Neal Adams, The X-Men, And The Revolution!

I've sung the praises of Neal Adams before...but I think that many of us just can't conceive what an earthquake, what a thunderclap his arrival on the scene was.

Take, for example, X-Men #55 (1969).

Granted it looks as if deadlines or some such made a bit of a dog's breakfast out of this. Layouts by Don Heck, pencils by Werner Roth, inks by Vince Colletta....

I'm not harshing on the art here--I've made no secret that I'm a fan of Don Heck's 60s work, and while this isn't Kirby, the many hands produced perfectly serviceable super-hero fare.

Pay special note to the layouts, the portrayal of emotion and power and speed.

Then, imagine yourself reading that in the day, and then, exactly one month later, being presented with this:

That "introducing" is a bit misleading...X-Men #56 wasn't even Adams' first Marvel work, let alone his first super-hero joint.

But here we have the same characters, same costumes, same powers...and it's like this comic book is coming from a different universe than last issue:

Obviously Tom Palmer was a big help here, too (Adams did his own colors during most of his X-Men run, so he gets extra credit there.). But Adams' experience in the advertising world, having to draw realistic characters for ads, blossomed into this incredibly different looking "photo-realism" that grabbed your adrenal gland and didn't let go!

Adams had already been making waves with the Deadman strip and other books at DC. But good gosh, just picture having read #55 four weeks earlier, and then reading this!!

Of course, it seems that not too many did pick it up, because despite some great stories and mind-blowing art, the Thomas/Adams run was insufficient to save the book from cancellation.

Soon enough, Neal would join up with Denny O'Neil for their famous Batman and Green Lantern/Green Arrow runs.

But these X-Men books, where the solid-but-staid-and-maybe-even-boring style was replaced, without warning or transition by a new, incredibly dynamic and kinetic style? That's where the revolution was, brother. And comics woulds never be the same again.

Same Fight, Different Artists

Some of you are old enough to remember this story...

...where, as part of a game, the Grandmaster And Kang were sending some of the Avengers bopping through time and space to fight other folks, so the villains could resolve a wager.

And The Vision, Yellowjacket and the Black Panther ended up in 1941, fighting Namor, The original Human Torch, and a much younger Captain America!!

That story was written by Roy Thomas, and 8 years later, he was writing the Invaders! So he decided to re-present that fight, from the Invaders' point of view!! It's good to be Roy!

So, this creates the perfect opportunity to compare and contrast the styles of different artists depicting the same scenes!

I'll  present several scenes from the tussle. The first panels from each scene are from Avengers #71 (1969), drawn by Sal Buscema and inked by Sam Grainger. Those will be followed by the same scene from Invaders Annual #1 (1977), as drawn by Frank Robbins and inked by Frank Springer!

Enjoy!!

1969

1977

1969

1977

1969

1977

1969

1977

1969

1977

1969

1977

1969

1977

Well, that should be a help to someone's art history doctoral thesis, right?

Manic Monday Triple Overtime--The One Thing That Has Been Wrong With Every Fantastic Four Movie!!

As you may recall, for a very brief period in 1976, Ben Grimm was transformed back into a normal human, and because the Fantastic Four's incorporated status legally required them to have four super-powered members (oh, Roy...), Reed came up with an exo-skeleton for Ben to wear...

OK, here's the most important panel:

"You always did, old buddy."

The Thing had always moved a "bit jerky, like somethin' out of a Harryhausen flick!" Always!!

See, that's what attempts to make Fantastic Four movies have missed. Screw the costumes, to heck with CGI. Ben Grimm should be moving around like some of these guys:


See? That's how you make a movie with the Thing in it!!

Roy Thomas and Reed Richards tell us how the Thing really moves in Fantastic Four #171 (1976), which was the first comic that I ever bought for myself, and thus is responsible for the past 7+ years of shenanigans at this site....

If You Can't Be With The Avengers You Love, Love The Avengers You're With

The Hulk is on a rampage with potentially devastating consequences, so Thunderbolt Ross calls in the Avengers for help. However, he's not too happy about who shows up:


Vaguely?? Really? I mean, Quicksilver was front page headlines all over the world when he joined in the first Avengers roster turnover.

And when the Scarlet Witch, Black Panther, and Hawkeye-As-Goliath show up, well, he's still going to be making snarky comments:

What an ungrateful buffoon, eh? You'd think the fastest man alive (Marvel version), a hyper-powerful android, a mutant with power over probability, a super-strong giant, and a master strategist and fighter (and king!) would be enough to satisfy him. And indeed, these "yardbirds" do manage to turn back the Hulk (although they can't capture or defeat him), despite Ross' misgivings.

Roy Thomas was writing both Hulk and Avengers at the time. I wouldn't be surprised if he meant Ross' whining to be a veiled response to the many fans at the time who were bemoaning that the Avengers "didn't have enough power" and "weren't stars" and wanted the Big Three back on the team. You got that a lot in the Avengers letters column at the time, and Roy using this team to beat back the Hulk may have been his answer to that.

Or, just maybe, Roy somehow saw through the mists of time to the distant future, when a writer of Justice League would be complaining loudly about not being allowed to use DC's Big Three, and attempting to demean the remaining Leaguers as "Cap's Kooky Quartet."

So Thunderbolt Ross--jerk, allegory for certain fans, or prophet of the future? Maybe all three...

From Incredible Hulk #128 (1970)

A Replacement For The Sentry??

OK, so just about everybody hated the Sentry, at least as applied by Marvel--the hero who never really existed, but was jammed like a square peg into the round hole of Marvel's continuity.

Yeah, the idea of a long-lost Stan Lee character was vaguely clever. But the clumsy execution--he was Hulk's best friend!! He was Reed's best friend!! He taught Tony Stark to stop drinking!!--and Marvel's refusal to let the concept remain a cute one-off mini-series basically led to large chunks of fandom really, really really despising the character.

Well, he's dead now (for awhile, at least). So what are we gonna do for Silver Age character-insertion based retcons?

Well, I've got an answer. Instead of a fictional "lost Stan Lee character," how about an actual lost Roy Thomas character?!?

Marvel Super-Heroes was a giant-sized anthology title--every issue featured a full-length original lead story (Captain Marvel, Doctor Doom, Black Knight) and a bunch of reprints in the back. On the last page of issue #20 (1969), we had the following house ad:

Sounds exciting, right? Too bad it never happened. Starting with that next issue, Marvel Super-Heroes went all-reprint. So no Starhawk story, no "mind-bending new concept," no one "blasting his way across two centuries."

Well, that happens. But the odd thing? Even though the story was done, it was never published anywhere. A Roy Thomas script with a (possibly) exciting new character, art by Dan Adkins, even the cover was done:

I'll let other, smarter websites do the detective work here. Apparently somebody at Marvel felt this first story didn't work, and they didn't want to have the character make his debut in a bad light, and so they pulled it to re-draw and re-write it. But that never seems to have happened.

Once again going to a better blog, Rip Jagger's Dojo presents several pages from the unpublished story...go take a look!

So...we have an actual honest-to-gosh "long-lost character" from one of Marvel's early giants, just waiting to have someone revive him (although, obviously, he might need a name change). Here's someone Marvel can go back and retcon into old stories, and he ACTUALLY existed (sort of).

Folks, hop on board the bandwagon, write letters to Joe Quesada, flood the message boards, and let's make Starhawk into the Sentry for the second decade of the 21st century!!

(And this time, make him suck less...)

Maybe Roy Needed To Keep A Chart Or Something...

Don't get me wrong--I love Roy Thomas. He had a manic creativity and drive in his stories that make them well nigh impossible to put down.

But sometimes, in his early days, he seemed ridiculously eager to out-Stan Stan. And to that effect, he'd ratchet up the melodramatic dialogue and inter-character conflict to 11.

And sometimes he was so intent on doing that, he'd sorta lose track of his characterizations.

Case in point--Henry Pym in Avengers #58 (1968):

And the same Henry Pym in Avengers #66 (1969):

Oh, Henry...

Then again, Pym had recently had a severe mental breakdown and forgotten he was even Hank Pym...so maybe that would account for the change of mind on Vision's voice...Roy was just subtly letting us know how crazy Pym was, right?

Nah.

Then again, there's a fair chance this also had an impact of Pym's problem brain:

Man, Barry Smith was trippin' eh?