Snakes In The Glass!

These are two of my all-time favorite comic books. Underneath the Marie Severin cover above we find an Avengers team drawn by veteran inker Frank Giacoia. Apparently Giacoia didn't like to pencil, but preferred what he considered the less onerous task of inking.

But as the page above showcases, he's pretty dang good.  With Sam Grainger on inks his is a very handsome issue with some nifty panel designs. But when it comes to artwork the next issue is the absolute gem.

If you waterboarded me and forced me to pick only one cover as my favorite this one might be it. Outstanding and dramatic composition by John Buscema with sterling inks by Tom Palmer. If I could only have one art team they are the team. The Avengers have never (and I include George Perez in this) looked better than when Buscema and Palmer busted out for an amazing sequence of comics.

Now I haven't said much about the story so far. But in this one we meet for the first time Monica Lynne, the lady who will become a romantic interest for the Black Panther. The story stars the Panther as he takes on a new incarnation of the Sons of the Serpent. The story revolves around to TV hosts, one white and one black  but both vituperative and more than willing to stoke the racial animus which percolates at all times in American society. Roy Thomas says quite a bit and says it quite well about the power of mass media to move attitudes and form opinion. Something we need to pay more attention to even in our own time. Oh the Avengers win, but you knew that.

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Marvel Super-Heroes - The Demon And Doom!

Doctor Doom was a villain who got above his station, demanding and actually getting the treatment usually reserved for respected heroes. Doom, a complex character intricately linked into the saga of the Fantastic Four time and again, but always failed to finish them off. And despite being thought dead himself, always managed to survive and turn up to threaten the world all over again. A master of science in Marvel Super-Heroes #20 we encounter Doom's supernatural roots by way of his Romany ancestry.

This comic produced by Stan Lee's stalwart brother Larry Lieber with help from Roy Thomas and Frank Giacoia and inker Vinny Colletta features Doc Doom facing off against another Fab 4 enemy -- Diablo. The deadly alchemist from days gone by seeks Doom's assistance in taking control of Earth's satellites giving the deadly duo power over all of the planet. To woo Doom's help Diablo presents him with a lovely woman from Doom's past named Valeria. But in the end Doom defeats Diablo and loses Valeria too when she rejects him for becoming the villain he is.

This is the finale of Marvel Super-Heroes brief one year (or thereabouts) run as a "showcase" for Marvel. Despite the promise of a story about an intriguing hero called "Starhawk" by Dan Adkins, he'd have to wait for Marvel's prozine Marvelmania Magazine to get published some years later.

The next issue of Marvel Super-Heroes would be all reprint, and awesome reprints too, in what I've always considered one of Marvel's single finest individual issues.

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Marvel Super-Heroes - Captain Marvel Arrives!

Getting their mitts on the "Captain Marvel" name was quite the coup by the Marvel Bullpen back in the day. Fawcett's "Big Red Cheese" had been driven from the comics stands by a faltering market and a lawsuit from the boys at DC Comics and since that time the name was part of the lore of comics. Appropriated by Myron Fass for his notorious break-apart android in the previous year, the name was out there for Stan Lee to snag and snag it he did. But what to do with it? Well there was always the Kree, a mysterious gang of aliens which had been giving the Fantastic Four trouble in their magazine and Stan decided to introduce us to a hero from their ranks, a man of worthy character who was poised to become a hero.

"The Coming of Captain Marvel" in MSH #12 is a story told with as much speed as it was concocted. A spaceship descends to Earth and a man named "Mar-Vell" is saying farewell to the woman he loves, a medical officer named Una. His superior officer, Colonel Yon-Rogg is harassing him to be about his mission and we learn in short order that Yon-Rogg has designs on the lovely Una himself and that in all likelihood Captain Marv-Vell is being sent to his doom on an impossible mission. Out he pops onto the landscape of Earth and we learn that cannot breathe Earth's air or be without his helmet for more than an hour. He is stronger on Earth but it's suggested his uniform is somewhat responsible for that. And to complicate matters further he's surprised to find he's been dropped off in the middle of a United States military testing ground and a missile is just about to launch. The radiation from his uniform is enough to cause it to fail and also that same radiation leads troops right to him despite his mighty leaps to cover the territory. Only his "Universal Beam Blaster" can save the day when he uses black light to blind his pursuers and hops into the night and relative safety. He hitchhikes to an unnamed town and checks into a hotel under a variation of his real name "C. Marvel". Almost immediately he is frozen in a beam from his own spacecraft and Yon-Rogg beams down a wrist monitor through which Mar-Vell can be tracked and communicated with at any time and sure enough a message comes through from the Kree Imperial Minister of the Supreme Intelligence wishing him well reminding him he will die if he fails. With that the hour is up and our hero must don his helmet again to breathe as looks out onto the night sky and ponders his fate.

With artwork by Gene Colan and Frank Giacoia this one looks good enough, but does have a feel of having been done under a gun, but then that was almost the norm at Marvel. It's the story which always startles me a little. Stan was famous for giving his heroes weaknesses and that was a key to his storytelling, but with Captain Marvel it's almost like he gets a new weakness or limitation every other page, and as a spy he is a great big bust making mistake after mistake. Still and all he does wear a nifty uniform (I like it a lot even if most folks don't) and that counts for something. He gets another try-out in the next issue and that's up tomorrow.

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