unretouched version.

And finally, the unretouched version of this final page. In Brazil, Toro’s name had been changed to Centelha, or “Spark” as Toro means Bull in Portugese.