After several months more than I'd like, I finally got back to my 60's Marvel re-reading project tonight. (Losing momentum can really derail you...)

Among tonight's goodies...

FF #30 -- The Dreaded Diablo!

FF Annual #2 -- "The Final Victory of Dr. Doom!"

TTA #59 -- "Enter: The Hulk!"

ASM #16 -- "Duel With Daredevil!"

JIM #108 -- "At The Mercy Of Loki, Prince Of Evil!"


Stan really went guest-star crazy this month. Rama-Tut turns up in a Dr. Doom story. The Avengers cameo in a story where Giant-Man & Wasp fight Hulk. Daredevil shows up to fight a hypnotized Spider-Man. And Dr. Strange's life is saved by Don Blake, and later returns the favor, even as The Avengers have another cameo in the same story. Sheesh! (Luckily, no multi-parters, so you could read any of these in any order.)

The Dr. Doom-Rama Tut scene was always cool-- at least, it looked cool. Out of the entire FF Annual, that one scene apparently proves Stan was seriously over-worked. He took an off-handed comment by Ben Grimm from almost a year earlier (FF #19) where Ben suggested that the 2 villains might be one and the same, and had Dr. Doom reitterate it, almost convincing Rama-Tut it might be true. But it MAKES NO SENSE!!! In the very same scene, he has Rama-Tut claim to be from the 25th Century-- when in FF #19 it states repeatedly he was from the year 3,000. (Early Legion of Super-Heroes stories had the same lack of consistency-- but stuff like that wasn't supposed to happen at Marvel!)

As with his previous appearance, Doom hadn't realized Sue had an invisible force-field-- but by story's end, after being brushed aside by one (not sure if he still realized she was responsible), he's put together one of his own. The "Encephalo-Gun" that supposedly allows Reed & Doom to wage a MENTAL combat found its way into the Tom Baker DOCTOR WHO story, "The Brain of Morbius". (Since the outcome was an illusion, was the gun itself even real, I wonder?)

It's funny-- but until tonight, I NEVER realized that "Duel With Daredevil"-- or at least, one page of it-- may have been the "inspiration" (jumping-off point) for one of the Ralph Bakshi-Gray Morrow SPIDER-MAN cartoons: "Pardo Presents" !!! An eager audience is hypnotized by a villain dressed in outrageous colors; the show being a "benefit" is mentioned; a hero is sitting in the audience and suddenly realizes the crowd is under a spell; the villain is surprised when somebody from the crowd gets up and attacks him. EVERYTHING else in the cartoon was completely, utterly different-- but it does seem to me that somebody doing the 'toons must have at least skimmed that issue.

It's kinda like how the very 1st Doc Ock story, where he goes mad and takes over a nuclear research plant, seems to have served as a jumping-off point for "Swing City" (and I NEVER realized it until I re-read the comic last year) while the idea of lifting Manhattan into the sky (in the SAME cartoon) actually came from the Gil Kane Captain America story in SUSPENSE.

JIM #108 was the earliest THOR comic I have the original of, so I took the opportunity to compare, page-by-page, with the MASTERWORKS book. What a disaster the reprint was! Apart from the colors on Thor & Loki's costumes, not one color is consistent on any page of the entire comic. You'd think they'd at least have looked at the originals, wouldn't you? Every page appears to be reproduced from 2nd or 3rd-generation stats, which look like 6th-generation photocopies. It's THAT bad. I didn't realize Chic Stone (like Don Heck & Vince Colletta) liked using razor-sharp thin fine lines in places. Most of them were re-inked from scratch. The Colletta-inked TOA story appears intact, except all the lines are blurred, and in places a multitude of fine lines become a solid black. There's 1 page of the Thor story, however, where it looks like they couldn't even find a BAD stat-- EVERY line is different, much of the detail is obliterated, and I can only guess it was recreated from scratch using a lightbox and a mylar overlay. AUGH!!! (I think one of the FF pages in the 1st Inhumans multi-parter had the same "problem".)

They should really put the word out to collectors, where original art exists, to get fresh, clean, sharp scans made, so other fans can enjoy the art the way it was meant to be seen. When they reprinted FF #53 a couple years ago (the 2nd half of the 1st Black Panther story), I was shocked. Apparently, someone had loaned them the original art for that entire issue-- and they'd shot new stats from it. I had the original comic in that case. The reprint-- looked BETTER than the original!!! If only it could always be the case...