Guardians of the Galaxy Origins: Marvel Super-Heroes #18

 Oh Guardians of the Galaxy. How you have haunted my comics-reading life. I’d be lying if I claimed I was ever a fan, but like Captain Marvel, the Guardians are figures that have kept popping up on the fringe every now and then. I own Marvel Super Heroes #18, the first appearance of the Guardians, I own Marvel Presents #3 (their first major solo appearance after MSH) and I own the first issue of their 90’s series.

 The strange part though, is that I didn’t end up with any of those comics because I cared about the Guardians themselves. I bought Marvel Super Heroes #18 because of the Golden Age reprints in the back of the book, and the Marvel Presents #3 and Guardians #1 both came in a “mystery box” of comics I bought at a garage sale. I actually tried to sell the Marvel Super Heroes #18 several times because hey, first appearances always sell, right? Not if no one knows who the characters are! Now all these years later, a movie comes out featuring this team I own the key ‘first” issues of (which usually =$$$), and except for Yondu (who sources indicate will play an antagonistic role) not a single member of the original team will be used in the movie.

 Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?

 Still, despite my financial disappointments (over used comics I bought 20 years ago) and the film featuring characters I’m mostly unfamiliar with except for Groot and Rocket Raccoon, I have to say I’m still eager to see the movie.

 Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there’s no denying that the Marvel Studios films are here to stay, and while the same thing was once said about Raimi’s Spider-Man series or Nolan’s Batman series (before he announced that he was only going to do three films), the consistently strong box office and favorable reviews have made it clear that, even if they hit a snag, we aren’t going to be seeing the last of these movies for a long time.

 The Guardians film, more than any other, marks a turning point. Think of the incentive and confidence it will give Marvel to tap into other obscure properties if it is a success. We could see movies based on Moon Knight (maybe they could introduce him first as the villain in a Werewolf by Night film), Agents of Atlas, or hell, since it’s been confirmed he’ll make a cameo in Guardians, maybe even a good Howard the Duck movie. (You could argue that the success of Blade should have started this all the way back in the late 90’s, but honestly, did anyone who went to see that movie know it was based on a comic? Do any of the fans of those movies know that now?)

 On the other hand, if it fails, don’t expect to see anything other than the major Avengers-related characters onscreen for the next few years.

 So with all that said, let’s take a look back at the first appearance of the Guardians in 1969. Ah, 1969, when men were men, women were women, Black Sabbath was no longer Earth, hippies were mass-murderers and Gene Colan was John Buscema:

 The story starts off in the year 3007, where all Earth nations have joined together as the U.L.E (United Lands of Earth) and set up colonies on different planets where the inhabitants are modified at birth to survive. We are introduced to just one such of these humans; Charlie-27, who was raised on Jupiter and has a bulky, square-shaped physique to withstand its pressures. Returning from a trip, he arrives home only to find that his planet has been conquered by a race of reptilian creatures called the Badoon:

 The Badoon have forced most of the Jovian colonists into concentration camps (including Charlie's father), while the others are forced to mine uranium without protective suits:

 Charlie manages to escape by using a teleportation device to warp himself over to a random planet, where he is saved from the Badoon’s “Saturnian Hound-Hawks” by Martinex, a colonist altered to live on Pluto who has crystals for skin. Although the Plutonian and Jovian colonies have centuries of bad blood between them, they agree to work together:

 The story then shifts over to Earth, where we meet the Badoon commander Drang and his erstwhile prisoners (and the true protagonists of the piece); Major Vance Astro and his servant Yondu.

 Astro is forced to wear a purple copper suit (which sometimes appears to have a mouth and other times does not) to sustain his life, and the story of how he ended up wearing it is not only a supreme example of tragi-comedy, but one of the darkest origins in all of Silver Age comics. I’m not even going to summarize it, read for yourself:

 Damn.

 Despite being time-displaced by millennia, Drang nevertheless is willing to give Astro employment and power if he betrays the rest of the human race, who have set up a small resistance group. Astro appears to comply at first since all the people he knew are centuries dead, even selling out Yondu:

 However, it’s all just a ruse and Astro and Yondu escape. Astro is not as unfamiliar with current technology as the Badoon would think:

 They then meet Martinex and Charlie and, typically for Marvel, mistake them for bad guys and a fight ensues.

 Also typically for Marvel, they then realize the error of their ways and join forces quickly. Escaping the Badoon guards, they set out to find the rebel colony and sing a modified version of “We Shall Overcome”:

 And that’s that.

 As we all know, the Guardians of the Galaxy didn’t exactly grip the comics reading public, with their longest-lived series not coming about for two more decades and the incarnation of the team that caught Hollywood’s notice consisting of entirely different characters. As a stand-alone work of fiction, it’s a pretty typical pulp sci-fi tale, not much different from the kind of series that would have run in Planet Comics back in the 40s (In fact, Planet Comics’ old Lost World series seems to have been something of an influence, with the Badoon substituting for the Voltamen) and the usual Marvel formula of heroes fighting over a misunderstanding and then becoming fast friends is repeated here.

  Nevertheless, the debut story of the original Guardians is fascinating for several reasons. The idea that humans would have to drastically alter their bodies in order to successfully colonize and live in the atmosphere of other planets, although not an idea original to Drake, is a hard sci-fi concept that one rarely sees addressed in books and films, and even rarer in comics, particularly Silver Age comics. The tragic circumstances of why Vance Astro must wear his costume are also amazingly dark for the time. His whole origin story is essentially a Weird Science twist-ending (or a twisted parody of Buck Rogers, depending on your point of view), and the fact that he can never remove his suit makes Tony Stark’s problems seem trite in comparison. If he had betrayed the rebels to Drang, he would be a compellingly tragic villain.

 Another interesting aspect not often mentioned about the original Guardians is that they are probably comicdom’s first true team of “freak” heroes.

 

 It is true that the X-Men and the Doom Patrol pre-dated the Guardians (and considering that Arnold Drake wrote this, the Doom Patrol couldn’t have been too far from his mind), but the whole “X-Men are treated as freaks/X-Men are a metaphor for minorities” thing didn’t really come about in the original series much except for a few out-of-place scenes that could just as easily be found in Fantastic Four and Avengers. Even the whole Sentinels storyline was really just a prolonged variation on the standard “Public turns against the heroes until an even worse menace is created” plot. Instead of being discriminated against, you were more likely 99% of the time to find scenes of the public asking the X-Men for autographs, drooling over Marvel Girl, teenyboppers swooning over The Angel’s blond good looks or hippies trying to draw on The Beast’s big feet. The rare times that humans were shown hating mutants often felt tacked on, like the mob sequence in X-Men #8. I’m not saying that a subtext wasn’t there, but it was focused on in the 60’s about as much as Bruce Wayne’s angst over his losing his parents was in pre-Bronze Age Batman comics. I could write a whole essay about this, and probably will.

 The Doom Patrol definitely had tragic origins that made them outcasts, and certainly would be frightening to look at in real life, but most of their stories were showcases for Drake’s absurdist sense of humor and surreal imagination. Quite a contrast to Byrne and Morrison’s grim takes on the characters.

 Either way, my point is that the X-Men and Doom Patrol were all either fairly normal-looking, or the few who were abnormal-looking were non-threatening. The Beast and Iceman, the most inhuman appearing of the X-Men, were generally played for comic relief and were handsome in civilian guise. The other members of the team were all traditionally good-looking. Robotman was also made a cuddly presence in Doom Patrol. Even Negative Man was drawn to look cute underneath the bandages, showing a whole array of facial expressions. Elasti-Girl was a glamorous movie star in her civilian identity. You wouldn’t mind being around them, or being them despite their painful origins.

 The original Guardians though, truly are grotesque and freakish. Charlie-27 looks like a human compressed into a square shape, Martinex’s vaguely defined features and segmented, crystalline structure make him look like a grotesque cross between Iceman and Batman villain The Outsider and far eerier than either of them, Vance Astro is a man trapped in an inexpressive suit that makes him look more like a robot (or Superman villain the Parasite), than a hero. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be him. In fact, it is Yondu, oddly enough, who is the most normal-looking, despite being characterized as the most primitive and uneducated. All of them are the last of their kind in a sense (even the human Astro is the last living man from the twentieth century), with all the other members of their “races” dead or imprisoned. All of them would be misfits wherever they were to go.

 Perhaps it was this very aspect that was the reason the original Guardians were never a major hit, just like DC’s even more freakish-looking (and even less successful) Outsiders from First Issue Special #10.

 Another fascinating aspect of the Guardian’s debut is Drake’s vision of the future. All of Earth’s nations have united and we are specifically told by the narration that there haven’t been any wars. Normally this would imply some kind of peaceful, idealistic Utopia, but Drake never forgets or tries to overlook human nature. There are mentions of “New Paris”, “New Moscow”, “New New York etc. Clearly, there was a lot of blood spilt to create this ‘U.L.E’.

 Nor are racial or class conflicts depicted as a thing of the past, despite “We Shall Overcome” having changed to “Earth shall overcome” over the years. This is demonstrated briefly by mentioning the conflict between the “Jovians” and the “Pluvians”; they have even created their own slurs for each other. You can bet that if humanity ever does split into subspecies like this that it will just leads to new forms of racism, despite all the talk about “transhumanism” these days and claims that it will end racial conflict. Casual racism too can be observed in the hurtful things Astro says about Yondu, even if they were a bluff (Although then again, Yondu is written as a Tonto-like “Noble Savage”). We also see “robot servants”, but since normal labor jobs are shown to still exist and not made obsolete, apparently they are something only the very wealthy can afford.

 

  I wish more writers of futuristic space epics spent as much time on world-building as Drake does here, rather than simply making everything black and white, with the future being either a Utopian paradise or a Dystopian hellhole which has to be rebelled against, and Drake manages to achieve this in a story about rebels fighting a dystopian hellhole.

 All in all, while the original Guardians story isn’t great, and has even less potential as a film series than, well, a film starring a tree and a raccoon, it still offers up a truly fascinating vision of the future that’s neither too hopeful or too cynical, as well as a team of “freak” heroes that really are freakish for once. For fans of bizarre and unusual Silver Age comics, it’s one of Marvel’s most fascinating failed experiments.

 

 And let’s hope “failed experiment” isn’t a term that will be applied to the movie after it opens tonight.

 

UPDATE: Saw it opening night, and just went to see it a second time tonight. Loved it both times, and there’s really nothing for me to say that hasn’t already been said. In fact, I’m tempted to call it my favorite of all the Marvel Studios productions along with Winter Soldier, but it’s a bit too early to make that call.

 The doors are open. The Marvel Cinematic “Universe” has truly begun. Let Fox keep Fantastic Four and it’s supposed “grounded/found footage” approach, comic book movies that aren’t afraid to be comic book movies are going to be the norm from now on! Bring on Adam Warlock, Mar-Vell and Thanos!

 

 

I was an EC Frankenstein

 Don’t let my posts about Jeph Loeb witches and Topps anti-heroes fool you. I haven’t forsaken my love for classic horror (in comics or in film) one bit. Longtime readers of mine know how big a fan I am of Frankenstein and his Monster, and since it’s obligatory for every comic blogger worth his salt to post something EC-related during October, I thought I’d explore the famed publisher’s takes on one of horror’s most beloved characters. Besides, since comicdom’s most famous version of the Frankenstein Monster has already been written about ad nauseam on the interwebs, why not offer up something different? These stories deserve to be re-evaluated anyway, because, and I admit I can’t say this with any certainty; they contain ideas which, as far as I can tell, debuted in these comics and nowhere else, and have ended up in several Frankenstein films.

  Although few would deny that EC brought forth a degree of artistry heretofore unseen with its horror comics, few would also deny that they weren’t particularly original. Swiping stories from famous authors and then thinly disguising them would become an EC specialty of sorts, although thankfully when one famous science fiction writer noticed what was happening the results turned out happily for all involved. Since pretty much every horror filmmaker had swiped from Universal’s Frankenstein films by the early 50’s, it made sense that one of EC’s earliest horror comics would do the same. So in 1950, in the third story of Haunt of Fear #17 (actually #3), we were treated to “Ghastly” Graham Ingel’s take on the story of the world’s most famous monster-maker, called….“Monster Maker”.

   Hey, titles are hard.

  It began with the chief surgeon in London dismissing neurosurgeon John Ravenscar:

 A veteran doctor, Ravenscar was incensed that the hospital could dismiss him after years of success over what he termed “trivial failures”:

 Those trivial failures turned out to be the deaths of three people:

 Determined to prove himself superior to his colleagues, Ravenscar and his effeminate assistant Whitsly travelled to his ancestral castle to begin work on a new experiment, and immediately began ordering equipment. Since the equipment in question was massive electrical apparatus, you can probably see where this is going.

 Ravenscar’s plan was to transfer the brain of an ape into the skull of a dog, an idea which the writer may have picked up from Universal’s 1944 film House of Frankenstein, where the protagonist, Dr. Niemann, was jailed for “trying to give a dog the mind of a human being”. So far, Ravenscar doesn’t seem so bad compared to most mad doctors, since he isn’t experimenting with humans, but this being a horror story, how long do you want to bet that lasts?

 Whitsly sighted a corpse that washed ashore, and Ravenscar immediately decided to instead transfer the ape’s brain to the corpse:

  Unfortunately, Whitsly was very clumsy, and smashed the brain:

 Ravenscar needed another brain fast, and he knew just where to get one:

 With a brain and a body, Ravenscar was all set, and before long he had his equipment running, shocking thousands of volts into the being he had created. And of course, he just had to give his own variation on Colin Clive’s famous line:

 Too bad he also forgot to wrap the Monster’s head in bandages; the awakening creature was blinded by the flashing lights from the electrodes. Ravenscar attempted to subdue the blinded creature, but found he was too strong. But surely, a blind creature with no remaining intelligence from his previous life could be no match against a crafty genius like Ravenscar?

 Perhaps, but the creature was neither as dumb as he looked, or as blind as he was pretending to be. Oops.

 Ignoring the idiotic expression on the creature’s face and it’s fairly unimaginative design, you have to admit that’s a pretty creepy ending. Scariest of all though is that, although the Monster may have righteously avenged his death by killing an evil madman, there’s nothing to guarantee he’s not going to be a threat to innocent people. Here's the splash page:

 Sweet dreams kids.

 I think most people would consider an ending like that effectively creepy, turning a standard Frankenstein rip-off into something that plays with the reader’s imagination; the best kind of horror story, an open-ended one that gets the reader thinking long into the night, listening to every sound, afraid to look out the window…

  I consider that a sign of good storytelling.

 Fredric Wertham considered it a sign that the writers were too stupid and illiterate to come up with an actual ending:

 To a new world of clods and fraudsters, Fred.

 What’s most interesting about “Monster Maker” is how the Victor Frankenstein figure, Ravenscar, is depicted as a ruthless egomaniac who kills to obtain a brain, and sees his experiments as a legitimate (if groundbreaking) transplant procedure, rather than envisioning himself as a creator of life like Victor in the book, and Henry in Universal’s films. Could this possibly have been an inspiration for Hammer film’s depiction of Frankenstein? It’s worth noting that Hammer’s first film, Curse of Frankenstein, is also the first film version where Frankenstein kills a colleague to use his brain (an idea which has cropped up, more or less, in other adaptations), and this story predates it by six years.

 EC’s next Frankenstein story “The Monster in the Ice” from Vault of Horror #11 (actually #22) from (1951/2) was also drawn by Ingels, and bucked the trend of thinly disguising its source and here openly acknowledged it. This story wasn’t a mere variation, but actually utilized the character of Frankenstein’s Monster. What’s even more impressive is that, as far as I know, this is the first direct sequel to Shelley’s novel in print form, beginning in the arctic where her novel had left off. Whether it’s any good is another matter entirely.

 At the North Pole, geologists Gerald Dawson and Herbert Campbell ran into a problem when one of their Eskimo assistants, Lomo, refused to help them go any further because he was afraid of a monster in the ice, one who reportedly would drive anyone who encountered it raving mad.

 Dawson and Campbell then decided to make the journey themselves, and found this:

 After dragging the frozen creature back to their campsite, Campbell cruelly forced Lomo to chip whatever it was in the ice out, disregarding his fears as superstitious idiocy.

 The more sympathetic Dawson however, began to wonder if perhaps there was some truth to Lomo’s story, and he thought back to the novel Frankenstein:

 The two were interrupted by a scream, and found that whatever it was in the ice was now gone, while poor Lomo had gone insane seeing the creature’s face:

 The two then confronted the creature, planning to drive it back in the ice, a plan that worked, all too well, as the creature then dragged both of them underneath with it.

 A year later, the three bodies were found by government officials, who decided to chip them out, unknowingly starting the whole process over again.

 “Monster in the Ice” is obviously of great interest to Frankenstein fans for presenting itself as an actual sequel to the novel and remembering the arctic setting. Otherwise, it’s fairly typical story of explorers who fail to heed native warnings and wind up killed by a monster. It may as well not have involved Frankenstein’s Monster (specifically the novel’s monster) at all, especially since he was portrayed solely as a mindless, inarticulate brute.

 Perhaps most disappointing of all though, is that Graham Ingels, for all of his skill at drawing hideous undead beings, failed to deliver a memorable monster. Shelley’s description of the creature in the novel would have fit Ingels’s style like a glove. This is what he offered up instead:

 Not much different from standard, Universal-inspired depictions is it? The huge eyeball and jagged teeth look more comical than frightening. It disappointed me big time when I first read this story as a teenager, as I’d been hyped for it ever since I’d read Don Glut’s Frankenstein chapter in The Comic Book-Book (Which, as a teen, was pretty much my holy book when it came to comics), and was lucky enough to find a copy at a flea market. I thought it was so silly-looking that I drew a few shitty caricatures of it, and believe it or not, one of them is still with me:

 I don’t remember why I added the fur vest, but hey, I was 15, and as you can see, in no position to question anyone else’s artistic decisions.

 Glut had described it as “One of the most hideous versions ever to appear in a comic book. The eyes bulged from their sockets, enormous tusks protruded from the mouth, scraggly hair hung from the distorted head”.  I guess when you go off a description like that and conjure it up in your head; you’re bound to be disappointed.

 Another interesting thing about “Monster in the Ice” is that 1951 had also seen the release of the film The Thing from Another World which was loosely based off of John W. Campbell’s novella “Who Goes There?” (Which also got a comic book rip-off!). You may recall that the “thing” in that film was not only similarly chipped out of the ice, but bore a considerable resemblance to Universal’s Frankenstein Monster:

 So was Monster in the Ice an attempt to follow up Shelley, or an attempt to copy a then-recent movie and disguise it by throwing in Frankenstein?

 And just for a further monkey wrench, Stan Lee, Gene Colan and Syd Shores had done a story in Marvel Tales #96 (June 1950) called “Return of the Monster” which also quoted Shelley’s novel (although it didn't portray itself as a sequel) and featured a Frankenstein Monster with jagged teeth/fangs:

 He even was shown being thawed out of ice on the cover and in the splash page, if not in the story itself:

 My head hurts.

  EC’s next Frankenstein-themed story was “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall” from Tales from the Crypt #34 (1953). This one was drawn by Jack Davis. Although it utilized a very Universal-style Monster, Davis overcame that by making it look really ugly, resulting in a fairly memorable cover:

 Since horror comics owed as much to radio shows like Lights Out as they did film, many of them (particularly those at Atlas) utilized second-person narration. EC only used second-person narration a few times, often for the express purpose of involving the reader. “Mirror, Mirror” was one of them.

 The story begins with YOU waking up in a mad scientist’s laboratory, strapped down; you escape and find you are near a carnival, where everyone recoils him from you! Why?

 You try and flag down a  ride, and the driver is also terrified:

 You kill him, steal his car, and make it home to your wife, but she is also terrified, and falls out the window to her death:

 Then you head back to the carnival and confront the scientist:

 You take refuge in a hall of mirrors, and are terrified by what you see! Now you know what they fear!

 As you can see, “Mirror” is a fairly unremarkable gimmick story, owing as much to H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” than anything by Mary Shelley. What’s most interesting about the story is how it features the concept of a Frankenstein Monster trying to reconnect with one of his loved ones from when he was alive, only to be rejected, an idea which would be explored in Hammer’s Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969).

 Whereas “Mirror” used the image of the Frankenstein Monster but clearly treated the events of the novel as fiction, EC’s next Frankenstein story would utilize a member of the Frankenstein clan and was clearly set in the same universe as the novel, making it the second EC Frankenstein story to follow Shelley instead of using copycats like Ravenscar and the unnamed scientist from “Mirror”. It was also, sadly, EC’s last Frankenstein story. Fittingly, it saw print in the final issue of Vault of Horror. Graham Ingels, who had drawn EC’s first two Frankenstein stories, returned to draw this one. It was as if things had come full circle.

  Coming full circle was the theme of “Ashes to Ashes” as seen in Vault of Horror #29 (1954). The story was told by Dr. Emil Frankenstein, the great, great, great, great, great, great grandson of Victor, and his attempts to finish what his forefathers had started. This was no cliché attempt at bringing the dead to life though, as we’ll soon see.

 Here, the successive members of the Frankenstein clan had decided to create life not using the tissues of the dead, but by creating life out of a blob of swamp matter; the same kind of primordial ooze life was said to have sprung from in the first place:

 They spent generations incubating it, until it began showing signs of life, if only in an amoeba-like sense rather than anything human:

 After several decades it started developing human characteristics:

 By the time Emil had come of age, it was obvious that the once-lifeless blob would soon be fully human within a few years:

 The day finally came:

 Emil decided the ultimate way of knowing if the experiment had been a success would be to see if the child would be capable of reproducing when it came of age, so he took it to the hospital and disguised it as someone else’s baby so it would be brought up normally:

 He began silently following the child around, watching it from afar. One day he noticed an argument between two young men who were in love with the same woman:

 Emil persuaded the two to let Louisa, the woman they were arguing over, decide for herself:

  Louisa ended up choosing Heinrich Goedl, the more upstanding of the two men, and his rival, Karl Riker, walked off angrily. The happy couple invited the elderly scientist to their wedding.

  It all seemed to be going fine, until a deranged Riker broke in and killed Louisa:

 Louisa’s was not an ordinary death however…

 Yes, it was Louisa who had been the Frankenstein’s creation, and not Goedl as the reader was being led to suspect. She had returned to being the lifeless blob of muck she had originated as.

  This was a fairly horror-light story by EC standards, and since we never specifically see it said that Goedl is the “creature”, you just know there’s going to be a twist coming. The Old Witch’s usual puns also killed a lot of the tragedy of the ending.

 Nevertheless, “Ashes to Ashes” is easily the best of EC’s Frankenstein stories. This was no simple tale of creating or unleashing a hideous, rampaging monster, but a tragedy about the creation of a seemingly perfect being that ended with her hopes and dreams, as well as those of her lover, her creator and six generations of his family gone up in smoke due to an act of jealousy. Far different from what expects from a Frankenstein story.

  “Ashes to Ashes” is also notable as the first time that the creature had been depicted as being created through alchemical means since the 1910 Edison film. Almost all other depictions of the Monster’s creation had depicted it as a patchwork made from corpses and brought to life through electricity. It is also notable as the first version (again, as far as I know of) to depict a fully human-appearing and acting Frankenstein Monster, something which wouldn’t be seen on film until Hammer’s Revenge of Frankenstein in 1958, and that wouldn’t last long in that poor fellow’s case.

 Of EC’s four Frankenstein stories, only “Monster Maker” and “Ashes to Ashes” are really good, but because of the (possibly) prescient ideas and firsts in all four of them, as well as the cornucopia of influences you can see, I would say all of them are worth tracking down by any dedicated horror fan. At the very least, they make great potential “historical events” for anyone building a Wold-Newton timeline on Frankenstein.