Dr. Haydn

On the bright side, Dick Ayers inks over Heck's pencils looks pretty good! Heck wasn't much of a plotter, though, at least judging from this story. 18 pages of random scenes that don't add up to much. And Stan Lee was unable or unwilling to rescue him. The "heroes fight due to a misunderstanding" plotline is a pretty tired comic book trope by 1964! Pretty soon, the Captain America feature will debut in Tales of Suspense, cutting the Iron Man stories back to a manageable 12 pages. I guess this story was setting the stage for the "split book" era of ToS, much like the Hulk's guest appearance in Tales to Astonish just before his own 10-page feature debuted?

Oh, that would be great!😁

This splash illustrates the difference a great inker can make on the final product. Chic Stone was good over Kirby's pencils. Mike Royer was on a whole 'nother level.

Absolutely!

To my eyes, Romita, Colan, and (even) Heck were better than Kirby at drawing women. Still, that's only part of any artist's job.

Kirby (with Lee) certainly kicked it up a notch with this story. It must have been fun to watch this comic hit its stride in real time in the mid-60s.

FF is about to enter its best 3 or 4 years.

Is this the first (and only) appearance of the Fantasti-bar?

Is it just me, or did Kirby sneak a Clark Kent cameo into Marvel continuity?

I had forgotten about Doom's Roma background. Being part of a persecuted ethnic group no doubt contributed to his mistrust of humanity.

There were quite a few Iron Man stories in 1963-64, as I recall (including the origin story) versus the Communists. The Hulk's origin story might count as well. Also, Thor was "Prisoner of the Reds" in an early Journey into Mystery. Even the FF got into the act, with the Red Ghost and his Super Apes. I think Captain America had a story or two set in Vietnam, if you stretch things a bit.

During the Silver Age, DC could let the profits from the Superman line (and to a lesser extent, Batman's titles) carry books whose sales were more modest. I wonder what changed by 1973?

Rather convenient that the Hulk transformed back to Banner in the exact location of his glasses. What are the odds?

What was the name of that intelligent gorilla in Doom Patrol? Now there was an interesting character--especially in Grant Morrison's hands a generation later!

Tales to Astonish #60 - Lee, Ayers, Reinman, and Simek One of my favorite unintentionally funny Ant-Man stories. This is NOT advanced writing aimed at a college crowd. The Ray that gives Gorillas the Intelligence of Humans still makes me laugh out loud when I read it. Even better: the same ray gives humans the intelligence of gorillas!

Two things: 1. Bob Beerbohm was there. 2. His story hasn't changed in over 50 years. That makes his recollections hard to ignore.

I get the feeling that Stan Lee was becoming disinterested in the whole superhero phenomenon by the late 1960s. At the end of 1967, he was only doing the equivalent of five books a month (FF, Spider-man, Thor, Daredevil, and the half-book Captain America and Hulk features), farming out the remaining books to Roy Thomas and others (including Archie Goodwin, Gary Friedrich, Raymond Marais, and Jim Lawrence). His workload increased in 1968 with the expansion of the line but dropped back to five books by late 1969--all done with experienced artists who could carry the bulk of the plotting labor. Despite the public statements to the contrary, Lee wanted out. No doubt losing Kirby to DC accelerated the process.

--And 85 people voted for Roy Thomas as favorite editor--yet none of the books in 1971 gave him an editor credit. (That would come in 1972.) Did people in the know realize that Thomas was the de facto editor of the books he dialogued?

I started reading marvels in late 1973. Same deal--I much preferred the Silver Age reprints. FF, Thor, and Spidey were reprinting 1968 stories. (Tales of Suspense/Tales to Astonish a bit earlier.) Great stuff.

Just glanced at the spreadsheet. 1968, the last full year at the 12-cent price, is interesting. Neal Adams supposedly took over X-men the following year because it was "Marvel's weakest title"--at 273,360 copies, it was about the same as Avengers, Hulk, and Captain America, and slightly ahead of Dr. Strange in 1968. Yet in 1969, X-men (the acclaimed Adams-Thomas run) went down about 40,000 copies. Of course, most of the rest of the line suffered too, except for the two flagship titles (Spidey and FF). I suppose the kids were buying fewer titles across the board. Incidentally, Marvel increased the price to 25 cents right around the beginning of 1974, which makes it all the more interesting that their sales stayed about the same level they had been in 1973. (DC stayed at 20 cents for the first half of 1974, if memory serves.)

Given Marvel's modest sales figures at the time, I guess a lot of people missed these great stories when they first appeared. But almost HALF reprints?? Astounding! I guess it was cheaper than generating new material. Especially if the new material was a mediocre photocopy of the old.

Sure was a bargain, back in the day...

Judging from the caption, bottom right, Jack had not yet told Stan what the next issue's plot was going to be.

John Pound--letterer of pp. 1-9 (though Mike Royer seems to have done the display lettering and sound effects): was this the same guy that went on to have a modest career in underground comix? The lettering in the panel below (from the Lambiek Comiclopedia entry for Pound) looks like a close match to me.

Sam Rosen lettering on the caption, top left. The magazine went all out to preserve the Marvel look.