Golden Age antecedents to Marvel characters

C.C. Beck and Bill Parker's Captain Marvel debuted in 1940's Whiz Comics #2 and would go on to become one of the most popular characters of the Golden Age superhero boom. Because he bore more than a passing resemblance to the other caped strongman who started that boom, the company we now know as DC Comics sued Captain Marvel's publisher Fawcett, and the litigation dragged on until superhero comics were no longer popular, and so Fawcett settled in the 1950s, and the character went into limbo for about 20 years.

During that time, Marvel Comics created their own Captain Marvel character, a super-powered alien warrior with the unlikely real name of Mar-Vell, and they quickly copyrighted "Captain Marvel", so that by the time the Distinguished Competition finally revived the original Captain Marvel, DC couldn't use that name in the titles of any of their books. 

This is why since the 1970s, all of DC's Captain Marvel-starring books (and a 1970s TV show, and the 21st century pair of feature films) have gone by some formulation of "Shazam" instead (and the publisher has tried to change the character's name to "Shazam" in the last few decades, with limited success), while Marvel continues to publish books entitled Captain Marvel (and, of course, their film starring one of their Captain Marvels was able to use that name in the title). 

Marvel's Captain Marvel is by far the most obvious and famous case of the publisher using the name of a Golden Age hero for one of their characters, but as I've been learning, it wasn't the first or the last time.

I've been working my way through Lou Mougin's Secondary Superheroes of Golden Age Comics (McFarland; 2019), which is a defunct publisher by defunct publisher survey of the various superheroes who didn't survive the 1940s, which here seems to mean the various heroes who weren't published (or later acquired) by the company that would become DC or the company that would become Marvel.

Thanks to publications as various as Dynamite's Project Superpowers comics, Image's "Next Issue Project", Paul Karasik's efforts with the works of Fletcher Hanks and others, even casual modern readers will likely know the names and stories of many of these also-ran characters (Mougin notes many of these later revivals, of which AC Comics seems to be responsible for a lot of, along with Project Superpowers).

The other reason that several of these lesser Golden Agers' names will be familiar, of course, is that they have since been applied to Marvel heroes (And, to be fair, some DC characters as well). Let's take a look at some of them, shall we?

We just discussed the case of Daredevil recently. That was, of course, the name of a fairly popular hero from Lev Gleason Publications who wore a striking two-color costume divided vertically, wielded a boomerang, fought The Claw and Hitler and who was worked on by such Golden Age greats as Jack Cole and Charles Biro. 

He was around for a remarkable 16 years, not calling it quits until 1956...just eight years before Marvel's Daredevil would make his debut (And, as pointed out in the previous post, there's a chance—a "legend" in Mougin's words—that Marvel's Daredevil was pretty directly inspired by Lev Gleason's, the result of Stan Lee being asked by publisher Martin Goodman to revive the original guy).(UPDATE: Commentor kevhines pointed me to this 2020 post by Tom Brevoort, discussing the creation of Marvel's Daredevil, his story noting Goodman's interest in possibly reviving the Golden Age version.)

The next most popular Marvel hero with a Golden Age forebear was a pretty big surprise to me, as I had never heard of him, although there's a pretty good chance you might have, given how recently he was revived and by whom. 

I am talking about Doctor Strange.

The Marvel character by that name is, of course, a literal doctor whose surname was literally "Strange," a surgeon who, after a humbling car accident, an epic journey and the tutelage of a wise master, became Earth's Sorcerer Supreme, engaging in various mystic adventures. Steve Ditko created him in in 1963. 

The other Doctor Strange debuted in 1940's Thrilling Comics #1 from Nedor Comics, in a long action-packed story that Mougin refers to as "a 37-page marathon." Writer Richard Hughes and artists Alex Koster's Doctor Strange was "a powerful, brilliant scientist who didn't shy away from duking it out with villains," as Mougin puts it, and the character seemed to have far more in common with the Doc Savage of the pulps than the guy who would become the far more famous Doctor Strange a few decades later.

After happening upon a kidnapping plot and being shot, Strange prepares a dose of Alosun, a super-power granting "distillate of sun-atoms" that made him into something of a Superman in terms of speed, strength and invulnerability. A later refinement of his formula apparently also bestowed upon him the power of flight. Though he never adopted a cape or chest-symbol or went in for tights, by the eighth issue of Thrilling he adopted a uniform of sorts: A tight-fitting red shirt and a pair of blue jodhpurs. 

He also shortened his name to "Doc Strange" after just ten issues as "Doctor Strange," which is perhaps one reason he's not thought of as a contender for the more famous superhero appellation.

His adventures lasted a respectable eight years before he faded away, not to be revived until AC Comics decided to do so in a 1991 issue of Femforce. (I've never really found the covers of that series particularly appealing, but, after reading Mougin's book, I'd really like to check it out; sadly, as long-lived as it is, it doesn't appear to have ever been collected into any trades.)

But it was Alan Moore's revival that is probably better known. See, Nedor also published 31 issues of a book called America's Best Comics between 1940 and 1949, and that was, of course, the name of Moore's 1999 WildStorm imprint, under which he wrote the books The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Tom Strong, Promethea, Top Ten and other features. 

Apparently leaning into the Nedor connection, Moore reintroduced the Golden Age Doc Strange as Tom Strange in the pages of a 2001 issue of Tom Strong, wherein the older character was presented as an alternate Earth counterpart of the similarly pulp-inspired hero (It was a fortunate coincidence that Doc's first name was previously revealed to be Tom in the Golden Age comics).  

Eventually other Nedor heroes, all of whom had long since lapsed into public domain, showed up alongside Strange, starring in a pair of Terra Obscura miniseries in 2003 and 2004. 

Even more surprising than a character named Doctor Strange appearing in the 1940s, though, was one named Thor. Like the later Marvel one created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in 1962, he was a mortal empowered by the real Norse god and fought with the mythical Mjolnir (Marvel's Thor, of course, gradually dropped the mortal aspect of Donald Blake as time went on). 

This first Thor appeared in the pages of Fox Comics' 1940-launched Weird Comics, the first few covers of which seem appropriate for the title. (I put that of the second issue above, because it's slightly weirder than that of the first issue. You can seem 'em all on comics.org, of course; Thor doesn't seem to have ever been featured on one, but such caped weirdos as Dart and Ace and The Eagle and Buddy eventually replaced the mad scientists and scantily clad ladies of the first few issues.)

Here's how he dressed, showing considerably more skin than Marvel's later Thor ever would. 

According to Mougin, Fox's Thor was really mild-mannered mortal Grant Farrel, who was berated by his girlfriend for "his lack of adventurousness" at a night club before a "masher" cut in on them. Later, Grant is visited by the real Thor of mythology, who takes him back to his home realm to train him, telling him, "The lightning will be your servant, my magic hammer your weapon."

After his training, Grant saw his girlfriend trapped by spies, descended back to Earth, downed the plane she was on, smashed enemy tanks with his hammer and rescued her, returning to Thor afterwards to get an attaboy: "You have well earned the right to my name and my magic hammer...They are yours to keep."

Obviously, he didn't keep them long, as this Thor's feature lasted only five issues of Weird, although it's interesting to wonder if Goodman, Lee or Kirby might have encountered the feature and saw some potential in it, either filing it away in the back of their heads or completely forgetting about it except, perhaps, on some subconscious level. 

There are several other familiar names in Mougin's book. The most prominent of these is perhaps The Black Panther, a power-less, origin-less, secret identity-less character in a cat costume who appeared in a single story by artist Paul Gustavoson in a 1941 issue of Centaur Comics' Stars and Stripes. 

Like Fox's Thor, he never appeared on a cover, but you can see his skimpy costume (I do like the tail) in the above splash, which I swiped from Tom Brevoort's blog (You can read the whole story there, by the way; as Brevoort notes, this guy doesn't really seem to have anything at all in common with Marvel's much later T'Challa, save for the name).

There's also...

•The Banshee, a masked and caped Irishman from 1941 who pre-figured the 1967 mutant with a sonic scream that would become part of the extensive, wider X-Men cast (although the second Banshee lacked a "The" in his name)

•The Black Cat, a rather long-lived character from Harvey Comics who was a Hollywood actress/superheroine who debuted in 1941, long before the Spider-Man villainess-turned-love interest of the same name, who appeared in 1979 (You may have seen Harvey's Black Cat in 2018's Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Comic, which repurposed some of her original comics for riffing purposes.)

•Boomerang, a 1944 hero who fought crime alongside an archer named Diana, unlike the same-named character from 1966, who used the weapon for ill

•A couple of different Chameleons, a heroic master of disguise from 1940 and a crook from the 1940s; the Spider-Man villain from 1963 therefore seems to combine elements of both

•Dr. Doom, a civilian supporting character in the feature The Echo from Chesler's 1941 Yankee Comics. He would seem to have been a waste of a perfectly good villain's name, a name that Kirby and Lee's formidable character would begin putting to far better use in 1962

•Hydroman, a Bill Everett-created hero from a 1940 issue of Eastern Color Publishing Company's Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics who could, like the 1981-debuting Spider-Man villain, turn himself into water, not unlike a reverse Human Torch. Spidey's adversary would, of course, add a hyphen to the name

•At least two different guys named "Wonderman", one-word, a Fox Comics hero from 1939 who was very Superman-like and a Nedor Comics hero from 1944 who appeared in a feature called "Brad Spencer, Wonderman". Marvel's Wonder Man Simon Williams would debut in 1964, distinguishing himself from those prior Wondermen by separating his name into two words.

I'm sure there were other recycled names, but those are the ones that jumped out at me while reading. 

As for DC Comics, they too would later debut names that had previously been applied to Golden Age characters, though far fewer and none so famous as Captain Marvel, Daredevil, Doctor Strange or Thor. This is perhaps because so very many of the Golden Age's original characters ended up being absorbed into the DC comics line, and the attendant DC Universe shared setting.

Among the Golden Agers whose names DC fans might recognize are...

•Amazing-Man, an Everett-created hero from 1939 whose abilities are owed to training in Tibet; the green-and-yellow clad African-American hero that Roy Thomas introduced in a 1983 issue of All-Star Squadron had a different origin and powers, but his secret identity revealed his debt to the earlier hero: Will Everett

•Multiple Black Orchids, including a 1943 Harvey Comics character and 1944 Tops Comics character. Both were masked females with no powers, though the latter had a gimmicked ring. The 1973 DC character would sport a far more elaborate flower-inspired costume than either of her forebears, as well as array of superpowers. At this point the DC character is probably better known for the incarnation from disgraced writer Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean's 1988 miniseries, presaging her later, '90s absorption into the Vertigo "universe"

•Black Spider, a costumed detective from 1940 who fought crime with, in Mougin's description, "a cache of poisonous spiders along with his dukes and a gun." He therefore wasn't much like the Batman villain who debuted in 1976 at all

•Cat-Man, a cat-themed hero from 1940 who seemed to be a Batman riff with various cat powers, including, at the outset, nine lives. Like the Batman villain introduced in 1963, the hyphen in his name seemed to come and go (The Golden Ager just reappeared recently in a Jeff Parker-written Cat-Man and Kitten comic from Dynamite, by the way)

•The Mad Hatter, an intriguing-looking, hat-less caped hero who wore purple and spoke in rhyme and debuted in 1946, pre-dating the much more famous Batman villain of 1948 by just a few years

•The Unknown Soldier, Ace Comics' masked, patriotic-themed hero debuted in 1941's Our Flag Comics #1, and seemed to be in the mold of The Sheild and Captain America more than that of 1966's disfigured master of disguise from Star Spangled War Stories and, later, his own comic

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.