Week Ending Feb. 10, 1973

Mighty World of Marvel #19


We have reached the eve of big changes at Marvel UK, unfortunately it seems that the decision was made early in February 1973 to mark the occasion with a somewhat less impressive issue of MWOM than we have become accustomed to.


The Hulk continues his adventures in the made-up but definitely a bit communist Bodavia. Taking his sweet time to escape from one guy armed with what looks like a prototype Super Soaker. The story does little and goes nowhere, do we get some nice art along the way though? Unfortunately not. Steve Ditko is on pencils with Vince Colletta on inks, I know Colletta gets a lot of flak, so I wanted to be able to say his work was ok here. I'll be generous and say it is possibly a combination that doesn't flatter either artist, one small upside is Glenn Talbot looks even more like David Niven than he did last week.


Can Spider-Man raise the bar for this week's issue? Well he might have done, were he not reduced to a fill-in story for fairly sensible reasons relating to Marvel UK's plans for next week. Spidey's own plans for some creepy incel stalking of the Human Torch's girlfriend Doris (is this Doris' only appearance? I don't remember her at all) get spoiled when Johnny Storm arrives. Spider-Man reacts accordingly by gatecrashing the party and starting a fight. I really hope this sort of obnoxious behaviour is not condoned or rewarded in anyway, like getting his own weekly title.


The Fantastic Four continue with the most misguided movie idea since any randomly selected Adam Sandler comedy. The Submariner picks the FF off one by one under the pretext of shooting scenes for his blockbuster film. This in itself is pretty bad, Namor's bizarre colloquial New York style of speech adds a whole extra level of awful. After cornering Sue Storm with a disturbing marriage proposal, Namor is mobbed by the rest of the team. All is forgiven though when he agrees to release the movie and end the Fantastic Four's money worries.
I can only assume this is the actual behind-the-scenes story of Josh Trank's 2015 Fantastic Four film.

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