My seven favorite parts of Ngozi Ukazu's Orion

"Hmm, is the world ready for a dreamy Orion....?" 

That was my first thought when I saw the cover of Orion, the new original graphic novel from Ngozi Ukazu, the cartoonist responsible for Check, Please!, Flip (reviewed in this column) and, most relevantly, Barda, the last of which is something of a prequel to this work, as its events kick off those here. 

Of course, when Jack Kirby created Orion, who originally appeared in 1971's New Gods #1, his looks were integral to the character, as he had a handsome face provided by the fantastical technology of the mother box, as well as a truer, bestial face that he tried to keep hidden from others, a state of affairs reflective of the dual nature of the hero Kirbys' multi-book, mythology-inspired "Fourth World" saga. 

But while Kirby is an almost unparalleled artist in the history of American comic books, I don't think drawing sexy characters was necessarily his strength. When he drew a handsome man or a beautiful woman, particularly by that point in his career, they tended to look more peculiar than like they possessed standard good looks (Particularly, I think when read today; like, if you read the recent-ish DC Finest: The Demon: The Birth of the Demon, collecting Kirby comics from the early seventies, it's clear that Jason Blood and Glenda Mark are meant to be good-looking young people, and you can see it in their smoother faces with less exaggerated features than that of characters like, say, Harry Matthews, but they would stand out as odd is stood side by side with other DC heroes and their love interests of the time). Kirby's Orion, at his most handsome, was more rugged than dreamy.

But Ukazu's, as seen on that cover? That is the most handsome I've ever seen Orion. He looks young and sexy in a way Kirby's or John Byrne's or Walt Simonson's Orion's never really did, and I like the longer, seventies-style hair, as if Ukazu was drawing him in the style of handsome young man from the years in which he first appeared in comics.

In fact, while I didn't see it so much in this particular image, Ukazu's Orion reminded me quite a bit of a young, original trilogy era Mark Hamill, in his hair and in his face (if not as much in Orion's bigger, more muscular build). That is, of course, wholly appropriate, given that Hamill played the quintessential space fantasy hero of the seventies...and doubly so in that Hamill's Luke Skywalker was so inspired by Kirby's Orion, particularly in his conflict with his evil father. 

But enough about the cover image. How is Ukazu's Orion? It's good. I reviewed it at Good Comics for Kids last week, and I found it a satisfying portrait of the character, who is at the very heart of Kirby's Fourth World story in a way that Big Barda wasn't. 

While Ukauzu works in the space opera mold of Kirby's original comics here, there were also some really fun and a few funny moments. My favorite are below...but I would encourage you to read Orion prior to reading the rest of this post, so that you enjoy these moments in their original and proper context before reading my excited babbling about them (Like Godzilla's The Odyssey, I see Orion is also available on Hoopla, so you can read it online for free immediately, provided your library has Hoopla, and you have a library card). 

1.) Insecure Orion. Do you think this is the New Genesis version of "Would you still love me if I was a worm?" 

I should probably note that the love between Orion and Lightray here is entirely brotherly...although it is so strong and so affectionate, and neither of them have a female love interest in this book, so I would not be at all surprised if some young readers find themselves reading more into their relationship here.

2.) Orion meets the Female Furies. Lashina seems struck with both Orion's looks ("Never put that silly helmet back on, Orion. You're a delicious sight without it!" she says when she first meets him) and his political future on Apokolips given his heritage. And so, when she meets him, she approaches him, sits on his lap and rather PG-13-ishly comes on to him.

You can see his response in the panel above. I like how perfectly blase Ukazu draws him while he quite forcefully pushes Lashina off of him, as well as the look on her face. 

In the very next panel we see her rubbing her butt, while squiggly pain lines radiate from it, and Orion asks about Big Barda, to Lashina's disappointment. (Barda has escaped Apokolips for Earth off panel somewhere between the end of Ukazu's Barda and this point in Orion).

3.) Not quite Dredd level, but close! Unfortunately, Ukazu did not seem to be writing for quotability, or meme-ability, as you can see in this sequence. Throughout the book, Orion and his half-brother Kalibak fight repeatedly. In this, their second battle, Kalibak roars a bit about the psychology behind his enmity, noting that Darkseid doesn't really "see" him because of his focus on Orion, and returns to the motif again, saying "Then let all Apokalips see my brother's defeat at my hand!"

Orion comes up with a nice retort—"See my fists." But Ukazu inserts a wordless panel between those in which the two share dialogue, one in which she shows us Kalibak throwing Orion's astro-harness into a nearby firepit, and then she further has Orion make an aside about how big Kalibak is before his line about the fists.

Thus, though it's in the neighborhood, we don't get a classic moment like that of the "GAZE INTO THE FACE OF FEAR!"/"GAZE INTO THE FIST OF DREDD!" sequence that the comics Internet (so rightly) loves. 

4.) Was Orion cute when he was a baby? No, no he was not. 

5.) Barda is awesome in this book too. Things come to a head when Orion goes to Earth looking for his pact brother, the son of Highfather who was traded to Darkseid as a baby in exchange for him. As you know, this is Scott Free. This leads to a fun sequence where we see Scott and Barda grocery shopping on Earth, only for a pair of boom tubes to open up in rapid succession. Orion and a parademon tumble out of one, and Lightray emerges from the other. Naturally, Barda leaps into action when her old enemy suddenly appears ("Why did you clobber that guy?" Scott asks after she punches Orion across the store, "And how did he survive one of your punches?").

There's obviously a lot of confusion and some misunderstandings in the scene, but I love Barda's last line in that panel above, which actually made me laugh out loud.

Though her name and image aren't' on the cover of this one, and her panel time rather limited, it's well worth noting that Ukazu's Orion is also a pretty great Barda comic. 

The entire Earth sequence, in which Orion and Lightray encounter ways familiar to us but strange to them, is a lot of fun, and reminded me of the best parts of the original Thor movie, where the hero of another old Jack Kirby mythology-inspired comics saga was confronted the mundane world of Earth (and its breakfast foods).

6.) I do so love a comic book catchphrase. Look, I'm only human. I get excited every time Orion says some version of "I have heard the word — —and it is battle!"

The last time I did so was when rereading the John Ostrander-written Armageddon: Inferno a few months back, and Walt Simonson drew Orion appearing among other heroes in dinosaur times, spouting a version of that line.

By the way, this splash page, which kicks off the book's fifth and final chapter, is probably the Kirby-est of any image in the book. 

7.) Orion does not fight by Queensberry rules. This was the second time I laughed out loud. I love that Ukazu managed to depict Orion's ferocity in battle while simultaneously making it funny, and Scott's reaction to the sight of Orion biting an opponent. Why use the astro-force when you can just use your teeth...?

Briefly on Stane Lee and Julie Schwartz's introductions to 2008's JLA/Aveengers trade

When I wrote about Kurt Busiek and George Perez's JLA/Avengers a few months ago, there was one interesting aspect of the trade collection I read that I couldn't quite find a way to fit into the post, so I've decided to return to it now in a separate post. The particular 2008 trade paperback collection I used for my re-read included a pair of introductions from comics veterans who were integral in the creation of both of the title teams (as well as so much else that went on at Marvel and DC over the course of decades), Stan Lee and Julie Schwartz.

Everyone, of course, knows Lee. Even if this is your first visit to a comics blog, and if you somehow arrived here and started reading this post by accident, you probably know who Stan Lee is, as he's perhaps the only true household name that the medium has ever produced. The legendary editor, writer and promoter of Marvel comics not only co-created the super-team The Avengers (along with his frequent collaborator Jack Kirby) and not only served as The Avengers' first writer, he also co-created all five of the team's founding members (again, along with Kirby, and a couple of others like Ernie Hart, Don Heck and Larry Lieber).

As for Schwartz, he spent over 40 years as an editor with DC Comics, and was pivotal in the publisher's recommitment to superheroes in the latter half of the 1950s, working with writers and artists to reintroduce new, second-generation versions of The Flash, The Green Lantern and others, helping usher in waht became known as the Silver Age of superhero comics (and, indirectly, as we'll see, inspiring Lee and company's creation of the Marvel Universe). It was Schwartz who decided to also update the Justice Society of America team, and thus the Justice League of America debuted in 1960.

In 2008, the year these introductions were published in this collection, Schwartz had already been dead for several years, having died in 2004 at the age of 88 (This may explain why his introduction says "By Julie Schwartz, As told to Robert Greenberger"). And as for Lee, he was 86, and about to start the last decade of his life (He would die in 2018, at the age of 95). 

The introductions are set side-by-side in two parallel columns, not unlike those that were printed on the inside front cover of the first DC/Marvel superhero crossover, 1976's Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1, although in that case they were penned by Lee and his then DC equivalent, Carmine Infantino. 

Amusingly, the Stan Lee introduction is much longer than the Schwartz one, continuing for another six paragraphs after Schwartz's had ended. More amusingly still, neither man gives much in the way of an indication that he's actually read the comic they are supposedly introducing (Not that I blame either man, given their age at the point they must have been writing these). 

Schwartz, at least, proves he's well aware of who the creative team is, the fact that there are a ton of characters involved, and that the story will involve the first fighting and then teaming up. His intro ends thusly:

It may seem like a tired old plot, but in the hands of true professionals they make it entertaining. Kurt and Georg have my admiration for taking the time and care to fit in so many heroes, villains and other familiar beings. I'm just glad I'm not the one who has to proofread it all!

As for Lee, he eventually gets around to saying "There are countless thrills and chills on the action-packed pages ahead," but then, that's the same thing he would say about any Marvel comic (or any comic he himself had anything to do with). 

So if not the comic collected within the trade, what do they talk about? 

The history of the two teams, or at least the origins of the team each man is involved with, although, in Lee's case, it takes a bit to get to it, and he also talks about himself (and, charmingly, Schwartz) quite a bit too.

Lee's introduction is perhaps predictably jokey and jocular, as well as somewhat self-deprecatingn and often about the very writing he's in the act of doing. It's very Stan Lee.

He talks about the legendary 1960s golf game between National/DC Comics publisher Jack Liebowitz and Atlas/Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, in which Liebowitz said his new comic Justice League of America "was selling like there's no tomorrow."  

Writes Lee:

Well, might Marty didn't need a house to fall on him. As soon as the golf game was over he raced to a phone and called yours truly.

"Stan," he bellowed, "National's Justice League is a hot seller. I want us to get on the bandwagon too. Cook me up a book which stars a whole team of heroes — and to it yesterday!"

This, Lee says, is "comicdom's worst-kept secret," and the call that inspired not the Avengers, but instead the Fantastic Four. (As Lee puts it, it was "the reason I dreamed up the good ol' Fantastic Four, which I modestly called 'The World's Greatest Comic.'" Oh, did Lee dream them up? Well, that's one way of putting it; at least he mentions Jack Kirby in the next sentence, with "Aided by the artwork of the titanically talented Jack Kirby"...).

In Stan's telling, DC's JLoA and Marvel's FF were in " a no-holds-barred, neck-and-neck race," and, while that was going on, "we" (by which he means, but doesn't say, he and Kirby, Steve Ditko, Bill Everett and a handful of other collaborators) created  "a brand-new batch of additional super-heroes," those of the first generation of what was becoming the Marvel Universe.

He names them all, of course, and it's only after a few such years that Marvel actually has enough of its own superheroes with their own books to band together into a Justice League-like team, which is how Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk, Ant-Man and The Wasp ended up facing off against Loki in 1963's The Avengers #1. 

He spends several paragraphs talking about writing a team like the Avengers, and then spends a paragraph on Schwartz:

But I cannot come to the end of this candid little confessional without saying a few words about my co-Introduction writer, Julius Schwartz. I'm both pleased and honored to have the opportunity to appear with this legendary comic-book great in a watershed collection such as this. In all the years that I've known and admired him, we've never actually worked together or appeared in the same magazine before. It's taken half a century for this to happen. But y'know something? Considering the respect and admiration I have for the countless accomplishments of Julie Schwartz, it was well worth the wait.

Well that was sweet, I thought. 

While Lee's introduction appeared in blue ink on the lefthand side of the first two pages, Schwartz's was in red ink, and on the righthand side of the pages. 

Schwartz jumps right in:

The revivals of super-heroes were going so well that my schedule was getting crowded. But when we came up with the next logical step — combining these heroes into a team — no one else would touch it but me! Obviously, we modeled the new team after the Justice Society of America, but as I've said for years, I've never liked the name Society. It sounded too upscale. I preferred something like League, since, after all, everyone followed the baseball leagues.

He goes on to explain that "Every super-hero who had a feature was going to be in the new team," which is why they numbered at seven, and why characters like Martian Manhunter and Aquaman ended up on the team, despite the fact that those two didn't, at that point, have the sorts of resumes  or track records of the other five (if we allow The Flash and Green Lantern to list their forebears' accomplishments as their own,, of course). 

And as for Green Arrow, Schwartz says he couldn't remember exactly why he wasn't there at the beginning, but he had enough heroes for 24 pages anyway (And it's not like GA would never join the team; he would sign up within a year of the League's Brave and The Bold debut, in the fourth issue of their own book).

Schwartz goes on to write a bit about the original creative team—Gardner Fox, who had also written the old JSA stories, and Mike Sekowsky, "the only artist I worked with who could uniquely fit all these characters on each page"—and how the early issues came together, how they were received, and how the team expanded ("Well, we relented and finally let Green Arrow in. I was then sticking to my guns, and waited for heroes to have their own title before they could join, like the Atom and Hawkman.")

And then, how he and Fox introduced the parallel world of Earth-2, and the JLoA met the JSoA, the sales of which were incredible enough to keep the two teams meeting regularly for decades.

"But I never imagined they would ever cross paths with the Avengers," Schwartz writes. "When DC and Marvel first tried to have the teams meet, I was just an innocent bystander, curious to see what would happen."

Nothing, as it turned out. But that was in the 1980s.

"But as the house ad said when we first gave the JLA their own title, Just Imagine!," he writes. "Just imagine seeing the best and brightest from two entirely different companies combatting one another and then working together."

Obviously, neither piece says all that much about the amazing story that follows, the ultimate DC/Marvel crossover, but it was interesting hearing about the origins of the two teams from men present at (and integral to) their creation and, particularly in Lee's case, I found it somewhat revealing of the men themselves to hear what they had to say and how they said it. 

On the creation of superheroes as gradual development versus instantaneous inspiration

I've been thinking a lot about where exactly new superheroes come from over the course of the last few months, thanks largely to some of the books I've been reading: Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin's picture book biographies of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Douglas Wolk's All Of The Marvels and the late Lou Mougin's Secondary Superheroes of Golden Age Comics. I've also been thinking about the subject because of what I've been blogging about lately, like the Thunderbolts* movie, with its cast of characters created by almost 25 writers and artists over the course of some seven decades, and, of course, the related issue of who, exactly, created The Sentry and how.

Mougin's book, an exhaustive survey of Golden Age super-comics, rounds up the scores of characters created by over a dozen different publishers in the years following the first appearances of Joel Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman comics (and some of the more distinct characters to follow in his immediate wake, like Batman, Wonder Woman, The Human Torch and Captain America).

Given the pace at which this army of superheroes appeared and then disappeared from the pages of the comic books of the time, one imagines that most were created on-the-fly by the guys who wrote and/or drew them. 

When a modern reader thinks of how someone might have got the idea for a Cat-Man or a Crimebuster, a Wizard or a Boy King, a Daredevil or a Black Hood, a Mother Hubbard or The Face, it's easy to imagine that sort of out-of-the-blue, lightning bolt-style of inspiration, a deadline-driven act of creation that rushed from an image in someone's head to the drawing board to the printed page (For the more unique characters, anyway; a lot of these heroes seemed to come from artists doing their own riffs on a Superman, or trying a different animal theme for a Batman, or rearranging the stars and stripes on a costume to get their own Captain America).

As for the heroes of later generations, though? 

Well, they had these Golden Agers (and their peers from the pulps and radio and film serials and comic strips) as a vast reservoir of inspiration. Not only could later creators find various templates among the biggest  successes of those early years who are still starring in their own comic books today (Superman, Batman, Captain America, etc), but also the heroes I would consider the true second stringers (the characters who ended up on the JSA, for example, and those of publishers Fawcett, Quality and maybe MLJ). And then the more random-sounding also-rans that fill Mougin's book, like White Streak or The Conqueror or The Blue Bolt or Magno or the guys named The Reckoner, of whom there was more than one. 

Many of the later heroes of the late 1950s and 1960s created for DC and Marvel and Charlton and others could be traced back to Golden Age ancestors, and contemplating such second-generation heroes now, it's actually kind of hard to think of a character whose name, power or gimmick doesn't have Golden Age antecedents of some sort. (Seriously, try it!) 

But still, there are some. Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's The Thing, for example, seems to be born more of monster comics than old superhero comics, and wow, where did the idea for the Silver Surfer come from exactly, you know? 

Anyway, some bits of Wolk's book that I found particularly interesting were the examples he gives when discussing the creation of certain characters. 

In the weeks since I read All of the Marvels, these examples seemed to only become more resonant, as I thought about Lee's work with Kirby and Ditko on the first wave of Marvel heroes while reading those picture books and then later reading of the avalanche of superheroes of the 1940s in Mougin's book. 

Very early in Wolk's book—page 5, actually—he mentions that the "Marvel's narrative," the focus of his book, "has a peculiar relationship with his authorship": 

Legally, it's "maker" is a corporation, one that's gotten bigger over time as its body of intellectual property has changed hands. In practice, it was made by a specific group of people whose names we (mostly) know, and whose particular hands are (usually) unmistakable on any given page. But it's also almost always been created collaboratively: if you think any one person is the sole creator of a particular image or plot point, you're probably wrong, which is why it's a mistake to think of any one person who's worked on a Marvel comic book as it's "author."

This passage then leads to an extensive footnote, during which he notes the difficulties involved in untangling who created what.

This can obviously be a contentious subject that fans and sometimes the creators themselves have argued about over the decades, be it how much (or even if) Stan Lee might have contributed to those early Marvel heroes with his collaborators Kirby and Ditko, or the later disagreements regarding the creation of Wolverine and Ghost Rider (the latter of which went to court), or the current issues with The Sentry. 

Wolk writes:

Even the question of who created Marvel's best-known characters is also often more complicated than it looks. It's easy enough to assess who came up with Marvel's first superheroes of the 1960s, the Fantastic Four: Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. (Except that the Human Torch's name and basic design had been created by Carl Burgos back in 1939).

He goes on to cite a few other relatively easier ones, like Captain America (Kirby and Joe Simon) and Doctor Strange (Ditko), before showing how quickly it can get rather convoluted.

Iron Man? That's a little trickier. Lee plotted his first story, but Larry Lieber wrote its dialogue; Kirby drew the first cover and designed the character's initial costume (which barely resembles the familiar rend-and-gold one, designed by Ditko a bit later); Don Heck drew the initial story and invented what its protagonists Tony Stark and Pepper Potts look like.

So the Marvel Universe hadn't even been around a year yet, and there was already a character who seemed to have at least four primary creators, whom Wikipedia lists under "created by" in its article on Iron Man. (As for Ditko, who Wikipedia does not cite as a creator of the character, where does he fit in? Is a redesign considered an act of creation? If it comes some time after a character's debut, is it seen as somehow less important? Does it matter if that redesign becomes the primary, default one?)

The next example is more complicated still. Writes Wolk;

Daredevil? Well, now you're running into trouble. Lee wrote the first story, and Bill Everett drew it, but the cover was drawn by Kirby, who might have designed Daredevil's original costume, too, although the much more familiar red costume was first drawn by Wally Wood starting in the seventh issue. When you talk about the now-familir look and feel and mythology of "Daredevil," though—the tormented Catholic romantic who leaps around the shadows of Hell's Kitchen and fights ninjas and Wilson Fisk—you're mostly talking about what Frank Miller added to the character in the '80s, along with his artistic collaborators Klaus Janson and David Mazzucchelli. (Except that Wilson Fisk had been created by Lee and John Romita Sr. fifteen years earlier.) And so on. 

Wolk doesn't mention it at all here (this is just a footnote, long as it is, of course, and this is outside the purview of his book), but it's worth noting that Marvel's Daredevil, who debuted in 1964, was preceded by another comic book hero named Daredevil from an entirely different publisher. 

The two-toned, boomerang-wielding Daredevil of Lev Gleason Publications, whose creation is credited to Jack Binder and Don Rico, debuted in a 1941 issue of Silver Streak and his own title ran 134 issues, not being canceled until 1956. (This is the character who, long since lapsed into the public domain, one might have seen more recently in the pages of Savage Dragon as "The Dynamic Daredevil" or in various Dynamite Comics as "The Death-Defying 'Devil".)

Mougin does mention the possible relationship between Lev Gleason's Daredevil and Marvel's Daredevil in his book:

The legend goes that publisher Martin Goodman wanted Stan Lee to do a comic based on [longtime Daredevil writer Charles] Biro's hero, in 1964. Since Lee admired Biro's work, that may not be unfounded. But, instead, Lee, Bill Everett, and Steve Ditko created a new Daredevil, switching the original DD's muteness for blindness and subbing a billy club for a boomerang. 

Does that not sound plausible to you? If not, well, Mougin did say "legend", didn't he? (I am curious about his mention of Ditko here, as Wolk doesn't mention Ditko at all when he discusses the creation of Marvel's Daredevil.)

The sense I got while reading this very early bit of Wolk's book was that rather than being created by a single artist or a single writer or even a single writer/artists team, sometimes it's more of a group effort, a creation by committee. That certainly seems to been the case with Iron Man, for example.

As for the Daredevil example, it shows not only that sometimes it's a team or a staff (or, in Marvel's case, a bullpen) that might create a superhero character, but sometimes it can take multiple creative teams and multiple years—hell, here some 20 years!—before a corporate character like Marvel's Daredevil reaches what will ultimately be considered his essential, perfected form.

Far later in the book, in a chapter entitled "Good is a Thing You Do" that is devoted to the debut and early issues of the current Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan and to Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm and company's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (the latter of which was built around a 1991 character designed and originally drawn by Ditko), Wolk gives an even better example of a character being developed into creation, I think. He does so while also illustrating how newer Marvel characters are dependent on older ones, and how even their earliest antecedents can be traced back to still earlier, pre-Marvel ancestors.

"Kamala Khan is yet another of Marvel's collective creations, her real-world origin too complicated to be attributed to a single originator," Wolk writes.

She emerged from conversations between editors Sana Amanat and Stephen Wacker about Amanat's experience growing up as a South Asian Muslim in New Jersey, as well as writer G. Willow Wilson's interest in creating a teenage Muslim superhero ("Sana and I initially had very modest expectations for this book," Wilson wrote five years later. "Our goal was to get to ten issues.") Artist Adrian Alphona came up with the images of Kamala and her supporting cast, although her costume was designed by Jamie McKelvie. 

Wolk also cites the particular creative choices made by colorist Ian Herring and letterer Joe Carmagna as distinct and important, each further defining and differentiating the initial Ms. Marvel comic book series from others in Marvel's line.

We could also note that while McKelvie designed Kamala's costume, a significant component of it, the lightning bolt-shaped symbol, was taken from Dave Cockrum's redesigned costume for the previous Ms. Marvel Carol Danvers dating back to the '70s.

And, of course, the superhero codename "Ms. Marvel" also came from Danvers, who was created, as Danvers, by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan in 1968, but made into the superhero Ms. Marvel by Gerry Conway and John Buscema in 1977.

And, just to make this into a game of superhero telephone, the original Ms. Marvel was a distaff version of the male hero Captain Marvel (created by Stan Lee and Gene Colan in 1967). He took his name from the Golden Age Fawcett Comics character Captain Marvel (created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck in 1942), and that Captain Marvel was based on Siegel and Shuster's Superman...or at least, the company then known as Detective Comics was sure enough that he was that they took Fawcett to court, accusing them of copyright infringement (The case was eventually settled in 1953, in large part because, in Fawcett's estimation, superhero comics had by then ceased being profitable enough to fight over).

And thus we get from 2014's Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan all the way back to the very first superhero in 1938. 

Anyway, both Wolk and Mougin's books are very interesting reads, and ones that should be of interest to anyone who reads superhero comics. I'll be formally reviewing them in the future, but I wanted to touch on this idea of superhero creation as a process of development in a post of its own. 

On Monsters Unleashed: Prelude

This 264-page collection is billed as a prelude to Marvel's 2016 between-events event Monsters Unleashed, but it's a bit of a retroactive prelude. That is, these are a whole bunch of comics, the majority of them by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee and published decades before the first modern Marvel event series...Hell, they predate the Marvel Universe itself, some seeing publication long before 1961's Fantastic Four #1.

These classic monster comics are 13 in number, and come from the pages of Strange Tales, Tales To Astonish and Tales of Suspense. There doesn't seem to be too much in the way of rhyme or reason to them, with the exception of a pair featuring monsters that have been recurring characters in Marvel's superhero line of late--"I Challenged Groot, The Monster from Planet X!" and "Orrgo...The Unconquerable!"--so it's probably safe to assume that these stories were chosen because these 13 monsters will be among those in the pages of Monsters Unleashed. So the first 150 pages are so are devoted to introducing us to Grottu, Monstrom, Gorgilla, Groot, The Abominable Snowman, The Blip, Vandoom, Goom, Googam (Son of Goom), Rommbu, The Green Thing, Moomba, Bruttu and Orrgo.

These 13 short stories all read like mid-century monster movies, with incredibly crazy monster designs (thanks to Kirby) and all the boring parts of such schlocky sci-fi films cut out of them, as there isn't much room for character development or pseudo-science or extraneous exposition or any of that nonsense in such short stories.

After Orrgo's strange tale, the collection jumps to 2013's Fearless Defenders #8, followed by 2015's Marvel Zobmies #1 (that's the Secret Wars tie-in series) and then the first issue of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur and the second and third issues of Totally Awesome Hulk.

Why those particular comics? Well, Fearless Defenders by Monsters Unleashed writer Cullenn Bunn and artist Will Sliney features monster hunter Elsa Bloodstone teaming up with the characters of that short-lived series (a sort of answer to DC's Birds of Prey), and Elsa is also the star of that particular Marvel Zombies miniseries. Though the stories aren't entirely complete, I suppose they give one the basics about Elsa: She hunts monsters, she's British, her father was the famous monster-hunter Ulysses Bloodstone (and an asshole) and she's kind of mean.

Devil Dinosaur is another Kirby-created monster, although he came along a decade or so after the others in this book, and Kirby created him without any input from Stan Lee. Rather than publishing Devil Dinosaur #1, however, Marvel chose the first issue of the ongoing series written by Brandon Montclare and Amy Reeder and drawn by Natacha Bustos. Makes sense. Not only is that a very good and tragically under-read comic that could only benefit from a trade like this pushing readers towards it, but introduces both the original conception of DD and his current status quo, in which he is living in modern New York City and is aligned with a middle-school super-genius.

Those issues of Totally Awesome Hulk are similarly good, and that is a series that was similarly under-read. That particular Hulk is Amadeus Cho, who literally took the mantle from Bruce Banner in order to save his one-time hero's life--I never figured out how this book fit with Civil War II--and his first story arc was dominated by monster-fighting.

It features Fin Fang Foom, whose first appearance is notably absent from the first chunk of the book, and the new character Lady Hellbender, who is traveling the universe "collecting" monsters like FFF and the two-headed turtle that Cho fights in the first issue of the series and so on.

Given that they chose to include this story instead of an earlier Fin Fang Foom story, like his first one, which would have fit in better with the first section of the book, I have to assume that Lady Hellbender plays a role in Monsters Unleashed, and obviously The Hulk does...at least to some extent.

I guess one would have to first read Monsters Unleashed to be able to judge how well-chosen the stories in Monsters Unleashed: Prelude actually are. So maybe I can back to you on that later...?

But these are all pretty okay; the Defenders story is kind of generic and features at least one panel of downright terrible artwork, and the Marvel Zombies issue is kind of out of left-field, given that it's 1/4th of a tie-in to Marvel's most sprawling event ever, but everything is well worth a read.

Especially those first 150 pages, which we should probably spend some more time more closely reading...

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First up, it's Grottu in "Grottu, King of The Insects!" He's a giant ant, who appears a golden yellow on the cover, but is a grayish black within. He's also said to be as big as an elephant, but is clearly much larger. Our hero here is blonde, lantern-jawed, chain-smoking reporter Frank, who receives an urgent telegram from a museum curator friend of his to got to Africa in search of the monster. I never received such telegrams when I was reporter. Perhaps I wasn't working at the right kind of newspaper. Wait, come to think of it, I never received any telegrams when I was reporter!

Grottu was apparently granted his gigantic size and incredible intelligence as a side-effect of testing by "white men from behind what white men call 'iron curtain' country." "Communists, no doubt!" In addition to being big, Grottu serves as a sort of giant super-general, commanding hordes of millions of ants as they raze villages. His unstoppable army of army ants makes its way to a port city, where the plan is to board various ships and then spread out all over the world, conquering it. There could be some subtle metaphor here, but I doubt it! The monster is killed when the white men dump a bunch of sugar on it, and the little ants swarm all over it, apparently crushing him under their weight?

Just six pages and 36 panels; Kirby, Lee and their collaborators didn't screw around!

That's followed by Monstrom in "I Found Monstrom! The Dweller in the Black Swamp!" Aside from the catchy name, Monstrom appears to be your then-typical, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen swamp monster from the cover. There he's depicted as a humanoid of giant statue, rising out of the water covered in a viscous, dripping mud...hell, he could be made of mud!

Now, I didn't know this until I read TwoMorrows' Swampmen: Muck-Monsters and Their Makers, but apparently the lineage of comic book swamp monsters can be traced pretty directly back to writer Theodore Sturgeon's prose fiction story "It!", published in a 1940 issue of Unknown (The Heap would first appear two years later, and he was the trunk of the comic book swamp monster family tree).

Monstrom is pretty immediately distinguished by all other monsters that rise from the swamps by the bizarre appearance Kirby gave him, revealed on an opening splash page: The unwieldy-looking creature appears to be almost as wide as he is tall when crouching, and has orange, wrinkly skin suggestive of an elephant. Where its face should be is only a single-staring eye, and a crown of horn-like projections adorn its conical head. It also has a tail, and like most of these Kirby kreatures, its size varies depending on the panel; on one page it's only as tall as five or six men high, on the next page it's that tall at the waist, and its foot is bigger than the speeding car it tries to stomp on.

The hero in this story is also a handsome, square-jawed, pipe-smoking blond writer--this time a novelist, rather than a reporter--who has rented a cabin in the titular swamp to work on his latest novel. His It's his son who first meets Monstrom, and the city slickers flee, inadvertently leading the monster into town.

A lucky bolt of lightning strikes a telephone pole, setting it ablaze, and making Monstrom say "ARRGG--" Realizing he's afraid of fire, the townsfolk get torches and chase the monster back into the swamp, and it seems to shrink smaller and smaller the closer it gets to the swamp.

While the hicks whoop it up about having defeated the monster, the story ends with an extremely wordy panel, in which a tiny drawing of the monster resting alongside a very Silver Age-looking rocket ship is sandwiched between two slabs of narration, which reads like so (Please imagine it in Stan Lee's voice):

An alien with enormous intelligence, who has waited patiently for the time when Earthlings might understand him...fort he time when Earthlings would be advanced enough to help him rebuild his damaged spaceship! But that time has not yet come! We are still too ignorant--too barbaric! Perhaps one day it will be otherwise, but not yet...

Not yet...

To which I say, fuck you space man. You're the one who was so terrified of a lightning bolt and a half-dozen tiny Earthlings shouting and bearing torches. If you're so smart that you can build a rocket ship and fly across the stars, how come you act like Boris Karloff's Frankenstein when you see fire? I don't think your enormous intelligence is quite as enormous as Stan Lee seems to think it is.

(You know, I keep saying "Stan Lee," but it's possible Larry Lieber wrote this. Lieber and Lee are both credited as writers for these 13 old-school monster comics. Similarly, while Kirby handled the pencils, the inking was done by either Dick Ayers and Steve Ditko. Marvel just credits them all on the table of contents page, rather than distinguishing who wrote what and who inked what. All we know from sure from the credits Marvel gives us is that Kirby drew everything.)

That's followed by the charmingly named Gorgilla starring in "I Discovered Gorgilla! The Monster of Midnight Mountain!" This seven-pager was apparently dashed off shortly after someone rewatched King Kong. Aside from the gorilla-esque name, Kirby's design certainly doesn't make the monster look all that much like Kong. Humanoid in shape, the monster has a long mane of gray hair and a short beard, a long hairy tail and just four digits on its hands, each of which end with a blunt, square claw.

The title creature is discovered in Borneo. The local head-hunters worship him as a god, and he's kept behind some sort of wall. The explorers traverse a bridge that looks a bit like the tree bridge on Skull Island, and, at a later point, Gorigilla menaces them with a tree in a panel that looks not unlike a still image from Kong. To top it off, the climax comes when Gorgilla is challenged by a Tyrannosaur, which he wrestles to death. The cover also lifts from Kong, as the explorers realize that what at first resembles a huge hole in the ground is actually a huge footprint.

The human hero of this story is yet another handsome, blonde, pipe-smoking guy---this time an archeologist. He believes he's found the final resting place of "The Missing Link," and so he and a band of his fellow archeologists are off to find a creature "to bridge the wide gap between man and ape...a life-form that was half-ape and half-man!" This is, of course, pretty dubious science, but what's actually kind of hilarious is that when they lay eyes on Gorgilla, they become convinced that somehow this dinosaur-sized, tail-bearing, four-fingered, two-toed creature is the missing link between man and ape.

Like, I'm no scientist, but even if we ignore the alien extremities, I'm pretty sure we can rule anything bigger than a house out as a relative of any anthropoid apes, let alone our direct ancestor.

The next monster story introduces Groot, the breakout star of the Kirby/Lee monster stories, the one who made it to the silver screen before even Fin Fang Foom! It is, of course, "I Challenged Groot! The Monster From Planet X!", recently reprinted by Marvel as part of their True Believers line. The human star of the piece is a biologist named Leslie, who apparently isn't as rugged or manly as his wife Alice would like him to be.

In the very first panel, he narrates that they were returning home from a party, "and she was on her usual subject." Her dialogue reads, in part, "Honestly, that George Carter is a wonderful guy! He's so manly--so rugged! If only you more like that, Leslie!"

Sounds like a happy marriage! I wonder if Leslie will get the chance to prove himself the alpha male before this story is over?

The couple see some kind of luminous object land behind the treeline on their drive home, and put it out of their minds, until something weird happens: A pair of trees goes missing from their yard. When Leslie does investigate, he finds "a wooden giant" who is somehow able to draw wooden objects of all kinds to himself, absorb them and thus grow even larger.

Even with Leslie's warning, local law enforcement is powerless to stop Groot, as bullets don't penetrate his wooden hide deep enough to strike any vital organs. He delivers his most famous line--"I am Groot"--but he does so couched in a whole bunch of verbiage:

Earthlings--hear me!! I am Groot, Monarch of Planet X! I come to take an Earth village--your village, back to my planet! We want to study you, to experiment on you!

Groot talks a lot, and as he does so, we see this striking, strange imagery, in which we see the how of Groot's plan to abduct the village via trees.

There's another panel on the following page too, in which the trees become animate, their roots like legs and their branches like arms:

The great thing about these images, about the story in general, isn't just how different this ur-Groot is from the current movie star Groot--dig those branch-like antlers and the log-like ends of his fingers!--but the way in which it reflects the very simple, very basic, very innocent comic book story generation of the "good old days." That is, you just know that Lee or Kirby happened by a tree one day, and since, at this point, they were always thinking of monsters for comics, they basically just cast a tree as the heavy in a monster story and extrapolated from there.

This is basically where every Golden Age superhero of the boom period came from: Artist sees a bird swooping, and bam!, there's Hawkman. Artist sees a bee, and there are a handful of insect-themed heroes, none of whom really stick. In the same way a guy thinking about making new superheroes all the time applies just about anything that crosses his field of vision into a superhero narrative, you can sort of see the sources of inspiration for so many of these stories, in either their casting everyday objects as monsters, or what seem like they must have been inspired by particular movies or news articles or whatever.

The next story seems like it may have been something from an article or maybe a movie. The monster isn't an original creation, but The Abominable Snowman, and he is the title character in "I Found The Abominable Snowman!" The human hero here is another blonde smoker, but he's not a thinker or a professional. Rather he's a rough-looking customer named "Big Carl" Hanson, "a guy who will do anything for a buck!"

When he sees a photo of the legendary beast--strikingly designed with a bizarre beard that starts at the bridge of his nose--that a guy in a bar is bragging about selling, Carl clobbers the guy and takes the photo for himself. His plan isn't to sell the photo, but to capture the Snowman in the photo and sell it for even bigger bucks.

His method of searching is pretty awesome as he basically journeys to the foot of the Himalayas and starts threatening and roughing up people, insisting they tell him where the Abominable Snowman is. Think of Batman or Daredevil knocking heads in Gotham or Hell's Kitchen, trying to strongarm the location of a particular criminal out of the local underworld. Only here it's an amateur cryptozoologist looking for a cryptid.

The story has one of the better, more satisfying of the twist endings in the collection, which I won't spoil (UPDATE: I will note that the Snowman does indeed show up in Monsters Unleashed, and he's perplexingly off-model, being giant in size rather than just slightly larger than your average man. His role, like that of all the old Marvel monsters, is decidedly small, and mostly consists of Deadpool talking to him about his smell in the middle of a battle against the newer monsters).

The next monster has a name that will be familiar to any fan of Marvel's comics, even if they have never read this story: Vandoom. Like Xemnu, The Hulk (who is perhaps surprisingly MIA here, but did share the previously mentioned issue of True Believers with Groot), this is one of those examples of Kirby and Lee semi-plagiarizing themselves, or at least coming back to something that appealed to them previously while working on their later superhero comics. This Vandoom, star of "Vandoom, The Man Who Made a Creature!", also lives in Europe (Transylvania, to be exact), but rather than the metal-plated villain, he is a humble proprietor of a wax museum devoted to monsters (As with Frankenstein, whose monster actually appears in the first panel of this story after its title page, the name of the creator gets transposed onto the monster).

With tourists no longer interested in his wax replicas of the Universal monsters, he and his wife are destitute. And so he embarks on a seemingly mad task to create a monster of his own invention, one that will be the largest wax figure in the world. It is so large that its head sticks out of the top of his building, in fact.

During a dramatic storm, a bolt of lightning strikes the wax monstrosity's head and somehow brings it to life. Kinda like Frankenstein, although here it doesn't even make sense by the laws of theoretical fiction or monster movie science. The villagers take up torches and pitchforks and chase the monster around for a while, as is villagers' wont, until a cool, cruel-looking rocket ship with a scary face sculpted into it (like a space-age Viking ship, I guess) arrives and disgorges some horn-headed Martians, bent on conquering the world, as if their wont. The monster fights them off until they flee, deciding Earth is just too heavily defended, and then, exhausted, it dies.

"Now we know why fate gave life to my monster!" Vandoom declares, after he rebuilds his museum and its new titanic wax star. That's right, God brought his monster to life to save Earth from Martians. That all checks out.

Next we meet one of the more familiar of this era of Marvel monsters, due both to a memorable name--Goom--and another great design by Kirby, this one featuring a spherical-headed, Muppet-mouthed, vestigial-winked monster wearing shorts the same color as his skin. Like Groot, apparently, Goom hails from Planet X, as this story is entitled, "Goom! The Thing From Planet X!"

This story stars Mark, another blond scientist--a polymath who is "a good astronomer and a terrific psychologist"--whose bearded, pipe-smoking peers all mock him for his belief that there are unknown planets in the solar system, saying that his "latest notion...is fantastic enough to be in a comic book!" Indeed it is! Why, it's fantastic enough to be in a comic book like, say, 1961's Tales of Suspense #15 by Lee, Lieber, Kirby and Ayers!

After he puts in a whole two days of work at the observatory, Mark discovers a massive planet just beyond Jupiter, and begins beaming radio waves towards it, not unlike the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) initiative, which would have been in an infancy when this comic was published. Mark gets a reply in the form of Goom, he boards a huge space ship with a scary face design not unlike the one the Martians flew into Transylvania a few pages previously, and immediately starts showing off his awesome technology and powers. These include a gun capable of disintegrating a mountain, a suspiciously human-sized glass box able to turn adult human beings into babies and back again (suspicious because Goom said he thought Earth was uninhabited) and, finally, the ability to lift an entire city into the upper atmosphere with just his mind.

Realizing they are hopelessly outmatched, Earth surrenders. Everyone save Mark, who beams Earth's location back to Planet X on the gamble that "any race as advanced as Goom's must be too civilized to be evil." What made him think this? "I knew because of my training as a psychologist!" Okay Mark. Stephen Hawking might disagree, but Mark's gamble paid off because a trio of much better-dressed Planet X-lings appear and arrest Goom.

I guess Earth need never worry about invasion from Planet X again, right?

Wrong! For the very next story stars "Googam, Son of Goom" in "Beware of Googam, Son of Goom!!" The scion of Goom, starring in the collection's very first sequel (and the first nod toward anything approaching "continuity," as Groot's hailing from Planet X is of course not mentioned in the story of Goom), looks a lot like his dad, save he's much smaller, much redder and his mouth is devoid of square, gravestone-shaped tusks, making it a yawning, black hole that gives him an even stranger and more unsettling countenance than his dad.

Mark, who has now taken up smoking like any respectable mid-century man of science in pop culture, recounts the story of Goom and tells us that his son had just returned from military school. Billy, Son of Mark meets the infant Goom, who Googam had apparently stashed in a cave between panels in the previous story, is captured. Googam then holes up in the family's house, keeping them all prisoner while he grows and matures to the point where he can take over the world.

This section of the story is actually something of a psychological thriller, and has an unusual set-up compared to all these other monster stories, as Googam is basically just hiding out and keeping the family prisoner in their own homes, as if he were laying low from the law or something.

Billy is able to dispatch the monster all by himself eventually, with no help from his dad or the ruling class of Planet X.

The next story is called simply "Rommbu!", and it features the monster known as, um, Rommbu. In both the creature's design and plot, this story echoes that of Goom and Orrgo (or I guess it pre-echoes that of Orrgo). Once again the monster is a giant-sized humanoid of red-ish complexion, and he has the blank, staring eyes of Orrgo (though smaller) and the gaping, wide mouth of Goom and Son (though bigger). He also sports a pair of shorts, although these seem to be some rather tight-fitting briefs, with some space-age ribbing around the hips.

Our human protagonist is a career criminal named John, who has been handed a life sentence. The train he's riding to prison, accompanied by police officers, comes to a SCREEECH!-ing halt when a huge flying saucer lands on the tracks in front of it. Out strides the giant Rommbu, telling the random train passengers that his people are on their way from the Fourth Galaxy to conquer Earth, and he's come to accept their surrender. To demonstrate his power, he whips out a huge pistol and fires it on some bystanders, who...shrink. After reading a bunch of these stories where the space monsters don't kill anyone, I'm guessing this is yet another intentional effort on the creators' part to keep the death tolls more-or-less non-existent, with generally only one (1) monster dying per story. It's not as dramatic a fate as Goom's box that turns people into babies though, as he's already a giant. Shrinking puny earthlings to quite a few times more puny just seems kind of redundant.

While Rommbu is conversing with the Earthlings, John sneaks aboard his ship in an effort to escape, and ends up Rommbu's captive. If he can only destroy Rommbu, he'll have saved all of Earth, atoning for his crimes. Can he do it?

Yes. Yes he can.

Next up is The Green Thing in "The Green Thing!" I guess Lee and/or Lieber had just plain given up on titles, at this point? The Green Thing is fairly lazy in terms of monster names, and though he' a monstrous humanoid plant, under Kirby's pencils, he doesn't look a whole lot like any other monstrous humanoid plants you may have read about in other comics.

This comic's hero is once again a scientist with a crazy dream. His is to prove that plants have intelligence, and, to prove it, he wants to develop a serum that can increase plant intelligence. Once he things he has it, he flies to a small island off the cost of Australia, where grows "the highest known specimen of plant life," Ignatius Rex. Unable to find this plant, he just injects the serum into an ordinary weed, which immediately grows, gains intelligence, and begins talking and walking.

It takes a few panels to get used to that last bit.

Once he learns to walk and throw boulders, he figures he's ready to conquer the world, and so he commands our hero to take him to the mainland and use the serum to create an army of plant monsters. Then it fights a shark. The day isn't saved until a specimen of Ignatius Rex is found, gets a dose of serum, and then this smarter, more noble living plant kills The Green Thing, which turned out to be a real dick. Why, one could even say it was a dickweed.

Sadly, when the Ignatius Rex springs to life and goes on the attack, it does not shout, "Ignatius Rex!"

The next monster in the menagerie is named Moomba, and he stars in a story entitled "The Unbelievable Menace of Moomba." I kind of love the cover to the issue he appeared in, Tales To Astonish #23, as it announces "Moomba Is Here!", as if people were awaiting Moomba's arrival, or not sure which comics magazine to purchase in order to read about Moomba. He's another variation on the huge, orange/red humanoid in shorts design Kirby was so enamored with, although Moomba's variation on the theme included short, stubby arms that seemed to hand from its shoulders (at least in the interiors; on the cover he was proportioned a bit more like an ape), and a gigantic face that covered much of his chest.

In Africa, big game hunter Frank is disappointed that people on the other six continents (well, five anyway) aren't interested in animals anymore, but are only interested in African sculpture. I have no idea if there really was a huge demand for such sculpture at the time, but for the sake of reading these 13-pages, let's assume that was indeed the case.

Almost immediately Frank encounters a comically attired witch doctor who is busy trying to cast the evil spirits out of the same sorts of wooden figures Frank is collecting. He of course thinks this is a bunch of poppycock, and goes on his way until he comes face to face with what looks like a huge carving that "must be at least twenty feet tall," although it's clearly no more than two, maybe three times taller than Frank himself (who is not, I should note, 8-10-feet tall).

This is, of course, Moomba, who wastes no time in telling Frank that he is from a planet where "all life is made of wood, even as yours is made of flesh and blood!" His people have infiltrated Earth, posing as African statues, and are simply awaiting Moomba's signal to attack.

That is...well, it's actually kind of awesome.

While his evil plot is akin to that of Grottu and The Green Thing, who sought to lead armies of ants and super-plants respectively, it seems a lot less likely to succeed, as while there may be a lot of wooden statues of African origins all over the world, there can't possibly be enough to overwhelm mankind the way an army of insects or plants might.

Anyway, Moomba and his wooden army kick all sorts of ass, and have conquered the world, until the witch doctor casts a spell on Moomba, turning him into an immobile, unthinking wooden statue...threatening to let the spell take hold unless Moomba agreed to leave the planet and never return. So Moomba, a wooden creature of his word, summons all of his fellow wooden warriors, they jump up into the air, form the shape of a giant rocket ship and then fly away into outer space (!!!!).

Frank has learned a valuable lesson:

I will never again ridicule the practices of a native witch doctor, fore there is just a chance--a slim chance--that it was an unheralded, unknown witch doctor, who saved all of mankind from the thing called--Moomba.

Yeah, sew that onto a throw pillow.

Just two more to go. The penultimate monster is Bruttu, and he appears in "Beware of...Bruttu." (What, no exclamation mark?) In this story, Lee and company make use of the extended page-count to offer a more psychological story than some of the others. Bruttu is actually a comic book monster within the pages of the comic book story. Our hero is a short, skinny scientist named Howard who has a short-temper and won't brook any insult, fighting anyone who makes fun of him...and losing the fight.

This is explained during three panels set on a college campus, and continued into three panels set at the lab where he works as an adult scientist. There are several tall, handsome, "husky" (in Howard's words) guys who are always making plays for the beautiful lab technician, Anne Benson. There's this one great exchange where Howard is in the background, fiddling with some science props and, in the foreground, one of those big, handsome scientists is pouring one test tube into an another, and makes a crack about Howard ("Howard ought to work on vitamin pills! He might discover one that'll help him grow into a man!"). A scientist next to him, of the balding, pipe-smoking variety, responds, "Careful, he's liable to hear you! Then he'll start another fight and you'll have to beat him up again!"

I would just like to pausefor a moment and appreciate the insanity of a science lab stocked with scientists who are all great-looking physical specimens, and where fist fights occasionally break out. Not to stereotype scientists or anything, but they're not exactly the sort of professionals one associates with big, strong, virile, handsome men, nor juvenile, schoolyard insults, nor regular bouts of physical violence. But maybe things were different in the 1960s...? I don't know. I wish I could tell what kind of scientists they were, exactly. The equipment suggests some kind of chemists, but the most important piece of equipment there is "a new type of atomic machine," one so powerful "no one can be sure how it will affect atoms at maximum power."

Meanwhile, after a date with Anne, who Howard is convinced only goes out with him because she feels sorry for him, he regards a magazine featuring a kaiju-sized fuzzy giant in underpants in a comic book. "Bruttu! Good name for a monster as big as that!" (I assume Lee wrote this script, based on the fact that the script itself compliments an element of the writing of the script.)

Howard is still thinking about how cool it would be to be a gigantic, three-fingered, hairy orange giant so no one could push him around when he accidentally turns on the machine, and guess what happens?

That's right, he has been transformed into Bruttu! Because his vocal chords have changed as well, all he can do by way of explaining himself is growl, gurgle and roar, and, not really wanting to squash humans, he begins running around the city, striking shock and fear in all passersby, and being fired upon by police. He runs through a series of monster movie set-pieces--rail car, wax museum, Ferris wheel-having carnival--before he writes a message to Anne in the ground with a stick, and she accidentally reveals to "Bruttu" that she truly loves Howard ("Howard disappeard when you arrived! You were first seen coming out of his laboratory! That's it! You killed Howard! You killed the man I loved!")

It ends happily, with Howard returning to the lab, thinking of his old self while the machine is on, and thus he returns to normal, and he and Anne live happily ever after, probably (He must have learned his lesson too, because he didn't imagine himself as his old self but, like, a foot taller or anything.)

This is another story that seems to prefigure elements of Lee and/or Kirby's later comics work for what would become the Marvel Universe proper, with Howard's school life recalling that of Puny Peter Parker's, and the puny scientist-who-accidentally-turns-into-a-hulking-misunderstood-monster aspect reading like a rough draft for The Incredible Hulk. Hell, Howard even seems to have the same sorts of pants that Dr. Bruce Banner would wear, as when he transforms into Bruttu, they tear at the knees, but otherwise continue to fit him at the waist and thigh!

And finally, it's time to meet Orrgo, also known as "Orrgo...The Unconquerable!."

I have to confess, I kind of love these opening four panels:

Everyday Earth life seems horrible. At least the women, who are doing their household chores, seem to be happy with their lot in life, as the woman singing "Dum...Dee Dee Dum" to herself seems really into polishing that vase. Look at he poor men, though, complete with a foreman yelling at them to go about their mindless task faster. They look like they can't wait for a weird-looking monster from outer space to end it all.

And that transition to the explosion in the fourth panel? Magnificent!

The particulars of the story all seem to be borrowed from earlier stories in this very collection, although the pace, as well as the level, of the weirdness in this one is remarkable. A group of large, weird-looking aliens regard Earth from their home planet, two billion miles away, and they decide to conquer it. They are so powerful, one of them, Orrgo, says it shouldn't take more than one of them to conquer the planet, and so he sets about it.

He has some vague, mental "do anything" powers, which allow him to transport himself to Earth via thought alone--"Faster than sound...faster than light...as fast as imagination itself"--and within panels of appearing in the center ring of a circus, he starts demonstrating those powers and conquering the world. He tells circus-goers that all of the worlds' governments must submit to him, and goes about levitating cars, bringing trees to life like Groot, melting artillery cannons, turning jet planes into bird plane hybrids and their missiles into eggs, even lifting an entire city high into orbit like Goom did.

Eventually he mentally enslaves all of man kind, and then, having conquered the world, takes a nap. At which point he's killed by a gorilla. That's our Orrgo!

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Remember when I said I can get back to you later on how well chosen the stories in Monsters Unleashed Prelude were? Well, I've since read Monsters Unleashed, and it is now later.

I think I'm going to go with "poorly." As an excuse for re-publishing a ton of old Kirby/Lee monster comics in a cheaper, more affordable format, it is totally a worthwhile endeavor, but if a reader picked it up for background or context into the Monsters Unleashed miniseries, they are going to be rather disappointed.

Of that portion of the book, I think almost all of the monsters appear, at least in terms of cameos...with the exception of that particular version of Groot, who isn't in the series at all (though he does appear on the most misleading cover of the series). Few of them have what one might call "roles" to play in the story, however, with only a handful of them getting speaking lines, or even getting named in the series. Appearing in the middle section of the six-issue miniseries, they are but one of three groups of giant monsters involved, and basically are there as a nameless mob of Earth monsters siding with the heroes to battle alien invaders (which, as you'll see have found in the Prelude, most of them are as well).

Oddly, a few of the Marvel monsters who get the most panel-time and/or a line of dialogue do not appear in this collection at all, so even having read it first, there were a handful of monsters that were unknown to me.

Elsa Bloodstone does play a sizable role in the series, although I don't know that the two stories featuring her are necessarily the best ones; I would probably have preferred a first appearance, in keeping with the theme of the book, or perhaps an issue of Nextwave: Agents of HATE, as that's where this particular design and take on the character came from (Also, she and her fellow Agents battled Fin Fang Foom and Devil Dinosaur in that series).

The Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur comic is well-chosen, as Moon Girl is probably the hero who gets the most and most important panel-time in the series, and that issue was her first appearance, if not Devil's (although, as I mentioned, it introduced Devil's original status quo as well as his current one).

Interplanetary monster hunter Lady Hellbender from Totally Awesome Hulk does not appear in the Monsters Unleashed at all, so apparently those 40-pages were included as a Fin Fang Foom story instead of a Hellbender story (She does briefly appear in Monsters Unleashed: Battleground, which collects all the tie-ins to Monsters Unleashed).

That's actually kind of weird, though, as one of the eyebrow-arching elements of Monsters Unleashed is that the heroes all profess confusion regarding the identities and intentions of the Marvel monsters, but Cho had just met/fought Foom. I think they may have been better served by using those 40 pages of space for more Kirby/Lee stories (like the first appearance of Fin Fang Foom), or maybe a few issues of Nextwave or some other Elsa Bloodstone arc.

Re: That movie that's probably well on its way to making tens of millions of dollars already

If you're reading this comics blog, then you're probably a fan of comic books in general, and superhero comics in particular. And I imagine there's a pretty good chance that, at some point this weekend, you went to the nearest movie theater to take in Guardians of the Galaxy, maybe the mostly hotly anticipated of all the many based-on-a-comic book movies that have appeared in theaters this year (Me? I'm going tomorrow night).

The movie is directed by James Gunn (Super, Slither), and written by Gunn and Nicole Perlman. It stars Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, David Bautista, Lee Pace and others. I don't generally follow box office returns, like, at all, but I'm fairly certain the film is going to be well-received and a huge financial success for Marvel Studios and Disney, as pretty much any profit made on a Guardians of the Galaxy movie is going to be seen as a remarkable amount (as far as properties likely to produce summer blockbusters, "Guardians of the Galaxy" was probably somewhere between Man-Thing and Red Raven on a list of all Marvel potential film fodder right up until about the point that it was announced that Marvel was doing a Guardians of the Galaxy movie).  A sequel is already showing up as announced under Gunn's IMDb profile, for whatever that's worth.

In short, a lot of people are going to make a lot of money off this movie.

And, if a lot of people make a lot of money and there are a lot of accolades being thrown about, then a lot of credit is going to go to a lot of people, from whoever cut those winning trailers to the designers and animators who got Rocket's fur to look just so to Gunn himself. If comic book people get any credit, chances are it's going to be as a collective (i.e. "Marvel") or under a "Special Thanks" near the end of the end-credit scrawl (IMDb has comics writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lannning receiving writing credit; if that's on the screen near the "written by" credit, then that's awesome).

So I think it's worthwhile to take a moment to remember who did what, and to maybe take a moment to write a check this weekend to The Hero Initiative, a non-profit that serves as a financial safety net for comics creators in need, for at least as much as the cost of a movie ticket (For me, it costs between $5-$9 to see a movie, depending on when I go; that's somewhere between one and three comic books). And/or to remember Bill Mantlo and his current circumstances, given his role in creating one of the more prominent and memorable characters in this particular film.

Hollywood, here we come!

The superhero team name "The Guardians of the Galaxy" was created for a 31st century group of heroes in 1969's Marvel Super-Heroes #18; they were written by Arnold Drake and their first appearance was pencilled by Gene Colan. The characters guest-starred in various Marvel books sporadically over the decades, eventually earning their own title in the 1990s.

In the 2007-2008 crossover storyline Annihilation: Conquest, overseen by writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, a rag-tag group of space heroes—including Groot and Rocket Raccoon—would begin to gravitate toward the character Peter Quill, Star-Lord. The miniseries Annihilation: Conquest—Starlord, written by Keith Giffen and drawn by Timothy Green II and Victor Olazaba, followed this thread most closely.

In 2008, Abnett and Lanning would launch the second volume of a Guardians of the Galaxy comic book, with pencil artist Paul Pelletier and inker Rick Magyar. The book spun out of the events of the writing team's various Annihilation storylines, and this particular line-up of this particular team is the same as in the movie—Star-Lord, Rocket, Gamora, Drax, Groot–and several others who come and go.

Behold: Groot's wide vocabulary!

Groot was created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers in 1960; he was one of the more memorable monsters in a string of one-off monster comics produced by Kirby and Lee in the pre-superhero days of Tales To Astonish.

The Collector was created by Lee and Don Heck in 1966 as an Avengers villain.

Please tell me "the deadly lips of Ronan" are referred to in the film.

Ronan The Accuser was created by Kirby and Lee in 1967 as a Fantastic Four villain; his alien race, The Kree, were also created by Kirby and Lee, and are a mainstay of the space-set stories in the Marvel Universe shared-setting.

Drax The Destroyer was created by Starlin and Mike Friedrich in 1973 in the pages of Iron Man.

Gamora was created by Jim Starlin in 1975; she is the adopted daughter of Thanos, another Starlin creation (albeit one heavily influenced by Kirby's DC-owned, 1971 creation Darkseid, who Thanos has beaten to the big screen).

Star-Lord was created by writer Steve Englehart and artist Steve Gan in 1976.

The Celestials were created in 1976 by Kirby for his series The Eternals.

Rocket Raccoon was created by Bill Mantlo and Keith Giffen in 1976 (and dramatically fleshed-out in a four-issue, 1985, self-titled mini-series by Mantlo, pencil artist Mike Mignola and inkers Al Gordon and Al Milgrom).

The Nova Corps (and Richard Rider, aka the superhero Nova who starred in the comic book Nova, but who I don't think actually appears at all in the film himself)  were created by writer Marv Wolfman and first drawn by artists John Buscema and Joe Sinnott in 1976.

Nebula was created by Roger Stern and John Buscema in 1985 as an Avengers villain.

Korath The Pursuer was created by Mark Gruenwald and Greg Capullo in 1992 in the pages of Quasar.

And...that's all I know of. Did I miss anyone or thing very important, that isn't a spoiler for the film...? I'm just going off what I've seen in the trailers and the cast-list on IMDb here.