Giant-Size Invaders #1.

What a cruel mistress The Mighty World of Marvel could be. Much as I loved it, there were times when it could inflict horror unimaginable upon a reader.

One such occasion was when it decided to run reprints of Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos for what seemed like an eternity. I really did try to read those stories but must confess that after a while I simply gave up and habitually left that section of the comic unread. How I celebrated when they were dropped from the mag, to be replaced by some other strip or other.

The other nightmare was when the comic started running reprints of The Invaders.

At this point, I have to come clean. As a kid, I hated war comics - all that, "Achtung!" and, "Donner und blitzen!" Even as a young child, it all seemed horribly stereotyped and juvenile. The truth is that the main reason I read Marvel Comics in the first place was because they bore no resemblance to the war comics that British publishers routinely inflicted on us.

The only exception to this antipathy was Weird War Tales - but that was only because it was full of ghosts and great artwork.

Sadly, The Invaders possessed neither, being straightforward super-hero fare and drawn by Frank Robbins. I don't like to be harsh on Frank Robbins but if he wasn't drawing The Shadow, I couldn't cope with his weirdly distorted characters who fought in strange balletic poses, with proportions that suggested they 'd been through some sort of mangling machine.

Well, the first time they made their appearance was in Giant-Size Invaders #1. How will that comic fare, upon me re-reading it for the first time since the late 1970s?

After bashing up some Nazis, Captain America learns that one of the scientists who helped create him has been taken to hospital after a run-in with yet more Nazis. There, he discovers the Germans have created their own super soldier known as The Master Man who's out to attack a British battleship headed for America.

Cap, Bucky, the Human Torch and Toro head off to stop him - and discover the Sub-Mariner's already on the boat. Our heroes then proceed to hit the Axis Antagonist from all sides.

When The Master Man's finally dispatched, it turns out his target on the boat was Winston Churchill who tells them to stay teamed-up in order to thwart the Germans, at which point our heroes go all gung ho and tell the Nazis (who aren't there) that they're going to smash their faces in, or words to that effect.

It'd be nice to say my adult self was won over by all this in a way my youthful incarnation never was but I still didn't like it. Roy Thomas' script is full of caricatured Germans being beastly and having silly accents (I'm sorry, I should have said, "Haffink der silly accents, schweinhund!") and it has to be said The Invaders are strangely inept and ineffectual. The only reason they beat The Master Man is because he loses his powers at an inconvenient moment, otherwise they'd have failed completely in their mission and Britain would have been looking for a new Prime Minister.

On top of that is the same old complaint that Frank Robbins' art just isn't suited to super-heroes. He was suited to the 1940s - just not men in tights in the 1940s.

There's also the problem that Namor talks like he did way back in the Golden Age. Granted, this makes some sort of sense, bearing in mind that the story's set in that era but, for a reader used to the more haughty Silver and Bronze Age Sub-Mariner, it really is jarring to see him rattling on about, "Ratzis," and slanging it up big-time. You also have to feel sorry for him not having a youthful sidekick like the other two adult members do. Could Marvel not have let him abduct Aqualad or something?

So, there you have it. I remain unconvinced that I was ever wrong about the strip. Still, at least it's not Nick Fury and His Howling Commandos.

Now that really would be a terrible thing to be.

PS. You can never say this blog isn't educational. Apparently, the phrase, "OMG," was first used in a letter sent to Winston Churchill way back in 1917.

I have no info on whether his diary entry for June 6th 1944 read, "Just invaded France. lol."

Fantastic Four Annual #4. The New Human Torch vs the Original Human Torch.

With the news that the Fantastic Four's Human Torch has died, or is dead or is going to die (no one can accuse me of not knowing exactly what the score is when it comes these fancy modern comics), it seems as good a time as ever to dry our tears by reminding ourselves of another Human Torch who died...

...and then came back...

... and then died...

...and then came back.

Yes! It's the Original Human Torch, created in 1939 by Carl Burgos and later resurrected - or not as the case may be - as the Avengers' Vision.

But it's easy to forget that, before his density-changing reappearance, the Original Human Torch made a fleeting comeback in the pages of the Fantastic Four Annual #4, to bother and bewilder the teen inheritor of his title, in a plan conceived by the Mad Thinker.

The Thinker's brought the android back from the dead in order to kill the new Human Torch who's looking for a way to be reunited with his beloved Crystal. She's still trapped, along with the other Inhumans, in the Great Refuge, so the new Torch flies into the desert in order to try something with his nova power that he thinks might bring a solution.

But, as John Lennon once said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," and our hero's promptly intercepted by the Original Torch.

Unfortunately for the Thinker, despite having amnesia and therefore not remembering he's a good guy, the Original Torch doesn't have it in him to try and kill his namesake and, when the rest of the Fantastic Four show up, thanks to Lockjaw they all find themselves in the Thinker's den where the Thinker kills the Original Torch and flees, leaving behind his super-computer Quasimodo to act in a pitiful manner at his abandonment.

It has to be said it's a somewhat undignified appearance for the Original Torch too, brought back to be a slave, blunder around not quite knowing what's going on and then die again, and he does come across as depressingly subservient and weak-spined. It's a major let-down when you compare it to the much more whole-hearted Silver Age resurrections of Captain America and the Sub-Mariner. I assume Stan Lee felt there was no place for the Original Torch in a comic book universe that had a new Torch and therefore he wasn't a permanently revivable character but you can't help feeling that one of the company's Golden Age trinity of classic heroes should have been treated with more respect on his return.

It's also a mystery as to what Quasimodo's doing in the tale. Leaving aside the fact he's a terrible character - a computer based on the Hunchback of Notre Dame - in this his first-ever appearance he serves no purpose at all. He just spends all his time whingeing and whining in a style reminiscent of the X-Men's Toad but worse.

But what matters most of all is that it involves a Human Torch coming back from the dead. How times change. With modern comics' much greater sense of reality, I'm afraid there's no way the current Human Torch is going to be coming back. I mean, there's no way any comic book company would ever dare kill a major hero and milk the sales from it before rendering that "collector's item" comic worth less than you paid for it by bringing him back six months later. Damn you, Marvel. In killing the Human Torch forever, you've robbed us eternally of a small part of our childhood.

The Fantastic Four. An age in comics.

Reader, can you spot what it is in this issue that
proves one of these characters is clinically
insane? 

Working out the ages of characters in comic books is a fraught business at the best  times. How for instance could Superman have been having adventures as an adult in the 1940s when, ten years later, he was having adventures as Superboy?

Mostly, for the sake of my sanity, I avoid such matters but the issue's been thrown in my face by my recent re-reading of a whole bunch of 1960s' Fantastic Four stories.

It comes down to the events of Fantastic Four #82 which throw a spanner and a half into the strip's already straining chronological cogs.

To work out the ages of the Fantastic Four, I suppose we have to start with Dr Doom. Thanks to his origin story in Fantastic Four Annual #2, we get a good look at his early life and career but the thing that strikes you is that nowhere is there any mention of the Second World War.

This is odd.

We know Reed Richards and Ben Grimm were old enough to be involved in the War because Reed Richards turned up in an issue of Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos. As, according to Doom's origin, everyone in Latveria seems to be called Boris and wears lederhosen, I think we can assume that Latveria's meant to be slap-bang next to Germany where - as we all know from reading any Jack Kirby drawn comic - everyone's called Boris and wears lederhosen. It seems unlikely that people in Latveria therefore could have failed to have noticed a World War going on in their own backyard.

This lack of a mention of the War implies Doom left Latveria and went to America to study before it broke out. This means the youngest he could have been in 1939, when hostilities erupted, was 18.

Now, we also know from that tale that Reed Richards started university on the very same day, as did Ben Grimm, which presumably makes them the same age as Dr Doom. This means that, in 1961 when the Fantastic Four made their debut, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm would've been at least forty. The Human Torch in those early stories is old enough to mess around with cars but not yet attend university, which I assume makes him around 17.

Now, we're led to believe from the start that the Invisible Girl's older than her brother.

But how much older?

In one of the early issues, Reed says that she and he were childhood sweethearts, which suggests they're the same sort of age as each other and therefore she's around forty. This makes her at least 23 years older than her brother.

OK.

It's a bit unlikely but not impossible.

But then Crystal of the Inhumans comes along. As she's his girlfriend and is portrayed as being a bit on the impetuous side, logically she's around the same age as the Human Torch who's now old enough to attend university and so should be 18.

The trouble is, in Fantastic Four issue #81, when she applies to join the FF in place of the pregnant but forty-odd year old Sue Storm, she says, "I'm no younger than Sue herself was -- when your team was first formed!" So, that makes Crystal in her forties and her boyfriend the Torch in his late teens.

The problem is that one issue later we're told Crystal's still a minor. This means that, one, the Human Torch is carrying on with an underage girl and, two, that Sue Storm was a minor when we first met her and her forty year old boyfriend. Not only that it means that when Reed Richards was fifteen, his "childhood sweetheart" was minus ten, making her a figment of his imagination.

Is that what this is all about? Is this like that Russell Crowe movie A Beautiful Mind where it turns out that hardly anyone the hero knows actually exists?

Suddenly it all makes sense. What are the chances that Galactus exists? A fifty-foot tall planet-eating alien who just happens to land on Reed Richards' roof? What are the chances that Reed Richards has been to the moon and met a fifty foot tall alien called the Watcher, shortly after fighting super-powered apes? What are the chances that, in his apartment, Reed Richards has built a gateway to a whole other universe called the Negative Zone?

There's no chance.

Clearly Reed Richards is a man beyond sanity. A man who spends his days on his own in an empty skyscraper, talking to himself, lost in imaginary adventures.

And if not for Fantastic Four #82, we'd never have known about it.

Of Miracle Men and Invisible Girls. Fantastic Four #139

By the time I was eight, I'd realised a marker pen was a wonderful thing. For one thing, you could sit there smelling it - although you had to give up after a while, as you started to get dizzy - and, for the other, you could use it to join the dots on the Invisible Girl.

For those unaware of the significance of the Invisible Girl's dots, way back in the weekly Mighty World of Marvel reprints of the early 1970s, jolly Jack Kirby used to get round the problem of how to let us see an invisible character by drawing her with dotted instead of full lines. "Well," I reasoned, if being dotted meant her foes couldn't see her, then joining those dots meant she'd no longer be invisible and the enemies of the Fantastic Four could find her and kill her.

Now, this may seem a mean thing to do but, even at that tender age, I'd decided Sue Storm was a bit of a useless article. All she ever seemed to do, for issue after issue, in those tales was get kidnapped and have to be rescued.

On top of that, there was the whole Reed vs Sub-Mariner thing with her. Catch yourself on, love, you're supposed to be a good guy. Stop lusting after someone who wants to destroy the human race - especially one who's half fish - and find yourself a proper boyfriend.

So, you can imagine my delight when I got the Fantastic Four #139 home from Sheffield's Sheaf Market and discovered Sue Storm was no longer a member of the world's greatest super-team.

Instead, she'd been replaced by Medusa.

Now, as an adult, I can see that Medusa's power - being able to trip people up with her hair - wasn't any better than Sue's power of invisibility and, given that she was in the habit of wearing a halter-neck top, despite being a well-endowed woman with a lot of running about to do, clearly wasn't of a very practical bent either but I didn't care. When it came down to it, useless power aside, there was always something more kick-ass about her than Sue.

She wasn't the only one because this issue featured someone else gone kick-ass; the Miracle Man.

I knew of the Miracle Man from those reprints and knew his miracles were no more than hypnosis.

From that we were supposed to view him as a fraud - although hypnosis seemed as valid a super-power as any to me.

Still, a fraud he was declared to be and a fraud was how we were meant to see him. But here, somehow, by means never really explained, hanging around with Wyatt Wingfoot's tribe had made him all-powerful.

Needless to say, being all-powerful didn't stop him quickly getting his come-uppance again, this time at that hands of those self-same Indians who were now giant ghosts.

The other great thrill for me was the tale was drawn by John Buscema. If someone forced me to name my favourite comic book artist of all time, I'd have to go for Buscema. He might not have been an innovator like Kirby or Adams, or have put in the care and attention of a Barry Smith - and he might have had an alarming tendency to not be able to remember anything at all about any of the comics he'd drawn - but his work was just so easy on the eye that, heretical as it might be, I do enjoy actually enjoy reading his FF and Thor tales more than the Kirby ones.

Anything else about this tale stand out for me?

Not half.

The Human Torch.

His costume was red.

It might not seem important now but, for a kid, that was more than enough to seal the deal.