Number 1071


Ditko x 4


These four stories drawn by Steve Ditko were originally published in Marvel Comics' Journey Into Mystery just after Thor became the main feature. Ditko's pages are masterpieces of composition. I loved these stories when they were published, and while the stories themselves are typical for Marvel Comics at the time, the artwork makes up for any shortcomings in the plots.

Did Ditko work "Marvel-style" on these stories, getting a springboard plot from Stan Lee, drawing them, then Lee would step in and write the dialogue? Or did Stan give him a script? I've never known how he and Lee worked on these five-page shorts during that period.

From Journey Into Mystery #84, 1962:





From Journey Into Mystery #85, 1962:






From Journey Into Mystery #86, 1962:





From Journey Into Mystery #92, 1963:

Number 1029


Leiber and Fox


Someone did me a big favor by posting online the backup stories from Marvel's Journey Into Mystery #83 to 104. I bought that comic regularly. Among the stories I remember were the five-pagers by Larry Leiber and Matt Fox.

I thought Leiber's art in those days was kind of rough, and combined with Fox's busy pen inking gave the stories their own oddball look. Like a lot of other fanboys in those days I dismissed it as not being up to the standards of Marvel artists like Kirby and Ditko. I didn't know that Leiber would find a career at Marvel, but at the time I also didn't know he was Stan Lee's brother. To his credit Leiber built a career in comics. He worked at it and got better. I also didn't know that Matt Fox's art was what we'd now call outsider art. He had a particular and peculiar vision. His Weird Tales artwork is considered classic, and here are three of my favorite covers by him:



Fox had also done interior drawings for Weird Tales, and comic book work in the early '50s for Stan Lee and a couple of other publishers.

Nowadays I find the Leiber/Fox team's artwork charming, if I may use that word. I like it and appreciate it more now than when I first saw it.

Here are four of the stories from that online source. "The Purple Planet" is from Journey Into Mystery #98, "The Unreal" from JIM #100, "The Enemies" from JIM #101, and "The Menace" from JIM #102.

The panel reproduced on the top of this page gave my high school buddy Ron and I a big laugh in 1963. We thought it looked like some kind of weird alien urination. It was the interpretation of immature minds, but hey, I still think that's what it looks like.

Tales of Asgard

As Marvel changed its focus from monsters to superheroes, the new characters quickly took over the featured spot in some of the line's existing comics. The Human Torch quickly became the headliner in Strange Tales, while Tales of Suspense picked up Iron Man and Tales to Astonish (initially) featured Ant-Man, while Journey into Mystery became the flagship of the Mighty Thor.

However, those comics did not drop their monster/horror stories entirely. At least, not at first. Journey into Mystery #95 (the 13th issue featuring Thor) included a Steve Ditko thriller called The Tomb of Tut-Amm-Tut and Save Me from the Lizard Men, in addition to the cover feature, The Demon Duplicators. Stan was hedging his bets at least slightly on the costumed crimebusters. But with JiM #97 he made it clear that he was going to push Thor in that magazine, by adding a five-page Tales of Asgard feature, which ran for several years. The stories were clearly intended to give us more background on the supporting characters of Thor.

The problem, back then, is that the feature ran a relatively brief five pages, and seldom tied into current events in the main Thor stories, so that it was hard to get excited about reading each one. Plus even with a friend's pretty good collection of Marvels to read back then there were always missing issues to contend with, so I never really took a hard look at the series.

I'm going to rectify that a bit starting today; I'll do it like the Iron Man run where I'll tackle several issues in a row so that I can hit on larger themes than just plot points.

In the first story we just get the who begat who stuff. Odin was the grandson of the first god, who's name was Buri. The gods battled constantly against the Frost Giants; one suspects that those from Scandinavia might have special concerns about the cold. The only signicant negative I see to the opening tale is that it is told completely by narration and not dialog.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but one of the singular reasons why comics have been so successful is because all readers instinctively hate long narrative passages and love dialog. The art obviates the need for the boring descriptions and thus we can get to what we really like, which is the interaction between characters.

However, by the second story Stan is more on his game, as he lets Odin and the Frost Giants exchange some insults before the former disposes of the latter. I do have to chuckle a bit at Odin's throne:



I can only think of one kind of throne that a ruler should be on where his knees are higher than his stomach. ;)

The third story is back to the narrative style. Odin battles Surtur, king of the fire demons. In the course of the story, we learn it was this battle that causes the earth to rotate on its axis and also resulted in the creation of the Moon. Note that many religious systems originated in attempts to explain the nighttime sky and other observed cosmological phenomena.

By the fourth story, Thor as a boy (and his vile brother Loki) have been introduced. They collaborate to recover some apples stolen by three storm giants. And in the end:



That's an interesting little detail that I didn't know before; earlier in the story I noticed that Thor was using a sword instead of his famed hammer.

The fifth story returns to the form of the prior one, where Loki plots to get the hammer rather than Thor, but fails, when his brother delays an invasion of Asgard (that Loki had orchestrated) long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

We continue with the story of Thor rescuing Sif from Hela, Goddess of Death; IIRC this was one of Sif's only appearances before she became Thor's official girlfriend at the end of Thor #136. Thor offers his life for hers; the nobility of this (offered but not accepted) sacrifice is what finally wins him the hammer.

In JiM #103 we learn that Thor had a key part to play in the Norse version of Adam and Eve:



Interesting stuff; I wonder if it caused any controversy at the time. You know how it is; if you present the Norse myths as real aren't you denying the myths of other religions?

It is announced at the end of this story that the next episode will feature bios of the major characters in Asgard, starting with Heimdall, so this seems like a good breaking point.

Number 477


Two cups of Joe


Like coffee? I love coffee, but after my recent surgery didn't have any for a week. I'm feeling well enough to be sitting here now with a cup of joe and two stories by Joe Sinnott.

"I Am A Robot" is from Journey Into Mystery #90, 1963, and "Shark Bait" is originally from 1954, scanned here from Marvel's 1976 Weird Wonder Tales #16.

I'm a fan of Joe Sinnott, and you can either click on his name in the links beneath this posting or enter his name in the search engine above to see the rest of the Joe Sinnott stories I've posted. I like Sinnott because he was like several others of my favorite Golden Age artists: He could draw anything. That he is best known now for his inking over Jack Kirby is OK, but as much as I liked that work I really liked his solid solo drawing style.

(SPOILER ALERT. Here's where I tell you what's wrong with the endings.)

The stories, though...eh. They both have fatal flaws in their plots. I don't expect other writers to observe Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, but to use half of the first law and ignore the second half is more designed for a snap ending than logic."A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." In the shark story, it seems the criminals who fed jewels in smaller fish to the shark may have forgotten that like all critters, human and otherwise, sharks gotta excrete, so they were taking a big chance that by the time they got the shark their jewels weren't shark scat all over the bottom of the ocean.