Professor H Reads Comics: December 1969

(Continued from November 1969)

I don't know what happened here exactly, but I had NO reviews for this month from 2007. I wouldn't have any reviews on this page right now at all, except I went back even further into my KLORDNY files, and found the ones I'd done for CAPTAIN MAR-VELL in 2004.

FANTASTIC FOUR 93
cover by Jack Kirby & Frank Giacoia

"AT THE MERCY OF TORGO!"

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 79
cover by JOHN ROMITA

"TO PROWL NO MORE!"

IRON MAN 20
cover by GEORGE TUSKA

"WHO SERVES LUCIFER?"

CAPTAIN AMERICA 120
cover by Gene Colan & Joe Sinnott

"CRACK UP ON CAMPUS!"

SILVER SURFER 11
cover by John Buscema & Dan Adkins

"O, BITTER VICTORY!"

SUB-MARINER 20
cover by John Buscema & Johnny Craig

"IN THE DARKNESS DWELLS DOOM!"

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 122
cover by HERB TRIMPE

"THE HULK'S LAST FIGHT"

CAPTAIN MARVEL 19
cover by Gil Kane & Dan Adkins

"THE MAD MASTER OF THE MURDER MAZE!"

Rick wakes up, CM flies to a nearby city, and Rick goes looking for a job and an apartment. Answering an ad, he becomes a tenant at Minos Towers, a futuristic building run by Dr. Cornelius Webb, a sociologist writing a book on human behavior. Webb has a fascination with rats in mazes, and before you know it, the tenants of the building find the entire complex is one gigantic rat-maze, with them as the “rats” in an experiment of Webb’s to “prove” that people can be scientifically reduced to cowering animals-- before he kills them all. CM manages to save the lives of most of the tenants, despite some overdone suspicion of theirs, and Webb’s mind appears to snap by the end. Overall, a sordid, pointless little melodrama.

According to the letters page, this nerve-wracking episode was entirely the idea of Gil Kane. WHY am I not surprised? For the last 30 years of his career, Kane’s work seemed to focus on high-tension nightmares and characters on the edge of nervous breakdowns. What WAS the guy’s problem?

There was no clue anywhere in the issue-- but CM was cancelled with this issue. So much for drastic overhauls.

Mitch had this one for $ 3.50. Thanks, man!
(7-2-2004 / originally published in KLORDNY #138)

It continues to blow my mind that die-hard Marvel fanatics ("card-carrying MMMS members") insist that the 5 issues by Thomas, Kane & Adkins were "GREAT!!!!!", when I view them as UTTER CRAP compared to the one issue by Goodwin, Heck & Shores that immediately preceded it. Readers were ROBBED of what could have been a VASTLY-better run because "ye editor" blinked at the crucial moment, and he felt that Roy Thomas-- a vastly-INFERIOR writer, could somehow do better to "save" the book.
(10-28-2018)

THOR 171
cover by Jack Kirby & Bill Everett