Introduced with that dynamic Jack
Kirby/Don Heck art in Journey Into
Mystery 97 (Oct. 1963), the Lava Man stands out in my mind as a favorite
among the thunder god’s early foes.
Remember the context of the times,
an era in which — hard as it is to conceive now — real superhero slugfests were
essentially something new.
DC’s heroes, in deference to that
namby-pamby Comics Code, engaged in elaborate puzzle games with their bizarre
enemies, finally dispatching them with a polite single-panel punch to the chin,
or forgot about fighting crime while they created complex ruses to shield the
secret of their identities.
But unlike DC, Marvel introduced
fresh, public-panicking physical menaces each month, formidable city-smashing
super-beings that required our heroes to defeat them in hand-to-hand combat.
Also, Thor had to face this
destructive heat thing from the center of the Earth while troubled by the
escalating soap operatic woes Stan Lee would invent for him. The woman he loves
has walked on him, quitting her job as Dr. Blake’s nurse, and Odin has
forbidden him to pursue her.
As in DC’s superhero comics, the
villains return, but at Marvel the ante is often upped. Defeated the first
time, a Dr. Doom or a Mr. Hyde will team up with a Sub-Mariner or a Cobra to
make things much tougher for our heroes in the second round.
And six months later, in Avengers 5 (May 1964), the Lava Man
would return with his entire tribe. I can remember thinking that if ONE Lava Man
gave Thor a fight, what might a whole RACE of them do to the Avengers? I was
excited to find out.
One other intriguing angle in
Marvel’s plots was that heroes and villains didn’t always behave in perfectly
predictable ways. They could grow and change. The Lava Man, for example, had
learned respect for surface dwellers in his battle with Thor, and tried to
argue his people out of their war on humanity.
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