As we covered here back in August, the twelfth — and final — issue of Marvel Feature ended with Benjamin J. Grimm (aka the Thing), stranded in a desert in the American Southwest. But we Marvel Comics readers of 1973 had no need to worry over the fate of our rocky orange hero, since just two months later, the narrative of Ben’s travails picked right up in Marvel Two-in-One #1 — the first issue of a brand-new title devoted to the “Thing Team-Up” series premise that had made its debut in Marvel Feature #11.
With the new title came a (mostly) new creative team; for, while longtime Fantastic Four inker Joe Sinnott soldiered on, making sure that Aunt Petunia’a favorite nephew remained reliably on-model, the series was now being written by Steve Gerber and pencilled by Gil Kane. Gerber and Kane faithfully picked up the threads left behind by previous storytellers Mike Friedrich and Jim Starlin, having Ben Grimm finally reach civilization and buy a bus ticket home to New York — only to exchange it for one for Florida, after catching sight of a news story regarding a certain muck-encrusted mockery of a man who’d been sighted shambling about the Sunshine State’s swampy Everglades. “Like it ain’t bad enuff just bein’ the Thing –!” Ben complained aloud to an uncaring universe. “This bug-eyed mudball’s gotta come along and rip off my name!”
A meeting between Thing and Man-Thing was probably all but inevitable, circa 1973 — still, it may have happened a bit sooner than it would have otherwise, given that Marvel Two-in-One‘s premiere scripter was also the writer of the swamp monster’s series. But while Steve Gerber’s means for getting the two characters together was contrived, to say the least — did Ben Grimm really have nothing better to do with his time than take a day-and-a-half bus ride to southern Florida to pick a fight with a stranger over a sort-of shared moniker? — the resulting story was nevertheless entertaining, and even touching, as, following the requisite slugfest between Thing One and Thing Two, the two “monsters” found themselves in league together against the Molecule Man… and after an all-to-brief period in which they were both restored to their human forms, Ben realized that fate had dealt research scientist Ted Sallis an even worse hand than his own.
“Vengeance of the Molecule Man!” ended with Ben Grimm presumably ready to return at last to New York, though Gerber and Kane didn’t go so far as to actually put him on the bus. And the series’s next bi-monthly issue — whose cover by John Romita promised that the Thing’s new team-up partner would be yet another character whose own book was currently being scripted by the busy writer — didn’t open by featuring either the Thing or his current co-star… though the distressed young man we encounter in its very first panel would be familiar to followers of the Sub-Mariner’s immediate predecessor in that role:
Regular readers of this blog should recognize Wundarr, regardless of whether or not they were Man-Thing fans back in the day, per our Fear #17 post from July. As you’ll hopefully recall, that issue told the story of how Wundarr had been rocketed to Earth as a baby from the supposedly doomed planet Dakkam, landing in the Florida Everglades — and then spending the next twenty-two years growing to adulthood in the life-sustaining confines of his spacecraft, which was never discovered, let alone opened, until the Man-Thing stumbled upon it. The physically adult Wundarr then emerged, possessing the mental and emotional maturity of a toddler — and also the ability to change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands, etc., etc.. After some further violent interaction between space-born visitor and slimy man-monster (not to mention some inadvertent terrorizing of the good people of Citrusville, FL), Wundarr bounded off into the wild blue yonder, not to be seen again… until now, that is.
Wundarr was an obvious parody of Superman — but however affectionately it might have been meant by Steve Gerber, DC Comics was not amused, and reportedly threatened legal action against Marvel. In the end, further unpleasantness was avoided when Marvel solemnly promised that they would rework the character of Wundarr, so that no one could henceforth recognize him as an analogue of the Last Son of Krypton… a project that began with this very issue of Marvel Two-in-One.
There are some elements of this scene that are undeniably just a little bit sketchy, once you get past the pleasant surface aspect of two attractive young people having some harmless mouth-to-mouth interaction. For one thing, as established in her earliest appearances by her creator Bill Everett, Namorita shouldn’t be more than fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. If Wundarr is physically twenty-three or thereabouts, then the gap in years between them is a problem (and not only because of age-of-consent legalities). On the other hand, the guy doesn’t seem to be more than a couple of years old from a psychological perspective, so the idea of a teenage girl kissing him “that way” is problematic from that angle as well. Basically, it’s kind of icky, any way you look at it.
It’s been a while since we last checked in with the Sub-Mariner’s own title, but let’s see if I can get us all more or less up to speed in a paragraph: As I touched on briefly in my Defenders #11 post some weeks back, Namor donned his new blue-and-gold duds under duress in Sub-Mariner #67 (Nov., 1973), after a nerve-gas explosion changed his body chemistry so that he couldn’t breathe out of water without wearing a special suit (designed, incidentally, by Ben Grimm’s friend and teammate, Reed “Mister Fantastic” Richards). The same nerve-gas disaster put all the ordinary blue-skinned citizens of Atlantis into a coma; at present, then, Namor is desperately searching for a cure, aided by the residents of Hydrobase — i.e., the unfortunate surface-dwellers who’d some time earlier been kidnapped by the villainous Dr. Hydro and turned into green-scaled amphibians (yeah, those folks need to find a cure for themselves, too, but first things first, I guess). Anyway, it’s safe to say that Namor has a lot on his plate right now…
Namorita tells her cousin that they need to go after the young stranger; he’s reluctant to do so, seeing as how the fellow evidently has the super-strength to be able to take care of himself — plus, Wundarr’s trajectory will take him towards “the realm of the surface-dwellers“, and Subby would prefer to keep his distance from such, if he can.
With this scene, Gerber clues us in to an important piece of information regarding Dakkam that Fear #17 never hinted at — namely, that Wundarr’s pop — Dakkam’s Jor-El, if you will — was 100% wrong about his planet being doomed. Oops!
We’ll skip the next page’s recap of the aforementioned issue of Fear, picking things up with Benjamin J. Grimm’s belated entry into our story…
“Five Fingers of Doom” appears to be a nod to the 1972 Hong Kong martial arts film Five Fingers of Death (aka King Boxer), though I have no idea who (if anyone) “Scott” is supposed to be (none of the stars of the real-life movie have that name, or anything similar).
Johnny “Human Torch” Storm announces he’s heading straight back to the Fantastic Four’s Baxter Building headquarters, but Ben decides to walk off his bad mood by “soak[ing] up a little o’ the seamy side o’ life — in Times Square.”
“Look — up in the sky!” Hmm, I guess Steve Gerber wasn’t that intimidated by DC’s displeasure — or by Marvel’s, either.
As the battle continues, it’s observed from orbit by Earth’s latest visitors from Dakkam:
Meanwhile, Namor and Nita have arrived on the New York City waterfront, and are preparing to begin what the Sub-Mariner, at least, expects to be a long and difficult search for their quarry…
…then again, sometimes you get lucky.
As the two Atlanteans fly towards the scene of the battle, Ben Grimm begins to have doubts about whether Wundarr really is the menace he first seemed to be: “The way he looks at me — with them puppy-dog eyes — like I’m the one who started this!”
But, hey, if the Thing stopped slugging away, we wouldn’t be able to groove on the great way Gil Kane stages action scenes, would we?
“Hold, craven brute!”? Is that any way to talk to someone whose much smarter teammate saved your life not so long ago? Apparently it is, if you’re the Sub-Mariner — who may not always behave like an asshole, but does it often enough so that it’s never a surprise when it happens.
Namor’s less belligerent cousin heads straight for Wundarr — who is pleased as punch to see “Nee-tah!”, naturally. She pulls him off to the sidelines while Ben and Subby commence to bludgeon one another; meanwhile, our observers from Out There find themselves bemused by this latest turn of events:
Okay, so it looks like after a whole lot of preliminaries, we’re finally going to get to see what the cover blurb promised us: “Namor and Ben Grimm — side by side in battle for a man’s life!!” And we’ve got a whole… three pages of story left to deliver that in. Hmm…
Um, did that climax seem a little rushed, or what? Not being privy to exactly how detailed the plot that Steve Gerber handed off to Gil Kane was, we can’t know if the story’s pacing issues originated with our writer or our artist. But wherever the responsibility lies, after building up the pending menace of the Mortoid for most of the issue, it’s a bit of a letdown when the Thing and Subby polish the big robot off in 1 1/2 pages. I mean, the poor thing barely manages to land a single blow before out heroes double-team it to scrap.
On the other hand, even as short as it is, the fight looks great — same as do the earlier dust-ups between Ben and Namor, and Ben and Wundarr. Whatever Kane’s role in the story’s pacing problems might have been, he and Joe Sinnott consistently keep the proceedings a joy to watch, throughout. For your humble blogger, this is one of those comics where the quality of the artwork makes the story a lot more memorable than it would be with simply serviceable graphics.
As for the abruptness of Namor and Namorita’s departure — yeah, it’s pretty tacky of them just to dump the whole responsibility for Wundarr on Ben like that. But in Subby’s defense, he does have a whole lot of problems to try to resolve between now and the final issue of his series, coming in just six months. (Spoiler warning: he’s not going to make it.) So perhaps it’s all for the best. And, as it happens, “Nee-tah” will be making a brief return to Marvel Two-in-One, and to Wundarr, a couple of issues from now… and since we probably aren’t going to be able to squeeze in a post about that one in April, we’re going to take the liberty of sharing that scene here.
First, however,, it behooves us to take a quick look at the Wundarr-centric scenes of the very next issue of MTIO, #3 (May, 1974), starting with this one set at the Fantastic Four’s Baxter Building headwuarters, where we find the aforementioned Mister Fantastic running some tests on our strange visitor from another planet while the Thing looks on (art by Sal Buscema and Joe Sinnott)…
Of course, an explosion like this is just another day at the office for the FF; and not too many pages later, not only has the mess been all cleared up, but Reed has used the knowledge gained from his tests to more or less resolve the problem that caused it to happen in the first place:
Yes, my friends, it’s Reed Richards — costume designer for the super-hero set! (At least in Steve Gerber’s books.)
That’s pretty much it for Wundarr in Marvel Two-in-One #3, so we’ll skip on ahead to issue #4 (Jul., 1974), and the promised return of Namorita. Just prior to her entrance into the story, the Thing and Wundarr’s pleasant outing at the Central Park Zoo is violently disrupted by Wundarr’s impulsive decision to rip open the cages of several big cats and great apes and free “these lovely beasts”. Ben manages to get everything under control before any animals or humans are harmed, but the incident has made a whole lot of noise (art by Buscema and Frank Giacoia)…
This was, for all practical purposes, Steve Gerber’s farewell to the pseudo-Superman he’d introduced back in Fear #17; Wundarr would make a couple more cameo appearances in Marvel Two-in-One before the writer moved on to other assignments, but, essentially, Gerber’s work with the character he’d co-created with “Man-Thing” artist Val Mayerik was done. And, arguably, he’d done what was required — at least as far as his employer’s peacemaking agreement with the good people of DC Comics was concerned. After all, Wundarr had now been unambiguously established as not being the Last Son of Dakkam. His powers came not from Earth’s yellow sun, or from its lower gravity, but from being exposed to cosmic rays while traveling in outer space (just like the Fantastic Four!). And while his new costume was, like his old one, mostly blue, it no longer included red trunks and boots. In any event, you can see not only why Gerber and/or Marvel felt they’d accomplished what was necessary, but also, perhaps, why they were just as happy to put Wundarr away on a shelf for a while. Not forever, of course… this is Marvel Comics we’re talking about here… but long enough to keep him off this blog’s radar for quite some time to come.
In memoriam: Earlier this week, it was reported online that Mike Voiles, founder of the “Mike’s Amazing World of Comics” web site, died recently. While I never met or communicated directly with Mr. Voiles, in some ways he has been a constant companion during the eight-plus years I have been writing this blog. Not only has his site been an invaluable reference resource for me from week to week, but it’s quite possible that without the ease with which its “Newsstand” feature made it possible for me to identify just when my comics-buying habit started back in 1965, and to arrange my subsequent purchases in chronological order, I never would have started the blog in the first place.
It’s too late for me to express my gratitude to Mike Voiles personally, which I will always regret. Still, I can, and do, offer my sincere condolences to his family and friends, and my deep appreciation for his efforts on behalf of comics scholarship.
According to a “farewell” message temporarily posted to the site, Mike’s Amazing World will continue for the foreseeable future — another gift for which all comics historians and enthusiasts should be grateful.
I couldn’t do my Silver Age rereading of the past few years without newsstand either. Farewell, Mike.
In the abstract, it feels appropriate that two of Earth’s strongest humans could just smash a supposedly invincible robot into steel splinters in a couple of pages. In context, yes, the story’s a bit unbalanced.
Don’t have a problem with Nita’s kiss. She’s hardly the first teen to find someone older sexy, and clearly Wundarr’s not encouraging or responding to it.
Wundarr … remains uninteresting. The amount of space spent on his backstory isn’t interesting either. Inferior Five had more fun with the same premise, revealing Awkwardman’s grandfather Dumb-Ell had rocketed his kid Barb-Ell to Earth, then discovered their planet Neon didn’t explode after all.
I liked both Namorita and Wundarr a very great deal. Too bad future writers would screw with them so bad. You had Byrne misuse his position to fix something that only bothered him and made Nita a clone. That makes him indirectly responsible for the blue skinned years where mischaracterization was heaped on a bad blue skinned look. And Aquarian? Ugh. My head canon is that the generic Atlantean mad scientist lied about Nita, captured and presented Namor with a clone while putting the real one in stasis. I have no idea how to undo the Aquarian garbage.
I had to go looking that up. I see rather than “Byrne erases everything since Creator originated character” it’s “Byrne dislikes established continuity so he overturns it.” Which most writers do at some point but his retcons are among the most irritating.
I enjoyed this issue, abrupt, perfunctory battle with the alien robot and all. Gerber, IMO, had a good grasp of Ben’s character and I rather liked how in his short run on MTIO he tended to link the stories within his chunk of the Marvel universe. Admittedly, reflecting on this story now, it seems odd that the manhunters from his home-planet appear to have given up on their attempts to permanently neutralize the potential threat of Wundarr. At least I don’t recall them ever showing up again, but then after issue 5, Wundarr himself didn’t show up for several more years, at least until the Project Pegasus storyline if my memory isn’t too defective!
As to Namorita, Gerber clearly aged her up at least a couple of years into full adulthood so she was at least 18 by this issue or certainly by issue 5. Funny how that sort of thing works in comics — some characters introduced as teens (or younger!) seem stuck at that age-range for decades while others are allowed to finally become young adults. DC appeared very reluctant to allow its teen heroes to age into 20-somethings. Marvel appeared to keep things a bit more nebulous — Peter Parker and Johnny Storm both got to college age – 18 years old – by 1965, and by 1973 they, as well as the X-Men, could be taken as at least 20 or 21. Hank McCoy certainly had to have been at least 23 or so when he underwent his transformation into a more furry Beast. It also would have been ridiculous to keep insisting that Rick Jones was still a ‘teen-ager” in 1973. Occurs to me, that during the period he was shown hanging out with the Hulk, I don’t believe Lee or anyone else established where he was living or how he was subsisting while a minor? Did General Ross allow him to stay in quarters on base and get some sort of stipend for meals and clothing? And on what basis was he even allowed to hang out on a military base when he was neither a member of the military or a dependent of one? Just some random musings on how Marvel dealt with its teen/young adult characters.
Peter would eventually move on to graduate school, pushing him even further into adulthood.
Good point about Namorita’s age, fred. She’s clearly in college in MTIO #5, and in fact was shown to be in college back in Sub-Mariner #57, as John Minehan notes in his comment.
As I believe I’ve mentioned before, I’ve never liked Namor. As you put it so succinctly, Alan, nine times out of ten, he’s an asshole, and a bully besides. I did like Ben Grimm, however, but my purchases of MTiO would always be dependent on either who he was teamed up with or who he was fighting. As a result, I have no memory of buying this one, though it’s possible…if I’d looked at the creator credits and seen that Steve Gerber wrote and Gil Kane drew the story…I might have bought it anyway. Don’t remember.
Every comics company has a Superman clone. Marvel has Wundarr and later, Hyperion, then there’s Homelander, Omni-Man, Superior…and the list goes on. Sometimes they’re done well and sometimes they’re not. Wundarr is a huge NOT. While the idea of a Superman who never got let out of his rocket until adulthood is interesting, Gerber never really did anything with it and the character was basically wasted every time he was used. It’s a shame because some interesting things could have been done with the whole “babe in the woods” aspect of Wundarr’s personality. Did anyone ever explore that with the character? I have no idea.
Anyway, as you said, Alan, the story is unbalanced, having taken too long to set up and leaving not enough time to resolve. A shame, because Kane’s pencils are gorgeous, as usual, and deserve a better story than what they got here. Also, I can’t believe Namor and Namorita just dumped Wundarr on Ben and took off (well, I can believe Namor did that, but Nita should have more compassion). Surely, there were easier ways to get Reed to make Wundarr a new costume.
This was a bland story, full of bland characters, surrounded by great art. The Thing deserved better. Not Namor, though. Namor’s just an asshole.
I didn’t buy my first Marvel 2 in 1 until another 9 months after this one when I decided to add all the Marvel superhero titles to must buy list in addition to my beloved DCs. So I wont comment more about this issue other than agreeing with others that the Kane art is gorgeous.
I want to echo you and add my condolences to Mike Voile’s family and friends. I first heard about his site through an article in the British magazine SFX which covers all things science fiction and fantasy in all media(comics, books, TV, film, games etc, etc). It mentioned what a great resource it was for comic lovers and once I had found it I spent hours on it looking through different publishers, different series and generally reminiscing. Like you Alan, it was using the site at I worked out that the first comic I (or maybe it was my older brothers) had bought was Superboy #128, cover dated April 1966. I still have it in my collection. Also, like you his site is my constant companion, as I’ve mentioned before I like to look ahead to the coming month of 50 year old comics and try to guess which of those you will be posting about in the upcoming weeks. It is one of the three sites that I have permanently open on my iPad (for the record, the other two are yours and Ross Pearsall’s Brave and Bold Lost blogspot).
Rest in peace Mike, and know that what you have produced has touched many, many lives.
Mike’s site showed me I bought my first comic (JLA 30) when I was six, not five as I’d misremembered it.
Kane & Sinnott were a good art team, not unlike Kane & Anderson or Kane & Wood. Kane was still in his “looking up characters’ noses” period, but Sinnott de-emphasised it.
I think Everett had “aged up” Namorita a bit as he had her in college when she lived with Betty Dean in Sub-Mariner #57.
I thought Gerber handled The Thing effectively. Not too much, just a reminder of what Ben lives with everyday,
Gerber was not a great Namor writter, though. Everett did it well, but he created him. Lee & Thomas did well with it, writting him like a questing hero from the pulps, but that did not come naturally for Conway or Gerber. Marv Wolfman was better in the last couple of issues of Sub_Mariner, but he sort of followed Lee & Thomas. John Byrne was interesting but a bit crazy, as he often is.
One of Kane’s sons was named “Scott.” I wonder if that is where the name on the marque came from?
Wundarr was a clever idea that just died out. When this hit the stands, it looked promising but went no where. I really liked Steve Gerber; a very clever wrtiter (whose ideas did not always pay off).
That’s a good point about Nita having been in college back in Sub-Mariner #57, John. I guess she was never intended to be quite as young as she originally looked!
In researching everything having to do with Amazing Spider-Man #121, I know Gerry Conway once said that Gil Kane had issues with pacing a story. I never really picked up on this before, but then I never really looked that hard.
I’ve grown much more aware of that when I read Marvel Method stories. Don Heck had major problems with it. Gene Colan has some on Iron Man. John Romita on Spider-Man always feels like he’s got a firm handle on the plotting.
That is an interesting question as to Gil Kane.
By 1973, Kane was Marvel’s chief cover artist. He had just done (and financed) His Name Is Svage . . . which was NOT a major success. He had a financial set back,
He probably made about as much penciling (and often inking) 20 or so covers per month as he woud have made doing a 20 page comic every month,
Additionally, he apparently complained (particularly about Roy Thomas) that writers wanting him to do very, possibly excessively, detailed work
It did not seem like Gil Kane wanted to get put on a book long term. He did, was it 4 issues? of Spider.Man after Romita l;eft He did two issues of MTIO and a Jungle Action and MTU about once a Quarter when the Torch had it. It wasn’t the output he had in the 1960s, where he had GL eight times a year and The Atom six times, with the odd Batman and something for Jack Schiff, Marvel or Tower.
Kane also was doing more of his own writing than, as with some of his Tower stuff,, His Name Is Savage (Dialogue by Archie Goodwin, though) or Blackmark. Kane did a bit of the conceptual stuff, going back to The Atom, where he took Quality’s Dollman and the last major Rex the Womder Dog story (set on a subatomic world by John Broome) to replace his Rex and Johnny Thunder pages when those books got cancelled in 1960 and ’61.
Kane was neither lazy or untalented, but his financial issues may have been begining to tell in 1972-’74 . . . .
John Minehan, is that you? Not sure what happened with your byline there…
I’m not either . . . .
Gil Kane had alimony to pay to at least one ex-wife as well as supporting his current one at the time. This is presently true of Romita Jr. as well. Neither seemed to consider a pre-nup agreement. Divorce is an expensive and painful predicament. While I have dodged that bullet, I have close friends who have not. Neither party comes out the “winner.” Sad business all around.
God bless the marriages that truly last.
Back in those days, prenups weren’t something most regular people (as opposed to rich ones) worried about
Commercial artists probably made what seemed like decent money in the 1960s and 1970s (even people doing comics) BUT they were independant contractors. They did not get benefits, if they got sick or injured and could not work—they did not get paid.
In Kane;s autobiographical note in one of the first Arom issues of Showcase, he made reference to a “rather hefty mortgage”
Kane (like Kirby, Lee, Broome, Kubert, Toth and some others) was a Vet and probably had a VA Loan at decent terms, but not an easy life.
For Kane, the whole His Name Isw Savage debackle probably did not help.
Thanks to iffy distribution (or bad timing in my shopping) I didn’t latch onto this title till #3, so it’s been interesting to see what came before it. Some observations…
“Scott” as name-dropped on the “Five Fingers of Doom” marquee, is presumably a nod to Kane’s son Scott, and the panel depicting Ben’s walking along the street also references Elaine and Eric, no doubt after his second wife and stepson (thanks to Wikipedia for all this). In a panel not shown there’s a marquee bearing the legend “Roy Drops Out” (rated three stars)…whether this is a nod to Editor and occasional collaborator Roy Thomas is anyone’s guess.
Couple of other things that struck me – MTIO was hardly a premier title, but Joe Sinnott (who I’d have thought was one of Marvel’s premier inkers) was doing the inks. Given the Fantastic Four’s position in Marvel’s pantheon at the time, I wonder whether Sinnott was given the job in order to keep the Thing “on model” as it were, while the title was establishing itself.
Then there’s Wundarr- throughout #2, apart from the Dakkamites, no-one knows who he is by name. Even he doesn’t know it. In the New York battle, there’s no indication that the Daakkamites speak English, and they mention his name only once, with no guarantee that Namorita was within earshot when they did so…and yet, by #4, it seems his name is known by one and all; in fact Nita, who hasn’t seen him since the battle, races up to him in #4 and addresses him by name (which she flew off without disclosing to anyone else at the end of #2…even if she did know).
I know, I know, I’m making mountains out of molehills here, but blogs like this are for such nanoscopic nitpicking, aren’t they?
PS I presume no-one’s mentioned the unsubtle plug for FOOM on the Times Square billboard since we all saw it, right?
I was tracking the FOOM plugs in all the Marvel comics I blogged about for a while there, Baden, but I got tired. 🙂
Given the fact that it was a Thing series and that the original creative team was announced as Wein, Starlin and (if I remember) Cockrum in CPT Marvel # 26. I wonder if Marvel did not see this as potential big hit? Hence, Sinnott when Cockrum went (briefly) back to being exclusive with DC in late 1972?
Thanks for showing the cover for #67 of Subby’s comic — now I know where the 1975 Marvel Topps sticker got the design for Namor’s “Don’t Pollute My Waters” sticker! https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?TID=31430396
There are hardly any artists I liked more than Kane in comics, but late in the ’60s he started writing some books for DC that usually featured enormous splash pages and not a lot of room for story. If Gerber was a loose hand with his page directions, it would explain the gorgeous fights and the terrible lack of room for the story. Still, sticking Ben with an unconscious super moron in the last panel is about as Thing a thing as ever happened to Thing. Which is one of the reasons why we love le grande orange.
When I logged onto Mike’s Amazing World website that first morning, I did quite the double-take upon seeing that stark image with its even starker message about Mike’s death. Echoing your sentiments, Alan, it’s impossible to understate what a great legacy Mike has left. His database has been an invaluable source of information about individual comics as well as continuity. The Newsstand has been essential to me in synchronizing issues across titles, especially in Silver Age Marvel with all of those monthly issues. The Fanboy articles were fabulous in pinpointing the dividing line in DC between the Earth-2 and Earth-1 continuities of characters who never stopped publication (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Green Arrow), as well as the seeming anomalies (Zatara, Sargon, Wildcat, Vigilante, Manhunter, Air Wave et al). Mike, your phenomenal efforts at cataloguing comic books into such an easily accessible database will always be greatly appreciated.
And back when he started there was absolutely nothing even remotely comparable out there. No wikis, no Grand Comics Database — it was mind-blowing to find Mike’s place.