If Not Superheroes, What? Part I: Monster Comics

In the moaning at the wake over the death of American comics - a ceremony that seems somewhat to disrespect the decedent by preceding his demise - observers make much of the narrow range of available materials. In fact, most of the substance for claims of the impending doom resides in a fundamental truth: The American comics medium has become dominated, almost monopolized, by the superhero form, and as the commercial appeal of superheroes contracts, it can act like a noose around the neck of the entire business.

The comics of an earlier day indeed did not so rigidly confine themselves to a single approach. The origins of the comic included more diverse material; and the shifts in the market had encouraged some experimentation, resulting in the development of new genres after the end of World War II.

Some comics forms represented self-sufficient schools that, though often availing of talent that worked in almost any of the commercial comics forms, did not rely on superhero comics for concepts or characters, let alone the post-Marvel Revolution editorial model.

The monster comic represents a particularly ephemeral approach that, though it did not truly survive the explosion of the Silver Age - though reprint books kept the material in circulation until the Bronze Age of Comics - left a strong imprint on fans by working from a formula that could do much to instruct comics creators today.

The classic monster comics didn't last long, and didn't really stretch much past the confines of Atlas / Marvel, but they would leave their imprint on the early superhero comics of the Marvel Revolution, and, furthermore, leave behind a body of fun, formulaic pieces that compete very well for entertainment value against today's more overblown, prosaic, and post-post-modern pieces.

Where Monster Comics Came From

The monster comic, in some ways, resulted from the strictures of the Comics Code Authority.

When superheroes mostly went belly-up after the Second World War, comics did not choose to die with them, at least not without a fight, and therefore a number of other genres flowered from the corpse of the first generation of costumed heroes.

Thus we saw romance comics, historical adventure comics, more and better western comics (though mainstream comic books had already explored western themes long before Superman made his first four-color appearance), wonder dog comics, and many others. A few forms managed to experiment with an increasingly lurid approach - albeit tame by modern standards. However, the crime, horror, and sometimes science fiction comics - and even humor comics - attracted a small but potent amount of unfriendly public attention that resulted in both the creation of the Comics Code Authority and the collapse of several aesthetically thriving genres.

The monster comic arose in the years immediately following the death of EC Comics. It arose mostly as default. How, after all, do you have an adventure story that pits man against something horrible - as in the old horror comics - without violating Code strictures about things like the portrayal of zombies, vampires, or the simple human corpses they might leave in the wake of the inevitable killing spree?

So writers had to invent bad guys that did not offend against code. No zombies, witches, vouduns, vampires, mummies, or any of the stock critters that casually cross the line from the dead to the living; no superheroes, because that dead end explained its absence by its previous commercial failures.

Therefore you got the bizarre thingies: the giant tapir-like beast that began as a man who took a muscle growth formula; the giant lizards, carved, painted and hatched; walking blobs of mud; walking trees; walking bursts of lightning; in essence whatever the Comics Code Authority hadn't explicitly forbidden.

The Formula

String together some nonsense syllables like "Tim Boo Baa" or "Fin Fang Foom" (or, really, almost any combination of vowels and consonants, pronounceable or not), and you might have the name of one of the great Atlas - Marvel monsters. Append an epithet like "the [insert some noun] that walks like a man," and you had about 1/3 of the story already.

The monster would appear and a) pretend to friendliness but turn out to intend to conquer the world; b) seem to threaten the townsfolk but turn out a helpless traveler in need of escape from the world; c) terrify the locals, who would attack him but realize, as he died, that the monster had actually saved them all from some worse fate; or d) revert to the form of the hero himself, who had somehow effected some amazing transformation that got out of control. Sometimes other variants appeared.

Furthermore, a certain problem-solving element appeared in those stories whose resolution didn't rely on deus ex machina or dumb luck. Given the nature of the monsters - something too big to handle by normal human fisticuff methods - the heroes routinely had to resort to wits, a lost art in most modern comics (excepting early Tom Strong).

This made for a story - fitting the definition that includes a beginning, a middle, and an end - and it didn't rely on the kind of rochambeau that ails superhero comics. Give Superman the Riddler and you can roughly estimate how and why the outcome you expect will happen. With the monster formula, while you expected the Good Guys to prevail (the Code required this, after all). Given the huge mismatch between Giant Slavering Monster and Noble But Puny Hero, these books gave a great deal of fun through wish-fulfillment in their resolutions. The intuitive leaps the heroes used to defeat the monsters, after all, frequently remained within the domain of knowledge available to ordinary humans.

The Talent

The purveyors of the monster comic have names that mean something more in the overall context of the Silver Age: Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Bill Everett. If the market didn't want the pieces, and if the pieces did not represent an enduring long-term approach to comics, the monster stories nonetheless enjoyed some hands who could (and would) reinvent comics over the next decade; Golden Age veterans like Everett and Kirby brought with them considerable experience and storytelling ability.

The End

If the monster comics bore reprinting and anthologization in a later day, during their first printings they represented no particular commercial success, and the collapse of Atlas at the end of the fifties occurred when some of their line involved such classic, but nonviable, pieces.

The monster books created their own end, in a way, because they served as a training ground for the talents that would rebuild Atlas as Marvel, with a new line of unconventional (for their time) superhero pieces. As the monster books hit their peak, the Big Guns over at DC Comics had already found some surprising success with Justice League of America, and this suggested that Lee might well consider exploring the commercial possibilities of superheroes.

We might view the extinction of these books, as their titles gave way to the new superheroes Marvel created in the early sixties, in the same light as the extinction of dinosaurs. Though dinosaurs do not exist today, some biologists view them as having left descendants in the form of modern birds - a remarkably successful group of animals over all and not, as a group, really in danger of extinction. The monster comics left descendants in the form of the new superheroes.

The monster titles continued publication until 1996, when Marvel suspended its entire product line to attempt the cynical ploy of remaking itself as Image - an effort of desperation that did not, in the end, succeed. But the monster stories themselves had become essentially extinct in the early sixties. Title by title, these books gave over to the new generation of superheroes.

Journey into Mystery became Thor's book with #82 in 1962, though it would not yield the banner completely to its new tenant until Mighty Thor #126 in 1966. Tales to Astonish featured monster fare between its beginnings in 1959, until the appearance of Ant-Man as a superhero in #35 in 1962; thereafter, it would feature superheroes, though Ant-Man/Giant-Man himself had failed to float the book. The Hulk and the Sub-Mariner would feature in the last days of Journey into Mystery until that title fractured into Sub-Mariner #1 and Incredible Hulk #102 (which continued the original numbering) in 1968. Tales of Suspense, similarly, became Iron Man's and Captain America's book beginning with #39 in 1963; it would split out into Iron Man #1 and Captain America #100 (original numbering) in 1968. Again, Strange Tales, which began featuring superheroes around #100 - generally a solo Human Torch feature - would become Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D #1 and Doctor Strange #169 in 1968.

Though superheroes comprehensively crowded out the monster comic form - which would have exhausted itself horribly if Marvel had not chosen to move on - the monster books nonetheless left an imprint on the new superhero stories of the early sixties. Ant-Man began as the typical scientist/protagonist of a science fiction tale in which he shrank himself to ant-size. The Thing of Fantastic Four owed considerably in design to the monster creation school typical of the fifties' monster comics. And, again in the pages of Fantastic Four, giant monsters would play significant roles in early issues of that series before Kirby moved on to things like Kirbytech and a new plateau of adrenal depiction. As such, traces of the monster comics remain with us, remnants familiar even to comics readers who never heard of "Tim Boo Baa" or "Fin Fang Foom."

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