Stan Lee listened, True Believer!
Determined to make Marvel an
interactive comic book company, with readers as stakeholders, Lee paid close
attention to readers’ requests and fulfilled them whenever possible.
A battle between the Hulk and the Thing?
A crossover between Iceman and the Human Torch? An Avengers lineup revamped to
provide more realistic continuity? Wedding bells for Sue and Reed?
Readers had but to name them to
get them.
One other thing readers wanted
were Golden Age reprints, and those too, Lee provided — in marked contrast to
DC Comics, which seemed extremely reluctant to reprint the earliest adventures
of their super-heroes.
Superman editor Mort Weisinger
claimed that was because the art was too crude, but I suspected that the
infamous conniver just didn’t want to spotlight the best work of the editors
who preceded him.
In 1966, two years after Captain
America’s revival, we readers began seeing his early 1940s adventures in the Fantasy Masterpieces reprint giant, and
could really begin to understand where these characters we loved came from.
Cap had puzzled me a little. Why
did he have a super-hero origin, the super-soldier serum, but no apparent super
powers? He seemed to be just a costumed acrobat, like Daredevil, but without
the super senses.
Now, his initial appeal was
apparent to me. The menaces, though often derivative, were wild and engaging —
a Hound of the Baskervilles villain, a Hunchback of Hollywood, Ivan the Terrible,
a gigantic sea serpent, a criminal disguised as a butterfly and those
love-to-hate-‘em fascists, including the Red Skull. The Ringmaster and his
Circus of Crime fought Captain America before taking on the Rawhide Kid and the
Hulk in slightly altered form. The Black Toad was determined to destroy
baseball itself! How un-American!
The feature’s earliest art had Jack
Kirby’s raw dynamism, but none of his later polish. Given the super-patriot
angle and the bursting-through-the-panels action, I could see why this
character had been so immensely popular from the start.
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