Just before Marvel was Marvel, the
comic book company was a nameless but distinctive and seemingly endless parade
of giant monsters.
Stan Lee was weary of it, but the talents
of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko enlivened the standard twist-ending plots and
kept those dimes coming in.
Substances and species were
switched every month to supply new rampaging creatures. A water monster in
April, a smoke monster in May. A giant ant in June’s issue, and a giant lizard
in July’s.
Disposable, all. Yet one of them —
a tree monster named Groot — has become an immensely popular movie character
for Disney-Marvel. How ironic, as they say in the comics.
Marvel’s past was recalled and its
future foreshadowed n Strange Tales
76 (August 1960). This time, the substance was fire. A giant flaming alien
named Dragoom terrorizes Earth until he’s conned by movie special effects in a
wrapup that’s implausible even by comic book standards.
But who cared? The fun was in
Kirby’s art. He had a trick of having his giant alien invaders describe the
horrific world-destroying plans they had for humanity, giving him the opportunity
to draw several big, entertaining disaster scenes that really had nothing to do
with the plot.
In 1960, most readers were too
young to recognize Dragoom as a monstrous variation on the theme of one of
Marvel’s most popular Golden Age superheroes, the Human Torch. He hadn’t been
seen since Human Torch 38 (August
1954). And they couldn’t know he would be seen again, soon, in his fresh, edgy teenage
incarnation in Fantastic Four 1
(November 1961).
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