Week Ending April 14, 1973

What were the youth of Britain up to while they lived through Disco and waited for Punk to be invented? Well some of them were possibly enjoying another couple of almost symmetrical covers on their favourite Marvel UK weeklies, untroubled by satin bell-bottoms and the imminent threat of unsanitary safety-pin piercings.

Mighty World of Marvel #28

I am trying to view this cover with the eyes of a youngster, I probably would have thought it was cool when I was a child. To be honest this is not much of a compliment, I was a fairly stupid child. Looking at it now as a jaded adult, it almost seems like a surrealist masterpiece, Hulk batting away missiles with scant regard for the laws of physics, logic or how missiles work and a pair of Fantastic Four/Daredevil tableaux that can't possibly represent the stories within. Can they?

We left the Hulk last week standing over the body of the late Leader. Surprisingly for these disjointed early episodes, that is where our story opens its next chapter. Our green anti-hero, who currently has the mind of Bruce Banner (on and off) and the Watcher's fishbowl of wisdom, debates his next move. A move that turns out to be 'jump to the Alps and try on the knowledge helmet to prove how hard he is'. The Watcher takes this opportunity to allow Hulk to hear the voice of Rick Jones, imprisoned by General Ross, in yet another example of his total inability to avoid interfering in events. In a bid to rescue his friend, Hulk makes his way to the White House, where the army are waiting, armed with the T-Gun, a weapon designed by Bruce Banner and built by General Ross, even though he has no idea what it does, on the off-chance that it might be useful, a plan straight out of Sun Tzu's Art of War. If your idea of useful is blasting the Hulk into the future, we can count this as a win.

This week sees the reprint of Daredevil #5 and the arrival of Wally Wood as artist on the strip. This must have been something of a coup at the time, as Stan heralds the recruitment loudly on the opening splash page. It is a shame then that Wally could not have been given a better story for his debut. DD is on the hunt for the Masked Matador, who I hoped had been bitten by a radioactive bull, but sadly just turns out to be a bloke who is very good at Matadoring. Much to my disappointment, Daredevil seems uniquely useless at thwarting a bullfighting themed crime-spree. It is lucky that the quality of the art has improved, because reading how Matt Murdock gets around not blowing his secret identity by making a loud guess that the Masked Matador might be raiding a wall safe at a fancy dress party, in order to draw attention to THAT VERY THING, would probably have stopped me ever reading another comic.

This week's mini-poster brings something of a mystery, it says it is the Hulk, and sure, he's green, he's big, he's angry, but it does look like a random Jack Kirby head (Sgt Fury maybe?) Pasted on a weirdly drawn body and coloured green. Any background on this would be most welcome.

The Fantastic Four return from their moon-based adventures, and after being mobbed by fans on landing, retire to the Baxter Building for a much needed rest. Well, three of them do, Sue gets on with the housework, and asked to do it quietly by Reed. A little later Mr Fantastic finishes his report for NASA on his new rocket fuel and searches for Sue to type it up for him. Amazingly, he is shocked to find her using the FF's 'roving eye' TV apparatus to look for Namor the Sub-Mariner. Given her choices, a flatheaded fish-prince seems like winner to me. We now take a trip across town to see a mysterious figure, wrapped up in his thoughts of revenge on the Fantastic Four, a figure who turns out to be the not-as-dead-as-we-thought Puppet Master. Our very much alive bad guy lets us in on his plan to defeat the FF by controlling Namor to do his nefarious bidding, which he does, the Sub-Mariner demonstrating his seemingly endless fish-based powers along the way. It won't come as much of a shock to regular readers to find out that Sue gets kidnapped at this point. The remaining members of the FF, plus Alicia Masters (because it seemed sensible to Ben to bring his blind girlfriend on a dangerous rescue mission rather than let her worry at home) set off in watery pursuit.

Spider-Man Comics Weekly #9

I have previously mentioned my admiration for the quality and design of Spider-Man's early foes, as week after week we have been served up classic antagonists. Well, not content to rest on their laurels, Steve and Stan take it one step further by having that cornucopia of bad-guys team up as the Sinister Six. Not satisfied with that, they also put a hat on a hat by having a bunch of unnecessary cameo appearances from Thor, the Thing and later the whole Fantastic Four, as well as Major Glenn Talbot showing up like they are on commission. 

Dr Octopus escapes from jail and starts the ball rolling on his plan for revenge against Spidey, recruiting five other recently vanquished evil-doers. His timing could not be better as Peter Parker has lost his superpowers and is in the middle of an existential funk. Now I in no way wish to second guess an evil genius, and while the first step of the Doc's plan (kidnap Betty Brant and Aunt May) is rock-solid, phase 2: have the Sinister Six split up and take on Spider-Man individually, is just bloody stupid. I feel my take on this is vindicated as our hero beats the hell out of two sixths of the criminal sextet within moments of suddenly getting his spider powers back. We will have to wait till next week to find out if the remaining four members of the Sinister Six chose the wrong alliterative adjective for their boy-band of crime.

Worthy of note this week in the internal colour pages, is a reworking of Stan's now famous editorial on the evils of bigotry. 

The pages of Thor bring us the first outing of a plot by Loki to defeat his brother by giving a mortal superpowers, a gambit that he would re-use in later years with varying degrees of success. The story itself is hardly the stuff of legends but there are a few items of note: Thor's magic belt makes its first appearance, the first page splash panel has what I assume is a hidden tribute to Len and Glynis Wein, furthermore Joe Sinnott steps in to take care of the art this week. I find this last item of particular interest as I only ever recall Joe's inking of other artists pencils, it is nice to see him doing his own thing here.