Where Monsters Dwell #20: Klagg! Whirlwind of Destruction in the Name of Peace

I started these Where Monsters Dwell posts on a lark. I grabbed a handful of comics from out of a box in the closet where I keep an old comic collection to see how well aged and yellowing newsprint that comics used to be printed on scanned. The title I happened to grab was Where Monsters Dwell, a Bronze Age reprint series of Silver Age Marvel science fiction and horror primarily featuring the work of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby from the early 1960s.

I began with Where Monster Dwell #21 -- the issue that reprinted from Strange Tales #89 (October 1961) Marvel's most famous pre-superhero Silver Age monster, Fin Fang Foom! -- and worked my way up to Where Monsters Dwell #29. I took a break last weekend because I didn't have Where Monsters Dwell #30 and was unable to locate it online at Atomic Avenue. I was able to purchase several issues that preceded Where Monsters Dwell #21. So let's start working backwards from #21.

Where Monsters Dwell #20 (March 1973) is special because it features original cover art from the superhistoric Jim Starlin: rejuvenator of Captain Marvel and Adam Warlock; creator of Thanos, Drax the Destroyer and Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu:

Starlin took some liberties. The cover depicts a monstrous robot named Klagg delivering a beat-down on some GIs at the behest of an evil alien. In the Lee-Kirby story -- "Klagg! His Mission: Destroy Mankind!" originally appearing in Tales of Suspense #21 (September 1961) -- Klagg is the egg-headed alien who travels in a high-tech, clean-powered, wind-generated, robot-looking spaceship. Starlin for purposes of a suitably alluring Bronze Age cover turns the spaceship into a killer robot named Klagg!

"Klagg! His Mission: Destroy Mankind!" is another Lee-Kirby Cold War yarn. A highly-evolved alien lost in space lands on earth to get his bearings. Immediately there is competition among adversarial nations to acquire the amazing technology that powers Klagg's spaceship. When Klagg discovers that the people of Earth still believe in war he sets out to annihilate the planet so its bellicose contamination can't spread to the rest of the galaxy. A wealthy ne'er-do-well and his girlfriend elicit a reconciliation of Cold War foes by pretending to have stolen the blueprints of Klagg's futuristic, powerful spaceship and the secret to its propulsion. The combined military might of all nations face Klagg in a united naval force. Klagg is impressed by humanity's ability to cooperate and exits Earth.

Most of these Silver Age Lee-Kirby Cold War stories are the same. An alien, a monster of some sort, arrives from outer space and threatens the good, law-abiding folk with destruction. Somehow, like the loafing one-percenter in "Klagg!" who miraculously discovers his own maturity and saves the day, doom is averted in the last few panels.

People in the early 1960s were terrified that the Cold War was going to turn hot and incinerate the planet. Then you had the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 followed by the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty a year later and there was a bit of a thaw.

When you have that kind of tension, an inside and an outside are clear. Aliens -- outsiders -- are bad. Social cohesion is a must. Cultural conservatives would love to return to the days of the Cold War when it was widely understood who was on the inside and who -- "subversives" -- needed to be kept out. But those days aren't coming back. Bush tried following 9/11. "You're either with us or against us." But the enemy this time, Al Qaeda, not only doesn't stack up to the Soviet Union, it is actively maintained by our historic ally and owner of the largest petroleum reserves on the planet, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless the national security state has grown and without a political renaissance of huge scale will continue to grow out of all proportion.

We need Klagg and his wind-powered spaceship to pay us a visit.

Where Monsters Dwell #25: The Ruler of the Earth!

Where Monsters Dwell #25, with an issue date of November 1973, reprints the cover story, "The Ruler of the Earth!," from Journey Into Mystery #81 (June 1962). To give you an idea where that falls in Marvel's publication history, in this month when Thor: The Dark World is set to earn over a $100 million in movie theaters, The Mighty Thor would debut two months later in Journey Into Mystery #83.

"The Ruler of the Earth!" is a classic Silver Age Lee-Kirby tale. Mankind, convinced that it is headed for destruction due to the escalating Cold War, decides to create a massive supercomputer to make all decisions. The supercomputer known by the acronym R.O.E. (Ruler of the Earth) has built into its underlying code that it is inferior to humans; hence, a fail-safe designed to prevent R.O.E. from wreaking havoc on the human race with its omniscient powers. Hydra, the nefarious secret organization bent on world domination, seeks to corrupt R.O.E. by injecting "greed, deceit and dishonesty!!" via "tubes" into its operating system. Stan Lee, in a nice turnabout, has R.O.E. foil the plot by detaching the corrupting tubes while saying the following words:

They attempted to corrupt me by linking these tubes to my power plant!

But they were fools! The qualities of greed, deceit, and lust for power can never affect ROE!

For I am incapable of any wrong doing! 

It is only man who can be evil!

And I am inferior to man, for I am only . . .

. . . a mere machine . . . 

The idea that the Cold War was fast headed toward a genocidal conflict was the prevailing wisdom at the time. The Cuban Missile Crisis was only a half-year away when "The Ruler of the Earth!" first arrived at drug stores and candy counters. In an interview last week Oliver Stone said that the generals of the Joint Chiefs were convinced that the U.S. would be at war with the Soviets by 1970. They were ready to go hot and heavy on Cuba because they felt they had a nuclear advantage that could take out Russia with a first strike. Thankfully, Kennedy had the stones to stand up to his Joint Chiefs.

Note how Hydra is represented as Russian. In one panel there is even a guy in Soviet military garb. Now, at least in Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates, Hydra is represented as Tea Party militia types.

Finally, "The Ruler of the Earth!" turns out to be not too far off the mark. With IT ruling the roost, server farms occupying a critical place in our global capitalist economy and the National Security Agency controlling the equivalent of the R.O.E. supercomputer, we should chalk another one up to the prescience of Lee-Kirby, with the caveat that the present day is far more dystopian than they were allowed to reveal in their comic books.