Saga Of Annihilation!

 

Forty-three years ago almost to the month, I and several other college students in a media-related course were invited to our professor's home for an informal gathering with his family to watch the premiere of the new "Battlestar Galactica" television series on ABC. With the amount of press the show was receiving, coasting as it did on the reception of the wildly successful "Star Wars" film a year and a half earlier, there was a good deal of curiosity as to the show's concept as well as the quality of its production values considering its multi-million-dollar price tag--and our professor, who enjoyed cataloguing such media events and related trivia, had his VCR all set up to record the three-hour special. (There's no telling what he eventually did with all those videocassette tapes he must have amassed by the time VCRs finally bit the dust, but he no doubt enjoyed the run while it lasted.)

Things didn't end well for Galactica as a weekly series (at least where ABC was concerned)--yet Marvel was still able to reap some benefits from the show, the first being an adaptation of part of its premiere, "Saga of a Star World," for magazine publication in its Marvel Super Special publication, which hit the stands a month later.

Origins, Redux

New readers to a Marvel book didn't have to wait too long before they were given a re-telling of the character's origin, whether in a cover-to-cover issue or in capsulized form in the middle of the current story. A complete issue dedicated to an origin tale was something of a rare treat. Typically, the first publication of a character's origin only took up a partial amount of space in that first issue, leaving room for seeing the character in action to presumably motivate the reader into picking up the next issue. In the case of the Fantastic Four, for instance, their origin was handled in five pages, before they went on to deal with the Mole Man.

The team would receive a more expansive origin issue eleven years later, in issue #126; yet prior issues would make sure to sustain interest in their origin by condensing it to a few panels and weaving it into the events of the featured story. For example, the team's origin was tailor-made for inclusion in a story such as "A Visit With the Fantastic Four"--and nearly eight years later, when Reed was making another attempt to cure the Thing, it seemed the perfect time for his thoughts to drift back to when it all started:

Iron Man, by contrast, seemed to have a tough time out of the gate, in his own title and away from the buffer that Tales Of Suspense provided him--and so, even though he received a full origin issue with his first appearance, he would be granted another one as part of the current storyline taking place in Invincible Iron Man #47. Another character, Daredevil, appeared to be in the same boat--his first issue a complete portrait of his origin, supplemented shortly afterward with another origin tale in issue #53. It would become more difficult to tie Iron Man's origin to the Vietnam War period (eventually, it would be completely revised in terms of time and place)--but, thanks to the basic elements of DD's origin, it would be easier to keep his origin intact, needing only to glaze over the time period.

Just as with the FF, it would be eleven years later before Daredevil's origin tale was dusted off and given a few tweaks. Only in this case, with two full issues dedicated to his origin (we can safely omit issue #1, since #53 doesn't stray from it to any great degree), it becomes more interesting to take a close look at how these issues parallel each other as well as their deviations.