Cody is endeavoring to read his way through Marvel's entire publishing history. Let's see if he can do it!
Wrapping up 1939.
The company we now know as Marvel Comics started out when Martin Goodman launched a company called Timely Comics by publishing the anthology comic book Marvel Comics #1 on August 31, 1939. (With an October cover date.) On October 3rd, the second issue of the series reached store shelves, sporting a December cover date and a modified title: as of issue #2, Marvel Comics was renamed Marvel Mystery Comics. This is indicative of something that happened quite often back in the day: a book would get a new title, but the numbering would continue. By the end of ‘39, readers also had the opportunity to check out issues #3 and 4 of the series, even though they had January 1940 and February 1940 cover dates, respectively.
Reaching store shelves on November 17, 1939, issue #3 begins with a story about the Human Torch. The first issue showed us the origin story of this Carl Burgos character, the result of a Professor Horton’s attempt to create a synthetic man, an exact replica of a human being. Horton made some bad calculations along the way, resulting in a robot that bursts into flames whenever it comes into contact with oxygen in the air. Since then, the Human Torch has found a way to control its flames and pass as human to make their way around in the world – and since the title panel of the third story features a preview of the characters we’re about to meet in the story, it spoils the fact that the Human Torch is about to deal with villains from out of this world right up front!
The spoiled character: Mr. Ritton, “an agent of the planet Mars, on Earth.”
The story begins on a train to Texas, where the Human Torch is headed on a sight-seeing vacation. On board is one of those new-fangled televisions, and when fellow passenger Mr. Carson, owner of the Carson Explosive Company, switches the TV on, it’s showing terrifying footage of New York City crumbling under an attack from electricity-spurting planes. The characters will later learn that this is a fictitious sight; an element of the story inspired by the fact that an Orson Welles-narrated radio drama based on H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds had scared the hell out of people in October of 1938.
The planes on the TV are fake, but the ones that attack the train and cause it to derail are real. The attackers want Carson to hand over his formula for a safer Super TNT. You see, Mars is being threatened by another heavenly body, so the Martians want the Super TNT so they can destroy this thing and save their planet. Of course, nobody trusts characters who just caused a train to derail, so Carson holds on to the formula until his dying moments, passing the paper only to Human Torch.
After saving people from the wreckage, the Human Torch catches up with Carson’s daughter Diane just in time to find that she’s being pestered by Mr. Ritton. The Martians who have come to Earth really do just want to save their own planet. They explain that Martians are poor scientists and their knowledge of explosives dwindled after they fought in wars hundreds of years ago, so they need help from the explosives experts on Earth. Unfortunately, they’re working under orders of “the Great One from Mars,” who has made a deal with Ritton: once their planet is saved, Mars will invade Earth and Ritton will become Emperor of the United States. And the Human Torch isn’t going to stand by and let that happen.
The story is a bit long-winded, but it’s entertaining and features some cool moments, like a scene where the Human Torch melts down an entire train engine to avoid a collision on the tracks.
Next, we get a story about Paul Gustavson’s the Angel; an action-packed quickie about the costumed vigilante fighting his way through a bunch of robe-wearing cultists who have abducted a woman and taken her to a stone mansion just outside of New York City so their hypnotist leader, The Sacred One, can sacrifice her to the Fire God.
The Angel makes sure to foil their plans and kicks their asses in the process. This one was a lot of fun.
In the third story, Bill Everett’s the Sub-Mariner, “amphibious demon of the Earth,” is continuing his violent, destructive campaign against the humans, mainly Americans, who all but obliterated his kind near Antarctica. “Revenge is his motive and evil is his intent.”
He’s on a scouting expedition to plan a military invasion of the United States when the New York police decide to set a trap for him, luring him into the clutches of Betty Dean – a darn good cop and an expert swimmer. When she jumps into the water and starts crying for help, pretending to be drowning, he quickly takes the bait because she’s “too lovely to die.” When he realizes he’s been tricked, the Sub-Mariner drags Betty far out to sea… and then gets distracted by the sight of German forces attacking a British ship.
After Sub-Mariner wrecks a German submarine and blasts a bomber out of the sky, it looks like Betty is able to talk him into becoming a hero who will fight along side the Allied forces – but we’ll have to wait and see if he sticks to that idea in future stories.
Next in the line-up is Al Ander’s Western hero the Masked Raider. This time, a land-grabber Jed Sirrah is having a couple of his lackeys pester a rancher, trying to get him to sell his land because Sirrah knows (and the rancher doesn’t) that there’s oil under the ranch and gold in the nearby hills. Since the local sheriff is a former associate of the lackeys’, it’s looking like Sirrah is going to get away with this scheme… until the villains catch the attention of The Masked Raider, the vigilante who’s working to bring justice to the Old West.
It’s a quick, simple, and entertaining Western story.
As I mentioned previously, artist Paul J. Lauretta had created a character called American Ace for the Marvel Comics #1 precursor Motion Picture Funnies Weekly. That book didn’t go far (the idea was that copies of Motion Picture Funnies Weekly would be used as a promotional giveaway that movie theatre owners would pass out to children, but only a handful of sample copies were printed to show to theatre owners, who were not interested in giving out comic books), so his American Ace story was reused for Marvel Mystery Comics #2.
In that issue, we learned that, somewhere in Europe, there’s a country called Castile D’Or. After a war, the country’s Queen Ursula, who dreamed of building an empire, was banished to a lonely islet in the Atlantic. But she’s still secretly communicating with her followers within Castile D’or, and they have built an army to help her take back control of her her country. They smuggle her back home and have their own minister assassinated in the country of Attainia so they can declare war. This event could be the start of a second World War!
Unaware of what’s going on between the two countries, young American engineer Perry Wade flew his personal plane into Attainia on business – and he gets there just in time for the war to break out. In this issue, we get to see how Perry deals with getting caught in the middle of a war… and, well, he deals with it by spending a week hanging out on a farm with a girl he saved from bombing wreckage, Jeanie, and her surviving family members.
As soon as Perry decides that it’s time to fly out of the country, he gets shot down by enemy planes. In the final panel of the story, Perry says he’s going to have to stick around in Castile D’or because there’s an “important job” to do. It looks like he’s going to join the fight! There’s a promise that we’ll have the chance to follow the adventures of the American Ace next month and every month in Marvel Comics… but it wasn’t to be. American Ace was deemed too politically intense for younger readers and Lauretta was let go, so the character vanished and this story was never finished.
What’s not too intense for younger readers? A two-page prose story called Siegfried Suicide! Written by David C. Cooke, this story focuses on an American soldier-of-fortune and his twenty-man company of French and English soldiers trying to smash a hole in the Germans’ Siegfried Line. Because stories of people getting shot to pieces and blown apart with a grenade while fighting in the “gory muck” is good for children of all ages, apparently.
The issue wraps up with another installment of the Adventures of Ka-Zar the Great series. In this one, we follow “Ka-Zar, the son of John Rand, owner of rich diamond mines, who crashes in his airplane with his wife and young son in the heart of the wild African Belgian Congo. After the death of his parents, the small boy develops a friendship with Zar, the lion. After saving Zar’s life, he goes to live with the lion and is given the name of Ka-Zar, brother of Zar. The lad grows to manhood knowing no other life than that of the jungle.”
Bob Byrd continues the story by showing how Ka-Zar reacts when a white man named Steve Hardy, assisted by several natives, raids the jungle and starts capturing animals to ship to zoos. Of course, Ka-Zar’s reaction is to start feeling those animals – which backfires a little bit when a leopard called N’Jaga decides to attack him. It’s a fun story overall, but there is some 1939 racism along the way in the presentation of Hardy’s native henchmen.
Previous issues of Marvel Comics / Marvel Mystery Comics had also included a couple pages of jokes, but they got left out of this one.
Marvel Mystery Comics #4 was available to purchase on December 20, 1939, so you can imagine kids across America spending the snowbound holidays leafing through its pages eighty-six years ago.
When they opened the book, they were first treated to my favorite story to feature Carl Burgos’ the Human Torch yet. In this one, the flame-controlling android is beckoned to New York City by his undercover cop friend Johnson and another undercover associate, Maizie. The city is being terrorized by the Green Flame, goblin-looking beings that roam the city while covered in green flames, busting concrete with the intensity of their cold fire. The situation has gotten so bad, the city is under martial art – so, taking human form and going by the name Jim Hamond, the Human Torch goes to check things out.
We’ll come to learn that the green flame was created by Dr. Manyac, who “has a mania for destruction and death.” The goblin-like beings are just henchmen wearing asbesos suits, and the Human Torch is able to make quick work of them and their creator – even while being tracked by Inspector Reiss, a local cop who doesn’t understand why Jim Hamond disappears when the Human Torch shows up, so he accuses the android of murdering his alter ego!
Paul Gustavson’s costumed vigilante the Angel takes the spotlight in the second story, and you can always count on Angel stories to deliver some good action. This time around, the setting is “the Devil’s Playground,” a few city blocks that are said to harbor “notorious criminals, killers, and every imaginable menace to civilization.” In this story, the Angel finally meets a character that can stand up to his strength – a towering brute called Butch, who has bulletproof skin. A mobster named Brink sends Butch out on a rampage through the city that the Angel has to work to bring to an end through some cool physical altercations. It’s sort of like watching him take on a precursor to the Hulk.
Bill Everett continues the story of Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, to confirm that New York police officer Betty Dean was able to convince him to join the war effort. And he’s not getting involved by himself, he’s bringing the entire armed forces of his underwater kingdom with him!This comes with the caveat that Namor will not “play favorites” in the battles, but will destroy anyone who interferes with the transportation of food or medicinal supply, no matter for whom they’re intended. So he’s quite a humanitarian, for someone who was previously planning to wage war on all mankind.
His kingdom’s Holy One isn’t thrilled with the idea, but gives it the go-ahead nonetheless and the armed forces go to battle with super aerial submarines, equipped with deadly steam guns and propelled by artificial steam generated by compressed air charging through a mixture of alcohol and water. We get to see these machines engage in an aerial dogfight with enemy forces while Namor sends out orders telepathically. They also down a submarine – but if a mission requires being out of the water for too long, Namor has to handle it on his own. His associates can only survive out of water for five hours.
This Namor story was a bit too wordy for my taste, both in descriptive passages and in dialogue exchanges, but it was still entertaining.
Al Ander’s Western hero the Masked Raider swings by for a short, fast-paced story in which he saves a couple of old men, Luke and Zeb, who are set upon by criminals after they discover gold. This one was a really nice break after that over-written Namor story.
David C. Cooke wrote a short thriller story called Warning Enough to fill up a couple of pages. It starts out with a guy named Steve going out for an afternoon drive and making the bad decision to pick up a hitchhiker on Shade Mountain. Turns out his new passenger is a killer on the run, “Slip Rodney”… and apparently Steve’s last name is Naylor, because after a few paragraphs of referring to the character as Steve, Cooke switches to calling him Naylor, despite never establishing that his name was Steve Naylor. Soon enough, he’s switching back and forth between calling the character Steve and Naylor, and at one point even credits Naylor for speaking a line that’s actually spoken by Rodney. It's a bit of a mess.
The next story, crafted by Steve Dahlman, introduces readers to a brand new character: Electro, the Marvel of the Age! As with the Human Torch, Marvel would use this character name again decades later, but just like the Human Torch in these issues has nothing to do with the Human Torch who’s part of the Fantastic Four, this Electro has nothing to do with the Spider-Man villain of the same name.
This Electro is a robot that was created by Professor Philo Zog in hopes to work for the welfare of humanity, “towards the ends that justice and universal happiness may take the place of wars, crime, and suffering.” Zog then employs a dozen “husky, intelligent” young men “of courage and good character” to work as operatives for him in a fight against the powers of the underworld. These young men will go out into the field on a mission to banish crime and evil, and if they run into trouble, they’ll call in for back-up from Electro.
Operative #3, Dick Gardner, discovers that child actress Joyce Lovely has been kidnapped by a group of thugs headed up by Hymie Pazetto, a.k.a. The Weasel (which was also used for a mobster nickname in this issue’s Angel story), and he saves the girl with the help of Electro. The story’s a bit odd, but it has an intriguing set-up, so I look forward to seeing more of Electro.
Next, another new character: Ferret, Mystery Detective, created by Stockbridge Winslow. This character had a future in Marvel Comics, appearing as recently as 2009. Ferret is a well-known author and private investigator who lives in, and operates out of, a remodeled stable in Greenwich Village. He gets drawn into a battle with underworld forces led by Knuckles Johnson when a shooting victim collapses in his doorway… but I have to admit that I found this story a bit hard to follow, because Winslow was not the most straightforward storyteller and his scene transitions can be a bit jarring.
Finally, it’s time for another chapter in Bob Byrd's the Adventures of Ka-Zar the Great. Paul De Kraft, the man who killed Ka-Zar’s father, has returned to the jungle on a search for precious stones, this time accompanied by a shady associate named Ed Kivlin, as well as some natives, which allows for some more that ‘39 racism to come up. The animals of the jungle disagree on how to handle the presence of the “Fat Face” De Kraft (N’jaga the leopard and his allies want to kill Ka-Zar and every other human in the jungle), which gives Ka-Zar even more incentive to take down his enemy, once and for all.
That’s his objective, but he didn’t accomplish it in this story. We’ll have to venture into 1940 to find out what happens next.
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