Fantastic Four #21. Give hate a chance.

Hooray! This weekend sees the return of Dr Who, the show made famous by my other blog.

Will it be any good? Will it make sense? Will it disappear so completely up its own backside that it comes out the other end?

None of us can know.

What we do know is the first episode goes by the endearingly arresting title of Let's Kill Hitler.

This is ludicrous.

We all know there's only one set of people allowed to kill Hitler.

And that's the Fantastic Four.

It's late 1963 and there's trouble on the streets of New York. A character called the Hate-Monger's spreading a message of bigotry and intolerance. Apparently the authorities can do nothing because he's so far broken no laws.

Unamerican Sentiments?
Where's Joe McCarthy when you need him?

That doesn't stop the Fantastic Four from sticky-beaking at one of his rallies and, as sure as night follows day, within moments they're fighting amongst themselves, as the Hate-Monger fires his hate ray at them.

Fortunately, Nick Fury, now a colonel in the CIA, is at hand to trick them into going to the well-known republic of San Gusto whose government the Hate-Monger and his men are trying to depose.

Together Fury and the Fantastic Four defeat the villain by turning his own hate powers against him, causing his own men to shoot him dead. It's then that we get the dread revelation...

...The Hate-Monger was none other than Adolf Hitler!

"Feuhrer"?

You can't get away from it, it's a pretty silly tale. The idea that the authorities can't do anything to stop the Hate-Monger because he's broken no law - when he's conducting public rallies, complete with storm-troopers, inciting full-blown riots and public lynchings - makes me wonder just what kind of slack laws New York has in the world of the Fantastic Four. No wonder it needs super-heroes.

There's also the problem of it featuring Nick Fury.

Long-suffering readers'll know I've never been the biggest fan of Fury, and his appearance here - with both continuity-busting eyes intact - does nothing to change my mind as he announces his presence by beating up the Baxter Building security staff just because they won't let him go barging unannounced into the FF's headquarters.

But of course the story's pivotal weakness is the revelation that the Hate-Monger is Hitler; as silly a denouement as was ever seen in a Silver Age Marvel comic - and let's face it, silly Silver Age denouements were not exactly hens' teeth in Marvel comics. The fact that, in the very next panel, Stan Lee has Mr Fantastic fling in the caveat that it might not be the real Hitler but just a look-alike, suggests Lee realised they were venturing too liberally into the valley of the absurd, and I do wonder if the Hitler thing was Kirby's idea, inflicted on Lee as a fait accomplis, with Lee trying to write his way out of it through dialogue.

It also has to be said that George Bell's inking's not great, looking crude, rushed and slapdash. It's a bit of a shock to the system for those used to the clean and classic lines of Joe Sinnott.

But of course, there's always something to like in a Silver Age Fantastic Four tale and, on the upside, the Hate-Monger's costume, with its hints of the Inquisition and medieval torturers, is a great design. The Hate-Monger himself - apart from the Hitler thing - is a potentially great villain, which probably explains why he returned on numerous occasions, his guise adopted by various baddies, including at one point the Man-Beast.

Nick Fury, despite my general dislike of him, does at least show a fair amount of intelligence in the way he quickly realises the Fantastic Four's quarrelsome behaviour must be down to the villain, and in the way he subsequently manipulates them into tackling the revolutionary forces of San Gusto.

So, in the end, I don't think this can be regarded as a classic tale, coming well before the strip's peak era, when it was still aimed at a relatively naive and undemanding audience.

Still, at least with Hitler dead, it means Dr Who isn't going to have to worry about killing him after all. Meaning, no doubt, that Saturday's episode's going to consist mostly of The Doctor, Amy and Rory sitting around doing nothing. In other words, the show exactly as it would be if I were allowed to write it.

Heaven only knows why I'm not allowed to write it.

Horizontal heroics from a long-gone landscape. The Titans #1.

Has there ever been a greater comic book cover than that of Marvel UK's The Titans #1? What kind of comics fan could resist the sight of all those heroes rushing out of the page at him?

Of course, the other thing that leapt out at you when you first saw The Titans was that it was printed the wrong way up. Surely such a thing was madness but it was also genius, allowing twice as much content at no extra cost.

Admittedly, not all those heroes on the cover could exactly be called easily recognisable. Just who is, for instance, that blue man with the pointy ears behind Nick Fury?

But, if the cover wasn't packed entirely with what you could call Marvel "A" Listers, it was at least a reflection of the mag's not-always Top Line content as the issue kicked off with the Inhumans in a tale written as well as drawn by Jack Kirby, which means the dialogue's often made up of people just describing what's happening and we get a silly plot by Maximus the Mad to start a war between the Inhumans and humans by making the former think the Fantastic Four are firing missiles at them. The Inhuman Royal Family, having seemingly had lobotomies, all fall for this cunning ruse and, within mere pages, Black Bolt's all ready to declare war.

If the Inhumans are ready to launch into conflict, the next story starts in the thick of one as we get Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's 1960s retelling of Captain America's origin. At just ten pages, it can only be seen as a master class in compression - although it does bring home Captain America's irresponsibility in making a young boy his accomplice on deadly missions and it does beg the question as to why Captain America - who was presumably a captain - spent most of the war pretending to be a private instead of just being Captain America.

From one World War Two veteran to another as we're then given the first half of Nick Fury's first-ever adventure as Agent of SHIELD. It's not exactly a secret that I'm somewhat allergic to both Nick Fury and SHIELD but the story does at least feature a flying car, so it has something to appeal to me.

Next we get the issue's only real clunker as Stan Lee and Gene Colan give us the start of a Sub-Mariner epic in which Namor returns to Atlantis only to discover Warlord Krang has claimed the throne of Atlantis in his absence. It'd be easy to say one's outraged by this villainous behaviour but the truth is Namor acts like such a complete jerk in virtually every panel that when Krang has him flung into a cage to rot, you're hoping he spends the rest of eternity there. Sadly, Lady Dorma - who betrayed Namor to Krang in an attempt to win Namor's heart - then helps him to escape in order to try and win his heart. Those Stan Lee scripted women, eh?

Captain Marvel too finds himself threatened by a menace that arrives from underwater as he faces the Metazoid, a Soviet dissident who, exposed to experimental rays, has become a strange inhuman creature. The Metazoid's been told by his masters that if he kidnaps Mar-Vell's alter-ego - rocket scientist Walt Lawson - they'll restore him to normal. The tale's dominated by the Metazoid's struggles with his conscience and endless philosophising as he tries to work out whether he can justify kidnapping a man to return himself to normal. Surprisingly the haunted nature of the Metazoid makes the Captain Marvel tale the best story in the issue, marred only by the fact that some of the pages are printed out of order. Was this a consequence of the printers struggling to make sense of the new format or was it just one of those things that happens?

Throw in a John Buscema poster featuring a whole host of Marvel super-doers, and a plug for that year's Marvel annuals and there you have it; as far as I know, Britain's - and possibly the world's - first ever landscape format comic. I can't deny it, the format and the five stories per issue always made The Titans feel like something special to me. There was also something that appealed about the unpredictability of just what strips were going to be in it that week.

Have there been any comics since The Titans and Super Spider-Man that were printed in landscape format? It's a shame if there haven't because it was an ingenious idea and, when my destiny's finally fulfilled and I hold ownership of the American comic book industry in my talons, then the world had better beware, for I shall make sure the landscape format returns to once more bamboozle printers and newsagents alike.

Nick Fury Poll Results.

The votes are in. The Internet has spoken. And you The Reader voted Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD as being better than Nick Fury: Howling Commando, by a mighty five votes to one - a result that only an agent of HYDRA could quibble with. Two people voted, "I don't like either." I could accuse those people of being mean-spirited but I was one of them, and for me to accuse myself of being mean-spirited would be the height of mean-spiritedness, so I won't do it.

As always I'd like to give a big thank you to everyone who voted. And, on this occasion, wish a Merry Christmas to you all. I hope that Santa's taken note of your efforts and'll be leaving more for you than you bargained for in your Christmas stockings tomorrow night.

Nick Fury. Agent of SHIELD.

One of the things I always find hard to believe in life is that the Second World War ended less than twenty years before I was born, and that those people who were teaching me at school - even some of the younger ones - had actually lived through it. Somehow they seemed too much a part of the modern world to have come from such ancient and alien times.

Another person I always found it hard to believe had been in the War was Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD.

Oh, I know we were told he was and I knew he had his own comic set in that very conflict but, somehow, no matter how I tried, I couldn't see him as the same man. The Nick Fury we got in Agent of SHIELD didn't look like the Nick Fury of the Howling Commandos, didn't dress like him and didn't even seem to live in the same world as him. While the other Nick Fury was stuck in the 1940s - a time we all knew to be technological primitive compared to our hi-tech world of the 60s and 70s - this Nick Fury inhabited a realm of ray guns, spaceships and jet packs.

And maybe that was the root cause of my problem with the strip.

I never believed in it.

Even when I was a kid and could accept that being bitten by a spider could give you super-powers, every single thing that happened in Agent of SHIELD just seemed too far-fetched to me. I remember reading the first SHIELD story, in Son of Origins of Marvel Comics, and even then, with its Life Model Decoys, cars that fired missiles, and flying fortresses, it just seemed totally disconnected from any kind of reality. Lee and Kirby (Kirby especially, you suspect) were clearly taking their lead from James Bond and his many gadgets but, being Lee and Kirby, they turned the dial up to 11 till it felt like gadgets were all you were getting. Only twenty years after the days of the Howling Commandos, the  world according to Marvel had gone from World War Two technology to devices that could do anything. How could you take such a technological leap seriously when, in Nick Fury, it had a thread tying it so intrinsically to that past - one whose very presence instantly reminded us that only twenty years separated the technology of the two eras?

The odd thing was I didn't mind either Nick Fury or SHIELD when they turned up as guests in someone else's mag. Nor did I mind characters in other mags using ridiculous technology. It was just when Fury, his cohorts and his technology came together in their own mag that I had a problem.

Still, despite all my complaining about the strip being too far-fetched, SHIELD did at least give us one thing I could accept.

Nick Fury's flying car.

I refuse to listen to anyone who tells me that thing could never work.