Reading through Marvel, 1939 'til today

Every single existing issue of Timely/Atlas/Marvel Comics, in chronological order

[timelyovertime]

Daring Mystery Comics #1

Date of publication: October 30th, 1939

Daring Mystery Comics is the second addition to Timely's line-up. It will be one of the two main auxiliary books until books headlined by a particular character take off; theoretically, its stories are more "daring", but there's not actually a lot of difference from any of the others. The first five issues of Daring though are just compilations of strips that were bought from companies that churned out comics for new publishers who hadn't found their footing yet. As a result they kinda don't matter, so there'll be less to say about them than Marvel.

The first story, & possibly the most interesting in the book's entire run, is the origin story of a hero called the Fiery Mask, alias Jack Castle. And right at the start, he is attacked by a green-skinned man who was completely unresponsive until mysterious green lights triggered him to commit murder. No time to work our way up to adventure, this is Daring, damnit. The green man was one of 9 missing people, & so Castle goes looking for leads to find the other 8, bringing him to a run-down house on the waterfront, where another green guy pulls a gun on him, bringing him down into a subterranean lair for "the Doctor". On the way down, he explains that this Doctor employs treatments & hypnosis to turn people into his green minions; there's a young woman who was to be the next victim, but she has a strong will & Castle has come now, so he'll replace the one they lost. There are also giant vultures to eat the minions who are of no use, meaning Castle has to help his captor to fight their way into the Doctor's clutches. The Doctor turns out to be well over twice Castle's size, who has lived underground for half a century in shame. He has learned advanced technologies, allowing him to master the elements- the wind, lightning, the storm itself- & now seeks to use his army of "living dead" to conquer the world.

Jack Castle, being a learned man, has a strong will & understands the principles of hypnosis, so he shrugs it off. In a rage, the Doctor turns his element-hypnosis machine to full power, & it explodes, but the blast infuses Castle with those natural elements. He now shines like the sun, can melt metal in his hands, blow gusts of wind from his mouth, & lift the giant Doctor like he was weightless. He saves the girl & resolves to use his newfound powers to fight injustice, wearing a red mask to conceal the fact that his face now glows when angered.

Having someone whose body is powered by the elements, instead of controlling them like most weather-themed heroes, is a very cool change of pace... although, this early, I guess the other way around would have been the change. Either way, Fiery Mask is, right at a conceptual level, my favorite Daring hero.

Soldier of Fortune is a short tale centered on a WW1 soldier, the titular John Steele, who takes shelter from artillery inside a house, where a German soldier just so happens to be about to kill a woman with secret information for the allied forces. John saves her, & they hijack a tank to try to get through the enemy line. They go from tank to motorcycle to trench back to motorcycle as the Germans try to stop them, but John punches &/or grenades his way out of every pinch until they find the American general. She jumps in the general's car with the information, & as they drive away, John complains that he had finally found a girl with nerves & she's already gone. There isn't a lot of substance here, but it's entertaining.

Next up is Texas Kid: Robin Hood of the Range. It's a pretty derivative western story- Texas Kid comes into town, finds out that a gang are trying to buy up people's land for cheap by using force, & sets about stopping them. The hook into the plot is fun, the victim dies before he can give any solid leads but one of the criminals dropped his hat, so Texas just starts flaunting his new hat around until its previous owner comes to him. He also has a clever way to bait the gang, by replacing the money they stole with the hat & then tearing it in half to bait their boss into the open, with the other halves as evidence for the sheriff. I think this Texas Kid strip is better 'n all the Masked Raiders combined.

Monako. I think that, without a shadow of a doubt, he is the most powerful character in Timely Comics' catalogue, because his power is basically whatever the hell he wants. People didn't conceive of magic having this pesky thing called "limits" yet so he's just a reality warper. In this story, he saves a young woman named Josie from his nemesis, an evil Asian man called Mr. Muro, & she tells him that Muro has kidnapped her brother Al, a scientist who invented a super-explosive. Monako uses a "vision" to astrally project & find their hideout, then enters by shrinking through the keyhole, & multiplies himself to fight the goons- but he gets caught, Al is tortured, & they're both set to be executed when Al refuses to give Muro the formula. Muro leaves them both alone under a bladed pendulum, but obviously the answer is just for Monako to tell the pendulum to help them. It honest to god responds "Okay!" & cuts their ropes so they can escape, just in time to see Josie arrive outside, & watch Muro kidnap her away to a second hideout. Muro sets another trap to kill her & leaves to Al's lab, where Monako has been waiting for him. As soon as Muro gets jumpscared by Monako, & in the span of a single page, they have a car chase, Muro escapes on a private plane, they happen to hear Josie screaming for help, rescue her, the tugboat explodes, & the heroes have their concluding dialogue. Monako stories are exhausting.

The prose story was much too short for its plot. The first page & a half were dedicated to a horse stampede that devastated an old west town, burning it down & leaving only 5 survivors, with the main character's infant child having been killed. The remaining half a page consisted of rounding up the horses, discovering they all had pieces of metal surgically inserted into their skulls, deducing that they had been sent into a frenzy by a controlled radio-beam, & having a fight with the 6 men responsible. It's a pretty crazy story, & I think could've been really good, if it actually had enough space to tell it.

Flash Foster at Midwestern is a sports story! Kinda. Flash is a star football player. To make winnings by betting against his team, some criminals decide to kidnap his fiancée, Connie, to blackmail him into throwing the big game. Luckily, his nerd friend Shorty finds where they had taken her, & after getting pulled off the field for playing terribly, Flash single-handedly beats up all the armed criminals, saves his girl, & gets back with 4 minutes left in the game, after which the rest of the story is all sportsball. Midwestern wins the big game, getting into the *even bigger* Rose Bowl game next issue.

In Phantom of the Underworld, Detective "Doc" Denton is tasked with taking over a doctor's office undercover in order to catch the gang of a newly released criminal, Perrone. He takes bribes to come on the downlow & remove bullets, that sort of thing. Injects the whole gang with a solution that causes temporary blindness. I don't know why it's called "Phantom of the Underworld" though. He also ends it with a really weird panel where he looks directly at the 4th wall & basically says "My hot nurse is my sidekick now so my next issue will be very pleasant" the story itself is enjoyable but that one panel skeeves me out hard.

The next page is "Wartime Wonders", just some illustrated trivia about like, battleships & fighter pilots. One of the things listed is the existence of a "mystery weapon" made from air & wood that is many times stronger than TNT. I have no idea what that's referring to but am very curious!

The final story this issue is Barney Mullen, Sea Rover. who is hired to take a shipment of gold filigree from Lisbon to Rotterdam, knowing that it's an active war zone where every power involved will try to sink his ship in fear that it's supplies for the enemy. They are fought over by a cruiser, sub, & an airplane, causing some men to mutiny, but Barney wins the fight & pulls into port to get a doctor for the wounded- on hearing he's shipping gold, the harbor officials say they will detain him, so he beats them up too & throws them overboard. Just as the ship comes into view of Rotterdam, the boiler explodes, & everyone rushes to the lifeboats, bemoaning the loss of the cargo- but Barney reveals he had already stashed the filigree in the life boats to be safe, & he's fine losing the ship considering how much he's getting paid for it.

That's the end of Daring Mystery Comics #1. Unlike Marvel's line-up, with several characters you have probably heard the names of, Daring is largely a dead end. But it's even more-so than you might think: every single story (except the prose one & Sea Rover) has a promise of a sequel at the end. Most notably, Flash Foster not only is going to the Rose Bowl next issue, but his sequel hook panel promises the appearance of a sinister villain called "The Dip" as well. Of the 7 comic stories in this issue, though, only 2 will ever get followed up on. A couple more will be revived in the modern era as call-backs, but their Golden Age stories end here. That is generally the fate of these early issues of Daring. Being just bought from another company to fill pages, they don't have dedicated writers or artists to make them regular features. In some cases, that's a good thing, but in others it's a shame.

Next time, we'll be back to Marvel, which will be a weird one for pretty much everybody.

[timelyovertime]

Marvel Mystery Comics #2

Date of publication: October 13, 1939

Starting with the second issue, Marvel Comics gets 'Mystery' added to its title. It's more of a standardized title than a reflection of the contents, as the next book will also be a 'Mystery Comics' & there isn't really a lot of mysteries in either. It could be a case of language evolving over time though, and mild intrigue with an occasional villain reveal was enough to count as proper mystery back then, I'm not sure.

This is the first time we are seeing a cover date too, since the image I used for the previous issue had that corner torn off. Saying on the cover that the comic comes out in December, but then releasing it in October, is just an advertising gimmick to make it seem cutting edge when it first hits the shelves & stops it from seeming out-of-date a couple months later. No idea if comics still do this, but it made trying to find the right order to read them in pretty annoying before I figured out what was going on.

Interestingly, the first page is actually an advertisement for a different publisher's comic. Silver Streak Comics #1 would come out around the same time as Marvel Mystery 2, but it didn't come to have the long-term success of the two big superhero comic companies, & its titular flying speedster is now in the public domain. Timely's cross-promotions wouldn't last long, as their popularity quickly made them self-sufficient. Reading about the Silver Streak's convoluted origin, I can see why he's not the one who stood the test of time.

The following page is a recap of the first Human Torch story, with the framing device of it being notes left by Professor Horton before his death. It's a cool way to get readers up to speed, especially since the changed title might make kids think this isn't the same book. The choice to kill Horton off-screen like this without explanation is odd, but maybe it's just to write out the possibility of him making a second Torch, which would be ironic considering a future development. While I haven't gotten quite that far, I am aware that this death will get retconned anyway, so who knows.

The story starts off at an auto race track with a woman reading the newspaper, who strikes up a conversation with a stranger about the news of Horton's death, revealing that it was because Torch's escape burned his house down. (Which doesn't track with either visual depiction of Torch jumping out through the roof, or the fact that Horton left notes about it- I'm going to err on the side of clumsy early comic book fumbles instead of assuming that's clever foreshadowing for years later.) Little does she know, the stranger she is talking to is none other than the Torch himself, who tells her that Horton deserved it because he wanted to use the Torch to make money. And, I have to point out, Horton did say "WE could make a fortune" in the previous issue, there's not actually any signs that he was being a selfish money-grubber, and Torch's personality in these early stories makes me think that we're not actually supposed to think he's morally justified here so much as he's self-centered & taking his personal offense as more important than a human life. It's not an interpretation that will track with his characterization in the future, so Horton appropriately gets a bad rap going forward, but that's how I read these early stories at least.

In any case, the race begins, but a car locks up & crashes off the track, bursting into flame. Torch rushes down to try saving the driver, but not only is he too late, he's blamed as more cars start to burn, despite the fact that a big red plane keeps swooping down right before each one ignites. After burning a cop's hands because he remains super-heated after turning off the flame, he allows himself to be arrested, & his cellmate luckily happens to be a former member of the racket, telling him it's run by a man named Blackie Ross, who pumps cars full of incendiary rounds so that he always wins with his own car. Which has to be the least subtle form of rigging a bet ever, I think even if I was a child in the 30s I would have noticed a fighter jet shooting at cars until they explode in every race so that the same guy wins every time, even as a burning freak of nature I don't know how Torch got successfully framed for this.

Torch breaks easily out of jail & a few days later is staking out the next race, ready to leap onto the plane when it passes by so he can melt its engine. He catches the pilot, but the plane explodes, destroying all incriminating evidence, so the Torch flees to think of a new plan. The criminals come up with a plan of their own, & Blackie's girlfriend pretends to be the sister of a victim in order to lure the Torch into a trap, a giant vat of water. They load the Torch into a truck & drive him out to a pit where limestone is burned, & dump him in there. Now, if they kept him in the water, it would have been fine, but they dumped the guy whose entire thing is being on fire into a giant kiln, so of course he escapes, & runs overnight (he can leap far, but they haven't decided he can fly yet) to reach the next race just in time for it to begin. As he rushes after Blackie & his goons, the car crashes & the stands burst into flame.

Then he does this. Fire apparently has some degree of sentience, & acknowledges the Human Torch as "their master", so if he yells like this, flames will obey him & disappear. This is easily the most baffling bit of lore I've seen so far.

Blackie's men escape, with Torch in hot pursuit, & we get our first example of a staple of Human Torch stories, both here in the Golden Age & later with Johnny: asbestos as a flame-retardant solution for mundane villains to deal with overwhelmingly literal firepower. It's kinda hilarious in hindsight, with multiple characters revealed to have suffered the predictable result in the modern era. In this case, they don asbestos suits, then force the Torch with hoses into a vat of molten steel. But he bursts out quickly, & Blackie escapes once again using a smokescreen.

Torch is approached by his cellmate, who reveals he was an undercover cop the whole time, which could explain why the police were so easily duped, but doesn't as a cop will later apologize for thinking he was responsible. He directs Torch towards the airport, assuming Blackie will make an escape by plane, & Torch gets there just in time to melt the propeller. There's a brief fight, which is relatively pretty interesting for these early comics because Blackie is in his car the whole time, trying to run the Torch over. It's still one-sided though, & after setting the car on fire, Torch gets Blackie to sign a confession, forgetting he was still wearing the fire-proof asbestos suit.

While in the first Torch story he felt like a tragic gothic monster, a modern, modern Prometheus, in this one he felt like a cryptid. Partially because at multiple points characters are baffled to see that he left blazing footprints behind, but overall he just has super bizarre vibes.

Our Angel story takes us to Hong Kong, where a woman named Jane is arriving by boat with instructions to find The Lost Temple of Alano and its cursed treasure for the Smithsonian. She is being watched though by two people, a "gruely-looking stranger" & a well-dressed American who had been on board the same boat. She gets a rickshaw to her hotel, & the American man gets his own, threatening to throw the driver in the water if he can't keep up with her. Almost immediately though, the gruely stranger leaps out of an alley with a knife to kill her, & the American leaps to her rescue, punching him off the docks. He is, of course, the Angel in his civilian clothes.

A heavy-set man, Mr. Sumner, also comes to her aid, & the Angel notes that this man is someone he recognizes, but in disguise. He quickly writes a note for Jane & slips it into her handbag before Sumner can drive her away to the hotel. In the car, she reads the note, warning her that her worst enemy may pretend to be her best friend. Meanwhile, the Angel finds her assailant & follows him to a gang of thugs that he throttles.

That night, Sumner creeps in through Jane's balcony & takes both her gun & the map to the temple, revealing that the supposed curse on the treasure was just him murdering any competition looking for it. He calls his men & tells them to be ready to dispose of her, not realizing on the other end of the line was the Angel after having beaten them all unconscious. After Jane tries & fails to get away by crashing the car, the Angel leaps into action, defeating Sumner & giving an exposition dump of his backstory as actually being a member of the original expedition who started the curse rumor before disappearing. Finally, he confesses that he has absolutely no proof that Sumner & this missing person named Lelong are the same guy, but assures Jane it's true anyway, showing he's just that good.

This was actually the first Angel story I read since most uploads of Marvel #1 are incomplete, & I'm inclined to think it's a better introduction to the character. All the same key points are there, like being clever enough to be right with just a wild hunch, & he's just as highly violent, but he never needs to kill anybody in this one, so he doesn't. His reputation now might be different if the two were switched around.

The Sub-Mariner story here picks up immediately where the former left off, as he dives into the water from Dorma's stolen plane. While not always the case, Namor's strips tend to have a much more consistent storyline than anybody else this early, usually following from one to the other. The narration says he has come to wage a "war of espionage against the white man". For the first five pages, Namor does not say a word. He is dragged into a water pipe &, feeling threatened, lashes out at powerplant workers & police officers. He takes refuge in the sewer, where he finds a homeless man & steals his clothes.

Realizing though that he needs better clothes, he knocks on the door of a nice looking house, which is answered by a stereotypical African-American butler who reprimands him for being a bum but still trying to use the main entrance, his dialogue written with an eye dialect as is unfortunately standard for any black characters fluent in English for this era. The owner of the house, a beautiful woman with a cigarette, invites him in before accidentally setting her dress on fire. Namor rushes to put it out, but as soon as he comes in contact with the hat, his pores spontaneously erupt with water, dousing both of them & putting the fire out.

The servant calls for an ambulance, & Namor, after stripping, almost leaves, but then decides he covets the girl. He leaps atop the ambulance, & once they have reached the hospital, he threatens to kill the doctors if they cause a scene, then ties them up & kidnaps the unconscious woman. The cops catch up to him once he reaches the docks & open fire, but Namor is completely bullet-proof. He jumps into the water with his captive, but 2 officers follow, one saving the girl while Namor kills the other, before disappearing in the depths. Torch being a selfish cryptid freak is a reading of his early stories, but Namor being one is explicit fact.

This installment of Masked Raider opens up by explaining how a one-handed killer named "Hook" Tebbs is leading an entire town of outlaws, who are looking to recruit new men for a big train robbery. The Raider poses as a lone bandit that recently stole $10,000 in a bank robbery in order to get an in with the gang. Tebbs gets rough with him right away for not being shown respect, but he throws Tebbs into a barrel & draws his guns on the rest of the gang, & this impresses Tebbs enough that he welcomes this outlaw they nickname "Streak".

They let "Streak" in on way too much information, & that night he lets the sheriff of the actual town nearby know their plan is working. The gang also includes a Mexican member, with an over the top accent, who "Streak" gets into a fight with and calls the first ethnic slur in Marvel's history. Most of the men leave for a job, but Tebbs wants to speak with "Streak" so they both stay behind; he shows him where their loot is stashed down the well, but tells him not to ever go down there. As soon as he turns his back, the Masked Raider does go down there, & Tebbs is waiting with a gun to tie him up. But the Raider easily escapes (I guess it's hard to tie a knot with a hook hand, but it's not explained), makes a smoke signal for the sheriff, & they round up all the criminals. My main takeaway is just how stupid the entire "don't go down the well" gambit is.

American Ace opens by explaining that after the First World War, an evil monarch, Queen Ursula, was exiled for 20 years from her nation of Castile d'Or. She has just been rescued by those loyal to her who have taken over the government, so that she can rule again in secret & start a war of revenge by having one of their own politicians assassinated by someone disguised as a citizen of the nearby country of Attainia (which was retconned into Attania 70 years later). The titular American Ace, a mining engineer here named Perry Wade (although that will also be retconned a couple times), flies to Attainia unaware of the impending war, & is knocked unconscious in the first air raid. It's a short & uneventful strip that only really serves as a set-up for Perry's ongoing adventures, which... didn't exactly play out, but we'll come back to that when it (doesn't) happen. Like the first Sub-Mariner story, "The Origins of the American Ace" was also originally supposed to be in Motion Picture Funnies Weekly, & the longer comic from that was split up into this issue & the continuation in Marvel Mystery Comics #3. The only other notable thing is that this begins Marvel's participation in the proud comic tradition of making up countries in order to avoid setting something unfortunate or controversial in an existing one.

The prose story this time, Death-Bird Squadron, is actually about the Angel. In a town in Poland during an air-raid, he leaps on top of a building, then onto a passing bomber. That's right; the cover of this issue is depicting the written short story, rather than any of the actual comics. That turns out to actually be pretty common in issues where the short story involves one of the comic characters, to compensate for the prose only having a single picture in it alongside the title. He climbs up the bomber & punches through the metal, grabs the pilot, & throws him at the tail-gunner with so much force that it shatters both of their skulls. He's not a hero who actually has any super powers, but this little story is written by a David Cooke instead of his creator Paul Gustavson, & David obviously hadn't actually read either of the existing Angel comics. The Angel then uses the gun to shoot down the other planes before crashing the one he was using into the last of them, & he leaps out of it to land lightly on the ground below. Maybe Mr. Cooke just didn't know how anything worked. It ends with him thinking about how this is just one more act of heroism the world will never know he was responsible for, which is pretty funny given how he is introduced as being an infamous crime fighter. Come to think of it, the start of the story also describes him as being dedicated to fighting war-mongers, even though he's almost always fighting street-level criminals. What a mess.

The second installment of Ka-Zar starts with showing that Zar's mate, the lioness Sha, doesn't trust him. He remembers seeing a mirror in the previous part of the story &, wondering if it was still in the abandoned camp, goes to look for it. But, upon reaching the camp, he hears sounds he identifies as the apes led by Chaka, who you might remember from last issue's title card. Inside de Kraft's tent he finds the mirror already in the possession of one of the apes, Bardak, & the two violently wrestle over it until Ka-Zar makes Bardak admit defeat. He allows Bardak to live, but back at their cave Zar disapproves of showing mercy.

As Sha's tolerance for Ka-Zar becomes more strained, he & Zar go on a trip to look for the elephants that are led by Trajah. Before finding Trajah though, they are attacked by another elephant that Trajah tells them has had "the madness come upon him", presumably meaning he has gone into musth in preparation for mating. When they return, they find Sha has given birth to two cubs, & Ka-Zar gets the shit kicked out of him for getting too close. Zar gets mad, but admits that it was Ka-Zar's fault & he should stay away from the cubs.

Bardak. this whole time, has been brooding over his humiliation, which reaches a boiling point when the lady ape he likes makes fun of him for it. He decides to enter the cave when no one is around to steal the mirror back, but cannot find it, & is chased out when Sha returns with her cubs. Desperate, he swings down & snatches up one of the cubs. Sha's roars bring both Zar & Ka-Zar, & the rest of the ape tribe, who mock the lions while Zar threatens war. Bardak throws the cub from high in the tree, but Ka-Zar catches it safely, then climbs after the ape, & manages to kill him with his knife, earning Sha's acceptance.

And instead of ending it on that nice note, we have All-in-Fun & Loony Laffs, both of which are another page of 5 single-panel jokes like the one that started Marvel Comics #1. They're funnier this time, but that's not saying much.

This was the final Timely Comic to be published with a cover date of 1939, but going by actual release dates, it's not even the last one this month. Next time we will start a daring new book, with a new cast of characters. Unfortunately.

[timelyovertime]

Marvel Comics #1

Date of publication: August 31st, 1939

Back in the Golden Age of comics, "Marvel Comics" didn't exist yet. The company at the time was called Timely Comics, hence the name of this blog. But, it just so happens that the first book they put out would also be called Marvel Comics, and it would go on to be their central pillar throughout this era. Obviously, it's the future namesake of the company, but it's just serendipity that this first comic had such a good name for them to adopt later, especially because that name will change in the very next issue. I wonder what would have happened if this first issue was "Marvel Mystery Comics #1" instead.

The other thing you might notice immediately from the cover is that the headliner for this book, & a lot of Timely Comics in general, is the Human Torch. I think it's not super obscure knowledge among comics fans, but as a fan of secondary media instead, it was definitely surprising for me that Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four actually took his name from this otherwise unrelated character.

Golden Age comics in general were mostly anthology books, collecting different shorter stories from different creators, & Marvel #1 is no different. The first page is 5 single-panel gags, which I am sure were hilarious in 1939. After that the first proper story is the origin for this Human Torch: a synthetic human, somewhere between robot & man, created by a brilliant scientist named Professor Horton. However, somehow, a flaw in the creation causes the Torch to burst into flame on contact with oxygen. Unable to control it, Horton seals the Torch in a concrete block until he can find a solution, but a leak allowed the Torch to escape. Setting everything in his path on fire, he takes refuge at the bottom of a swimming pool, that just so happens to make him easy to capture for a criminal named Sardo, who has a very poorly thought out plan to use the Torch as part of a racket, threatening companies to melt their wares if he isn't paid. But he doesn't mention having the Torch, nor does he have any plan to recapture him, so he gets nothing, commits a single case of arson, & then the Torch comes to burn his house down in revenge. In the conflict, some nitrogen gas neutralizes the Torch's flame, after which he is able to turn it off & on, & gains overall pyrokinesis. Police release him back into Horton's custody, but Horton mentions how much money they could make off his newfound powers, & the offended Torch leaps through the ceiling to freedom.

It's mostly an interesting story in comparison to how the Torch would go on to be portrayed. He's a tragic monster here, a victim of his own powers who is hated for no fault of his own. But he's also notably manic, frequently laughing, even with a firehose turned on him. Just an oddity of this being the first ever Timely strip.

The second story is The Angel, Tom Halloway (although his name won't be revealed yet). He's a crime fighter with no powers, with his trademark being a winged shadow he casts while leaving his defeated baddies for the police. In this issue, a mayor is convinced to ask for his help as a wave of violent crime rocks the city, over 200 arrests all walking free as no victim is brave enough to speak against them. Before the Angel can be contacted though, he sends a message that he's already on the trail of not just the "Six Big Men" behind the crimes, but also the "Big Boss" they all answer to. He promptly begins a violent crime spree of his own by killing 3 of the Six Big Men, before being captured by the 4th and a mysterious woman called Lil. He's driven out of town to be executed by 4 & 5, but Lil cuts his bonds, allowing him to kill both of them. He makes it back, unceremoniously kills the last of the 6, & finds a lead that brings him to Lil and the Big Boss, who turns out to have been the man who suggested to the mayor to contact the Angel in the first place, in the hopes that they could split their loot 2 ways instead of 8. It's a solid little story that sets the tone for the Angel well. My understanding is that he gets flanderized into a brutal killer in his few modern flashback appearances, but here as is often the case he's satisfied with just getting the criminals for the cops when it doesn't impede his ongoing investigation- but he definitely doesn't mind killing either when the situation calls for it. That's honestly kind of the vibe for most Golden Age comics, though.

The third story is famously the first to have been made, & the only character here to have an ongoing importance to Marvel today. It starts as a mystery, with a salvage ship sending 2 divers down to a wreck to find that someone had already been there. That someone was Namor, a capricious, water-breathing prince who cuts their airlines, this being over a decade before scuba was invented, so divers had actual tubes leading all the way from their helmets to the boat for air. He then crashes the entire ship, gathers up the divers' bodies, & carries them back to Atlantis (though it hasn't yet been identified as such), where his mother eggs him on to wage war on the surface world, telling him the story of how she came to love his father while acting as a double-agent on his ship, sending info back to her people about how to avenge the surface's accidental bombings of Atlanteans. Namor & his cousin Dorma then go on a short mission, attacking a lighthouse, & hijack a small plane so Dorma can escape before Namor plunges back into the sea.

This strip, or at least the first part of it, before they swim to the lighthouse, was originally produced for Motion Picture Funnies Weekly, a comic meant to be given away at movie theaters earlier in 1939, but it was never released. It was also not a Timely publication, so I don't really have any intention of going back to it. In every way that matters, the Sub-Mariner begins here. I have read that Bill Everett came up with the character after hearing about the plans for the Human Torch- might be just hearsay, but as the most long-standing duo in Marvel comics with only a couple of competitors on the DC side of things, it's only appropriate they both start alongside each other in the very first issue of Marvel.

One other thing worth mentioning is that the underwater scenes here are all covered extremely blue, to the point it is difficult to see details in a lot of cases. As a result, most appearances of the Atlanteans here show them as being blue, & they become established as just being blue-skinned in canon. However, the same is true for Namor, & both his mother & cousin have a caucasian skin tone when shown out of the water. Blue skin clearly wasn't intended, & is just a quirk of this heavy-handed coloring choice.

The Masked Raider is a typical western story, & unlike the previous three it won't be sticking around for very long. Jim Gardley here refused to sell his ranch to the man who "rules" the town, whose name is either Brunder or Brunter depending on the panel, even after Brunder kidnaps him and turns him into the sheriff on a made-up charge. He breaks out of jail & goes on the run for weeks, honing his skills as a gunslinger & taming a white stallion he names Lightning. After he's satisfied with his preparation, he takes on this secret identity & returns just in time before the rest of the ranchers decide to sell, teaming up with the sheriff to take the Brunder Gang down. Aside from the reaction of Brunder's right-hand man Slick to Jim's offer of surrender being very funny to me, I have little else to say about this comic, or most Masked Raider strips.

The fifth story is a one-shot called Jungle Terror, and it's at this point the negatives of media from so long ago become apparent. We made it about 2/3rds of the first issue before we hit any blatant racism. A professor has been missing in the Amazon for 3 months, so his nephew & a family friend resolve to go after him, while they are followed by a plantation-owner called Crafton, who wants to get the hypnotic diamond that the professor had gone to look for, owned by an "Indian" tribe. The protagonists' plane crashes, & they are taken captive by the "savages", who of course speak in broken English. In the hut where they are kept they conveniently find both the professor and an entrance to a cave full of the diamonds, but are forced to flee as they are first threatened by Crafton, then he is killed by the natives & they are chased from the cave. They manage to find Crafton's intact plane & get away. For exactly one panel on the last page, without explanation, the natives are also shown with demonic horns. It's a less than mediocre story & I'm glad it did not spawn an ongoing series.

The sixth story is in prose! Most of these early comics have a 2-page written short story, & the majority are self-contained. I also skipped over any that didn't involve existing characters for my first read, so in skimming back through these it will be my first time actually reading most. Burning Rubber is an... interesting story. Bill Williams (William Williams?) has a racecar that looks shabby because he & his mechanic Fred dedicated everything to its performance. The first segment of the story is dedicated to this dynamic, making it seem like it will just be about the ugly duckling winning the race. But the next segment has Fred explain to Bill's girlfriend Ann, who is worried about him crashing, that the race is actually a final test for their experimental new gas-feeder, which if anything goes wrong could explode, & that if she wants to save his life she needs to go to an acquaintance of hers with the blueprint & convince him to buy it. She succeeds, just in time as gas starts to fly out onto Bill's face & the car begins to smoke. Bill is, naturally, mad & sexist about being interrupted, thinking she was just stopping him from proving the gas-feeder made the car go faster, until he learns what happened & is is happy that they can discuss selling the gas-feeder... that is blatantly faulty. I'm just not sure what the takeaway here is, other than that Bill is terrible. Such an odd story.

Finally, we have Ka-Zar, another Golden Age character whose name will get reused for a completely unrelated Silver Age one. As the title card there says, he's a pre-existing character, from the 1936 novel King of Fang and Claw. The first five Ka-Zar stories here are adapted from that book. John Rand, owner of a South African diamond field, gets what he deserves as his plane crashes deep in the Congo with his wife Constance & their 3-year-old son, David, who quickly begins to befriend all the wildlife except for a leopard called N'Jaga, who tries to eat the boy but is wounded by John. They repeatedly try to get the attention of passing planes, but fail, & eventually Constance dies of a fever. Before they can start to try to reach civilization on foot, John is struck by a falling tree during a storm, & the injury, implied to have caused some minor brain damage, convinces him that Constance's grave is their home, & they would continue to build a life for themselves in the jungle. As he grows, David continues to grow close with the wildlife, learning the language of the beasts, & ultimately saving the lion Zar from quicksand.

A week after saving Zar, David and his father see smoke, & it leads them to the camp of a white man, Paul de Kraft, who is using native Africans for labor and is repeatedly emphasized as being both fat & greasy. de Kraft has come for emeralds, and when told to leave by John, pulls a gun out, but David hits him in the arm with an arrow so they can escape. However, de Kraft tracks down their home, mortally wounds John, & captures David, but Zar leaps into the clearing, killing the natives & driving the white man away. With John's death, Zar adopts David as his brother, & he officially becomes Ka-Zar in the final couple panels.

Ka-Zar's treatment of Africans is not exactly charitable, but at least they are the minions ordered around by an evil white guy instead of being the antagonists themselves. The comic is much meaner to overweight people than to racial minorities. Otherwise, it's a pretty typical "white baby grows up in darkest Africa" story, & while a solid example of that weird genre, it's nothing new for anybody that knows Tarzan, at least not in this first issue.

Skipping some advertisements as is typical for the back of these books, this is the end of the first issue of Timely Comics. This took longer than I expected, definitely longer than just reading the comic itself; I'd say that I'll try to keep future posts shorter, but I know myself better than that. Some issues are just gonna take 3 hours to write up. I will have to give up any delusions of being caught up with what I have read soon, though. Until next Timely.

...Yeah, I'll keep workshopping, I don't think that's gonna work as a catchphrase.

[timelyovertime]

Welcome to Timely Over Time

I'm Clocky, & this is a catalog of my attempt to read every single comic put out by Marvel Comics and its predecessors, Timely & Atlas, from the very start with Marvel Comics issue #1 up to whatever they're putting out when you read this. After I got about a hundred issues in, I realized that it would be a good concept for a tumblr, so here we are.

For every issue, I will go over its contents, & discuss whatever sticks out to me as worth talking about, whether that be trivia, something that irks me, or whatever else. I'm going based off of the actual date of publication, as recorded by the only website I could find that has an actual chronological list at all. If any orders are wrong or I miss something, please let me know, I want to do it "right" or I wouldn't be putting myself through this in the first place.

I grew up in a Marvel household, with the 90's cartoons & PS1 games being very formative media, so a lot of Marvel knowledge is second nature to me. But before starting this I had actually only read one American comic book at all, so there is a lot of new ground to cover, & I'm very excited to see most of what lies ahead.

(No mice were paid in the making of this blog.)