What do you think of Marvel's golden age? Either the actual comics of the 1930's, 40's and 50's or the plethora of revisionist comics taking place in that era.
Marvel has never really been interested in their roots unlike DC who have always reprinted the material and reused the characters much more.
Namor deserves the same love as Captain America fuck Marvel.
Marvel's golden age was around 75-85, which is different from the golden age of comic books
Marvel during the golden age was all Namor, Human Torch and Cap.
I had both volumes OP and I really enjoyed them.
I never noticed till you mentioned how there isn’t much actual golden age reprint books for any of marvel’s characters. I wonder why. Perhaps is due to it dehumanizing the Japanese and Germans, those old Captain America covers got pretty intense with the horror. Or it could be the fear of out dated and racism materiel that was found in the comics at the time. Not sure why really. It’s the same thing with Looney Tunes releasing their cartoons from the 40’s in dvds yet there’s nothing for Tom and Jerry.
I think Marvel and DC owe Roy Thomas big time for keeping and organizing their Golden Age history. Guy, really was a driving force and had a hand in anything with superheroes in WW2.
>Namor deserves the same love as Captain America
Two of my favorite characters user. Namor did get a lot of love during the silver and Bronze Age of marvel. He was gust starring and appearing in a lot of books back in the day. Even got a cartoon too.
I feel like the 70's was when Namor stories peaked. Roy Thomas did right by Bill Everett
The majority of Marvel's golden age stuff is pretty forgettable and a lot of the attempts to revive have been as well, but every now and then there's a gem like the New Invaders mini. I'm disappointed Thin Man didn't make anymore appearances after, he could have made a great antagonist for Cap. Overall though I think it's fitting that there aren't very many GA heroes running around Marvel and that there was the gulf of time where there weren't really any heroes. It's a contrast to DC's unbroken lineage of heroes, although that's getting harder and harder to explain as WWII gets farther away from the present, unless they just want to stick with the notion that the JSA were active in the 40s but didn't start having kids until the late 80s-90s.
>I never noticed till you mentioned how there isn’t much actual golden age reprint books for any of marvel’s characters.
Tom Brevoort was for a while the only one in editorial who was interested in golden age reprints (he was the one who championed for the two Golden Age volumes and the affordable versions of the Simon/Kirby Cap books that had previously only been a limited-run super deluxe collector set. Roy Thomas had an interest in it but when he was in editorial power at Marvel in the 70s they only did floppy reprints more or less.
We do have a lot more of it these days though. There's several golden age omnibuses now, even ones with Everett Namor and Burgos Torch.
While I’m not a fan of Tom (he’s a cunt) I appreciate the man’s will to collect a lot of the forgotten golden age comics from Marvel.
Speaking of which, what are some of the omnibuses that collect the golden age?
Roy and Bill were roommates at a time, they got at each other’s throats a couple of times at work and at home.
It’s sad that Bill’s drinking really effected his personal life and work. He was very talented when he put the effort but he would half ass it or fail to meet deadlines due to partying late. I think Roy would’ve fired him if it wasn’t for Stan Lee. All of this was is in the book “Fire & Water: Bill Everett, the Sub-Mariner, and the Birth of Marvel Comics”. A very good read for any Everett fans.
Stan really stood by him and always gave Bill a chance, even when he blew it, his daredevil run for example. I really think Stan admired Everett’s talent and I think he was a Namor fan himself.
I say this cause Stan Lee wrote Sub-Mariner’s early solo issues and I would put it up there in some the best issues. Yes the plot is corny but Stan knows dialogue. He’s very good with the dramatic theater like setting Namor’s court takes place in. If it wasn’t superhero comics, I think Stan would’ve done a great medieval comic like Prince Valiant or maybe even a more tone down Game of Thrones fantasy book.
ngl it'd be interesting if Marvel had their own version of Justice League's The New Frontier.
They kinda tried with the Marvels Project.
Tom is a cunt, but a few times he's had good policies.
Golden Age Captain America Omni - Cap 1-12
Golden Age Marvel Comics - Marvel (Mystery) 1-12
Timely's Greatest Namor by Bill Everett Vol 1 and 2 (all of his 40s work)
Timely's Greatest Carl Burgos - All his Human Torch work
Timely's Greatest Simon and Kirby - All their non-Cap work
As for affordable reprints, not that many of them around.
That's what Marvels was.
It was a very unfortunate situation. Roy idolized Bill. He loved his work since childhood and was thrilled to get to actually work with him, but like with many other cases you should never meet your idols. Bill's alcoholism and notorious temperamental nature did not go together with Roy's nerdy and meticulous life. I think Roy regretted this later on, since he has written a ton about Bill after his death and it's always little but glowing praise.
Stan giving Bill chance after chance was another thing that kept Bill afloat. He did the same for Jerry Siegel when Mort Weisinger fired him for the second time and barred him from working at DC. Jerry got to write the solo Human Torch strips for Strange Tales, and even though his scripts were disjointed messes because of Jerry slipping into deep depression and drinking Stan made sure he got full freelance pay for his work. Jerry insisted on writing under a pseudonym, though.
Superman’s Jerry Siegel wrote Human Torch? Man, that’s something you don’t hear everyday. What were some of the issues he wrote or pseudonym he used?
Strange Tales #112-113 which he wrote as "Joe Carter". He also wrote a few other things for Marvel.
I recommend checking out Battle Hymn. It’s a fun and good book that uses thinly hidden golden age marvel characters. It is a shame it was never picked up for another volume, as the ending felt rushed and the plot hooks that felt like they were leading up to something big, were left unexplained.
Namor thread?
>What do you think of Marvel's golden age?
I love The Destroyer, The Blazing Skull, Laughing/Purple Mask, Blue Diamond, Fiery Mask.
There are some terrible ones, though. Moon Man, Red Raven...
Everett's best stories are from the 50's to 70's. Shame he drank himself to death.
>The Destroyer
I got into him and Citizen V thanks to the Thunderbolts. Lots of Golden Age references in that.
Also, can anyone figure out why there is always a female patriotic hero and a male speedster being paired up? Examples are the Whizzer and Miss America over at marvel and Johnny Quick and Liberty Belle over at dc. I wouldn’t doubt Roy Thomas is behind it all and has his reasons.
i don't care about them, except the original Everett Namor stuff rules, but I love how much Roy Thomas loves it
invaders in 2000s decade were good.
Roy wrote both of those into couples, so the answer is Roy.
>2020
>we STILL haven't seen him retconned into a champion of Khonsu
That be pretty cool actually.
>Moon Man
>doesn't wear pants
I also like that he just sits in his living room, in front of a window, in his superhero outfit reading the paper.
>costumed vigilante looks into meat that's gone off
I mean, I get that comics were trying to highlight social injustices but c'mon...
Yeah it would kinda work since we've had Marc have visions of previous champions of Khonsu for quite some time now. In fact, during one 1990s issue we had a view of a Moon Knight called Moonman. But it wasn't this character or in any way a reference to him.
Yeah, the first Fiery Mask story is a trip. One of the things I really hated about The Twelve was how they retconned all that away. In some cases, goofy shit needs to be embraced.
The Twelve always read more like a Watchmen-style AU to me given that JMS tried to retcon away all golden age goofiness including Fiery Mask's origin, Rockman's origin and Black Widow's origin.
I really, really don't understand why Marvel never did anything with Claire Voyant. Obviously, Disney nowadays wouldn't want to use her, but she would have fit the 70s perfectly with characters like Satana, Ghost Rider and Hellstrom being pushed. And in the 90s she could easily have been the female Spawn equivalent. At least use her as a horror host or something.
>Marvel has never really been interested in their roots unlike DC who have always reprinted the material and reused the characters much more.
I think it's just because Marvel didn't fully become Marvel until the 60's. Hell, this was a belief at the company too, they had a 25th anniversary celebration in 1986 (doing the math, the year they're celebrating is 1961, the year Fantastic Four debuted)
The 60's was when DC brought back many of the Golden Age characters for Earth-Two (and acknowledged their history by making the characters older), but over at Marvel they brought back Namor, but only kinda/sorta acknowledged his old stuff during the 60's (Dorma came back but she and other Atlanteans were now blue). Captain America was brought back but now it turned out he disappeared for around 20 years, which means all post-WWII Cap stories were ignored. And then for Torch, they basically replaced him with a new character using the superhero name. The real Hammond didn't permanently come back until like 1989 (for like two decades it was believed Vision was built from the Torch's body till Byrne retconned that).
You don't really see much of Marvel's Golden Age being reintegrated in until the 70's and in limited fashion (like Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver believing Whizzer and Miss America were their parents).
Did people not like Vision being the android Human Torch? When did they add that he had Wonder Man’s brain patterns?
I like that too
Imperious Rex!
Other than a few appearances in the FF and Everett’s, Thomas’ and Byrne’s run, is there any other good Namor solo runs or guest appearances worth reading?
He had Wonder Man's brain patterns and Human Torch's body. At least, I think that was the original explanation.
Byrne didn't like this and gradually started to hint that Vision wasn't using the real Human Torch's body. In his Fantastic Four run there was a flashback with Phineas Horton hinting that there was the potential for an army of Human Torches, meaning possibility for multiple bodies. Then in his Avengers West Coast run he brought back the original Torch to make it really clear that Vision wasn't built from the Torch's body.
Zdarsky's Invaders was pretty much just a stealth Namor book and was pretty good. Really focused on the effect WW2 had on him, giving him PTSD and survivor's guilt, and the diferent perspectives people have on him.
Jae Lee's run after Byrne left is weird, but good. It attempts to take the series in a more Sword & Sorcery direction, with lots of Lovecraftian elements. If you can buy some pretty hard-to-swallow villain reformations, it's fun and Lee's art is superb.
The Depths is also an interesting look at Namor as a pure monster, hearkening back to the original 1939 story. Namor himself is barely seen in it though.
>be moon based superhero
>only have powers once a lunar month
>full moon night
>super excited, get costume on
>open up newspaper to look for crime to investigate
>only find a health code violation
>after powers are gone there's a string of bank robberies
>life is pain
Yeah, Stan and Jack wanted FF #1 to be a clean start. They didn't feel comfortable referencing all those weird-ass older characters and just wanted to use what they wanted and discard what they wanted, so they tried to go with what was essentially the Simon/Kirby Cap, bring back a more antagonistic early Sub-Mariner rather than the more amicable one he became by the 50s and so on. Roy Thomas did as much as he could to preserve the old stories in canon, though even he admitted he didn't like ones like the one where the original Human Torch flies to Saturn in a few hours and burns in space.
Another reason that Marvel didn't do much with their golden age catalogue until the 2000s and 2010s is that originally getting passable reprints of comics that old was a bitch. Marvel did not have the original art for more than a handful of golden age stories and for the majority of them the pre-digital restoration process was exceedingly slow, painstaking and complex. Basically you took a printed copy of a comic which you would have to destroy, washed the colors out, cleaned up the pink spatter by hand, and was left with a new black and white template for the page. Even at the best of times these reprints turned out rather murky, and sometimes they used the reprints themselves to make new reprint pages, which further deteriorated the quality. The very first volume of the Golden Age of Marvel Comics tpb actually almost only reprinted golden age stories that had already BEEN reprinted before, so the work had already been done. You can see it by Namor's hair color being black in the Marvel Mystery Comics reprint (it was originally red) and by the blocked-out but still visible reprint box in the Marvel Boy story.
The second volume of Golden Age of.. was the first one where they started using modern restoration, I think, as it features much crisper reprints of stories that had never been reprinted before.
>Byrne didn't like this
Byrne just plain didn't like Vision at all, given how he fucked the character over at every turn.
Other than Cap, I’m partial to the Patriot. Don’t think I ever read his GA stuff but his later appearances won me over to the character. He had a limited series or a one shot that showed his origin and how he struggled in upholding the Captain America mantle after the original went under.
It was a mini by Karl Kesel and it was fucking fantastic. I got the trade of it and it's still a favorite. I love the Marvels-style approach of going through different snapshots of Jeff Mace's life.
That's a good point, it was way easier for them to go and reprint stuff from the 50's and 60's just because a lot of the stuff was still available in the 70's. But things from the 30's and especially the 40's (when there was a lot of paper drives for the war efforts) would've been way harder to track down in the pre-internet days.
Yeah, plus Marvel had the common practice of just scrapping art boards after a while since reprints basically didn't exist. DC did this too, shredding hundreds of original golden age comics in the 60's and 70's before the process was halted. Roy went patrolling the Marvel archie in the 60s and was dismayed to find only a handful stories had survived, and those were the ones that he got reprinted into magazines like Fantasy Masterpieces and Marvel Tales. The digital revolution was literally the salvation of these old stories, without it they probably would have eventually become lost media.
Black Widow (Voyant) is a THOT
Invaders is good.
This is really damn interesting. Thanks for sharing, user!
Reminds me of the BBC tape wipe, when they erased a huge chunk of their archive to reuse the tape. If Terry Gilliam hadn't made back-ups the entire run of Monty Python's Flying Circus would have been lost.
The Vision being Human Torch was Roy connecting him to the Golden Age. Byrne was Byrne and fucked it all up. and ruined him and wanda until now/for the future basically.
Vision is in his like 3rd body at least by now though so shrug.
> Roy went patrolling the Marvel archie in the 60s and was dismayed to find only a handful stories had survived,
this is much better when you realize there's a good chance he was just doing it for his own enjoyment
NP I've read a lot of TwoMorrows books and most of Roy's old titles, he loved putting in fact pages in those.
>this is much better when you realize there's a good chance he was just doing it for his own enjoyment
Yeah, as a first generation comics fan he spent a large chunk of his younger years in the industry just championing for the preservation of older comics.He was the entire reason the Invaders happened. Then he tried to get DC to publish a JSA title but they were extremely adamant not to, so he had to settle for All-Star Squadron, Infinity Inc and eventually young All-Stars instead.
Thanks anons!
Yeah for all people's problems with Roy Thomas I ended up getting an appreciation of his dedication to try to preserve a lot of comics history, in spite of an industry full of people trying to trash the past to self-promote.