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Robert Greenberger

by Robert Greenberger

Strange Tales #73

In the 1950s, monsters were a staple of Atlas Comics, the forerunner of marvel Comics, and they filled books with titles like strange Tales of the Unusual, Astonishing, world of Fantasy, strange Worlds; journey into Mystery; Tales to Astonish; Tales of Suspense, and amazing Adventures, Stan Lee and/or his brother Larry Leiber composed the vast majority of these short tales, cramming three per issue, with all manner of creatures and aliens and demons. Over time, they handled bizarre, nearly unpronounceable names Gomdulla, Zetora, Rorgg, and Rommbu. What made these stories palatable, keeping sales strong through the back end of the decade, was the imaginative artwork of Jack Kirby.

The King had returned to Martin Goodman’s company after a falling out with DC Comics and he churned out pages as fast as possible to keep the titles fed. then an amazing thing happened: the line was required to contract when their supplier went out of business and they were reduced to being carried by Independent News, DC’s distributor. and then Goodman heard DC’s growing line of new superhero comics were selling so he told Lee to create his own team of heroes. all of us know what occurred next.

But what never gets enough attention is that these hundreds of pages of stories became a vital training ground for Lee and Kirby to get into synch with one another. Yes, a seventeen year old Lee helped Kirby and Joe Simon at the beginning of their careers, but this was different – here they were working together and learning how to feed off one another. Without this period of work, the sudden success of fantastic four and all that followed may not have happened.

Monsters volume One: The marvel Monsterbus

You now have a chance to see for yourselves how this worked with Monsters volume One: The marvel Monsterbus, the first of two books collecting all the Kirby-drawn stories from this era. The 872-page collection will be a treat as it also gives you the first hints of names and characters that would prove formative in the early 1960s: Thorr the Unbelievable; a wooly, alien Hulk; the eight-foot-tall Magneto. For the record, the material is culled from strange Tales of the unusual #7, Astonishing #56, world of fantasy #15-19, strange Worlds #1, 3-5; strange Tales #67-70, 72-86; journey into mystery #51-70; Tales to Astonish #1, 3-21; Tales of Suspense #2-19, amazing Adventures #1-2.

Strange Tales #84

“The six- and eight-page tales that populated interchangeably ginger-wiggling titles like journey into Mystery, Tales of Suspense, and Tales to Astonish were pure Twilight zone in their twist-ending moral lesson. They featured contributions from several of Lee’s longtime stable of artists, but it was the collaborations with Ditko and Kirby that held hints about what was to come. Kirby provided large-scale visions of amazing alien technology and brutish monsters…” composed Sean Howe in marvel Comics the Untold Story.

“Along with a few surviving western titles, much of Kirby’s output was now movie-matinee-style monsters with names like Monstrom and Titano and Groot and Krang and Droom. Lee would feed plots to his younger brother, Larry Leiber, who would then write them into scripts and send them to Kirby. With every successive cover, they became more humorous in their repetition: it was always a hold of tiny, high-tailing humans shrieking, falling down, and pointing fingers as they revealed the mind-boggling danger that pursued them.”

Journey into mystery #62

There were times Kirby arrived with one story, expecting to pick up another and Lee hadn’t handed a plot over to his brother for scripting. right then and there in the tiny office, the two men quickly hashed out a plot so Kirby wouldn’t leave empty-handed. It was these experiences that proved providential.

“In later years, Jack was of two mind about these stories,” composed mark Evanier in Kirby King of the Comics. ‘They were among the poorest-paying of his career, but he saw in them the remove antecedents of the marvel super-heroes. There was one story about a brute called the Thing, and several creatures named the Hulk. beyond the names, there was an underlying sensibility: The ‘monsters’ were not all monsters, the ‘good guys’ were not 100 percent good, and the attainment of great power was not without its downside.”

Tales of Suspense #15

And of course, first Lee and then subsequent writers would dip back into the scary tales and pluck some of the more interesting creatures for use in the marvel Universe, leading to the current Monster event, which prompted this collection. page through it and see how many you recognize from more current titles.

Purchase

Monsters volume One: The marvel Monsterbus

Classic covers fom the Grand Comics Database.