Where Monsters Dwell #12

As the media peddles furiously to convince us that Russia has plans to make us a nation of Manchurian Candidates, it is helpful to consider a simpler time, the first Cold War.

By happenstance -- to see how old newsprint paper that the interior pages of comic books were printed on scanned, I reached into my closet and arbitrarily grabbed a handful of comics -- I started working my way through old issues of Where Monsters Dwell.

Where Monsters Dwell was a Marvel title from the dawn of the Bronze Age of Comic Books (1970 to the mid-1980s) that reprinted Silver Age (1955 to 1970) science fiction and horror. While not having a quote from Stan Lee or Roy Thomas at hand to explain why Marvel did this, my guess is that the company was expanding and it had a lot of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko material from the period directly preceding its blastoff as a superhero factory of the 1960s. So why not introduce it to a new generation of readers (like me) who missed it the first go-round a decade earlier?

What my intermittent study of Where Monsters Dwell has revealed is that Marvel's Silver Age monster stories were about the Cold War. The space aliens and evil robots from another world like Orogo! were stand-ins for the specter of nuclear annihilation by the Soviet Union. The usual story has the alien appear, promise global domination, crush some buildings before it is defeated by the pluck and ingenuity of a boy; in Orogo's case, a blind old man.

"Orogo! The Nightmare from Outer Space!," reprinted in Where Monsters Dwell #12 (November 1971), was originally published in Journey into Mystery #57 with a cover date of March 1960, a little more than a year before the Bay of Pigs invasion. Stan Lee penned the story and Don Heck supplied the art. If you want to get the flavor of the guileless rootedness and materially secure America of the 1960s, look at Don Heck's work.

 

If you're unconvinced that these stories of aliens and robots are metaphors for the Cold War, "The Pretender!" should change your mind. Originally appearing in Tales to Astonish #31 (May 1962), "The Pretender!," a filler story penciled by Paul Reinman, posits that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev is in fact an alien space invader. (The story, whose author is not credited, was probably written after the alleged "shoe-banging incident" at the United Nations in the fall of 1960.)

Marvel became the top comic-book publisher in the 1960s by taking these Silver Age monsters and through a neat Kirby-Lee alchemy making them heroes. What are the Fantastic Four if not a exemplary bourgeois family of space monsters returned to Earth? What is Spider-Man if not a teenage laboratory abomination? We're not talking about Barry Allen here. We're talking about characters who seemed much more real than Batman and Superman. How Lee, Kirby and Ditko did this, I'm saying, is by taking all that ambient fear of the Cold War and putting it inside their heroes. 

The monsters became the heroes, but the monsters were merely stand-ins for the Cold War Soviet enemy. In other words, the whole Marvel superhero revolution of the 1960s was based on the conversion of the fear of an existential foe into a new more human heroism.

It's no wonder now that Marvel is experiencing trouble it has tried to go back to the Monsters Unleashed formula. The political parties in the United States are attempting the same sort of reboot with Cold War 2.0. 

But that era of Silver Age social conformity can't be Jiffy-Popped from on high. That cohesion is an organic thing. And the Marvel heroes of the 1960s played a big part in its undoing.

Now in the "Modern Age" Hollywood is dependent on Postmodern comic-book heroes. The lines are crossed. The cookies have crumbled. The New Cold War won't boot. It might work for partisan New Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans, but a cultural revolution it is not.

Uncanny Avengers #18.NOW + Uncanny Avengers #20

One thing capitalism has not been able to stifle over the last fifty years is a movement towards gender equality.

While war ravages seemingly every part of the planet (there are more displaced persons since any time going back to WWII) and wealth is concentrated more and more in the hands of a very few (the 1% -- but really, the top tenth of the 1%), and while racism still roils the body politic and corruption in both big business and government remains an endemic part of society, women have made colossal strides in my lifetime.

Of course, debilitating sexism still exists. It is still definitely a man's world. And what will become of women if Wahhabism as practiced by Islamic State and Boko Haram continues to spread?

Women only earn 78 cents on the dollar to men in the United States today. But in business, politics, and the arts, women do everything -- occupy the same commanding heights -- that men do, just not in numbers as robust.

To see this transformation in the role of women over the last fifty years all one need do is look at the Marvel character the Wasp, Janet van Dyne. Introduced in Tales to Astonish #44 (June 1963) as a romantic interest of and sidekick to Henry Pym's Ant-Man, Janet van Dyne is basically eye candy in a pill box hat.

The Wasp, the original female Avenger, I always thought of as a brunette version of Sue Storm, a.k.a., Invisible Girl; both, as depicted by Jack Kirby and Don Heck, are fine pieces of Park Avenue trim whose superhero identities -- insect smallness and invisibility -- accentuate patriarchal stereotypes of women as insignificant, passive and powerless, a conceptualization of the feminine that would make any misogynist happy. In the superhero yarns from the early 1960s, if either Janet or Sue were to save the day in the last panels of the comic book it is usually owing to the fact of being overlooked by the power-gorged super-villain. Stan Lee's moral might be summarized as something like, "See, now and then it comes in handy to be diminutive and invisible."

But that is not the Janet van Dyne of today. I have been spending the last few weekends dipping into accumulated issues of Rick Remender's Uncanny Avengers. And what struck me, besides Daniel Acuña's amazing art, is how forceful, strong, physical, alive the Wasp is. Is there a term for feminine virility? "Fertility" doesn't really do it since fertility connotes a certain passivity, a receptacle for insemination.

Whatever female virility is, Remender and Acuña bring it to life with Janet van Dyne in the pages of Uncanny Avengers #18.NOW and Uncanny Avengers #20. In Uncanny Avengers #18.NOW the Wasp takes out both the Blob and Magneto; in Uncanny Avengers #20, she delivers a bloody-mouth beat down to Kang the Conqueror.

Below you will find more scans than usual. Daniel Acuña's illustration of a free-falling fight on Planet X between Blob, Havoc, Wasp and Magneto is so compelling I couldn't resist. And Janet van Dyne's assault on Kang from Uncanny Avengers #20 cannot be omitted.

Where Monsters Dwell #29: Ozamm the Terrible

Where Monsters Dwell #29 reprints "Ozamm the Terrible," a filler story from Tales to Astonish #39. Tales to Astonish #39 featured Ant-Man. So this is the first one of these Silver Age monster reprints that I've been working through in Where Monsters Dwell that originally appeared alongside Marvel's new line of superheroes.

Where Monsters Dwell #29, with a publication date of July 1974, features new cover art by the great Larry Lieber, Stan Lee's little brother, famous for penciling the daily Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic strip. Lieber also scripted "Ozamm the Terrible," which had a publication date of January 1963. Stan Lee provided the plot; Don Heck, the art.

"Ozamm the Terrible" tells the story of a nefarious alien, Ozamm, with the head of a piranha and the body of a mountain gorilla, who comes to New York City to assert total domination over the dwellers of the metropolis. This is a standard storyline for Silver Age outer-space alien monsters. What is different is the backstory of machinist Joe Baxter. The tale begins with Joe being laid off due to automation at the factory where he works.

The last forty years of woe for the working class can be boiled down to its inability to share in the productivity gains made from the introduction of new technology. The promise of the 20th century -- i.e., the workerless factory -- was that the working class would share in these gains and be able to reduce the number of hours worked while maintaining the wages and benefits. In fact the opposite has occurred; people are working more for less. (For a study of how the idea of the workerless factory went from a utopian to a dystopian concept, see Jeremy Rifkin's excellent The End of Work, published in 1995.)

Jobs flow overseas because machines can be boxed up and shipped across the border; Detroit goes bankrupt; the mighty Boeing Machinists are in danger of losing their defined benefit pension plan. Who could have conceived of such things forty years ago?

Lee/Lieber end the story on a happy note. Joe Baxter saves the day by realizing that the source of Ozamm's power resides in electrical generation equipment in the alien's flying saucer; he is rewarded with his old job back by a newly appreciative boss, who says,

He is worth a hundred machines! Any human being is! Let's hope we've learned that lesson for good now!

Capitalism is not so ethical.

Where Monsters Dwell #28: Droom

Where Monsters Dwell #28 (May 1974) features a reprint from Tales to Astonish #9, "I Saw Droom the Living Lizard!" (May 1960). The story is by the great Stan Lee; the pencils, Don Heck.

Tales to Astonish started as a showcase for Stan Lee's science fiction before eventually becoming The Incredible Hulk in issue #102 (April 1968); in the interim it featured Ant-Man, Giant-Man, Hulk and Prince Namor the Submariner. Tales to Astonish was split between Hulk and the Submariner from August of 1965 until it became The Incredible Hulk. If you want to sample the vibe of American power at it's apex during LBJ's Great Society, check out the 1960s Tales to Astonish featuring Hulk and Namor. It is all there.

First, to return to the question of why Marvel would reprint Silver Age science fiction monster stories in a separate title during the iconoclastic Watergate-era Bronze Age, an answer can be found below in the character cameo trademark that appeared beneath the price, issue number and publication month. Where Monsters Dwell allowed Marvel to trademark the individual monsters that paved the way for the company's industry-leader status as a factory of iconoclastic superhero books.

For instance, "Droom," with its mix of serums and scientists and reptiles, prefigures in broad strokes the appearance of Spider-Man archenemy the Lizard three-years later in The Amazing Spider-Man #6; it tells the story of a scientist who wants to solve the problem of overpopulation and hunger by creating a growth serum for food. In the opening panels, the scientist successfully tests the serum on a tomato which balloons to the size of a cantaloupe; he then rushes over to show his friend, a museum curator who has just happened to have received a gift of a vicious lizard. While the scientist is demonstrating the growth serum to his museum pal, the lizard escapes its box and spills a tube of the growth serum on itself.

This weekend on the Counterpunch web site there is an excellent article, "The Real Cost of GM Animal Feed?" by Andrew Wasley, investigations editor for The Ecologist. If you ever wanted an accessible introduction to the issue of genetically-modified (GM) food, a.k.a., Frankenfoods, you can find it in this story. Wasley focuses on the findings of Danish pig farmer Ib Pedersen that GM animal feed and particularly the glyphosate herbicide -- originally developed and patented by Monsanto and is still marketed as Roundup -- associated with it cause birth defects and illness:

The farmer’s research, and outspoken stance, provoked a storm of controversy in Danish agricultural circles after the respected farming publication Effektivt Landbrug featured the story, interviewing Pedersen in detail and referring to the pig farmers’ suggestion that DDT and thalidomide – linked to deformities in up to 10,000 babies – could be regarded as trivial compared to the potential risks from GM and glyphosate. 

Critics accused him of scaremongering and slammed the findings as unscientific and “without merit” – pointing out that if the claims were true, thousands of other farmers using GM feed would be recording similar problems. 

Despite this, Pedersen’s work has prompted the Danish Pig Research Centre (VSP) to announce an in-depth study to test the effects of GM and non-GM soya on animal health. The findings of the research have yet to be published.

It is important to remember that the foremost genetic modification in most GM crops is a resistance to herbicides like glyphosate. The crops can be slathered with it and still survive unlike nearby weeds. The point that the Danish pig farmer Pedersen is making is that the GM feed retains some portion of that herbicide and it adversely impacts the health of his livestock.

While we can't pass any GM-labeling laws in this country thanks to that opulent spending on TV commercials by the likes of Monsanto and PepsiCo, in the UK they already have GM food labeling. But a loophole in the labeling law is animal feed. Meat sold does not require a label saying whether it was raised using GM or non-GM feed.

Another problem that Wasley points out is that non-GM feed is becoming increasingly difficult for farmers to acquire:

They say that although the availability of non GM feed is disputed (producers organisations in Brazil maintain there is an ample supply of conventionally grown soya but say poor infrastructure at ports has held some shipments up) some major feed supply companies are now only offering their customers GM options, or organic. 

“It’s a nightmare trying to source non GM feed,” a supermarket source said. “The reality is that trying to source it on the scale needed [by large retailers] is very difficult. The feed companies own the boats, the mills, they control the supply chain.” 

One UK feed merchant told The Ecologist that GM is now effectively being forced onto farmers: “As a farmer you are constantly under pressure, you are busy, you’ve got to be good at finance, a good production manager, so when someone offers [GM] feed that’s cheaper, it’s easy to say yes.” 

“Not having an option is not good. But when you’ve got an importer saying GM is fine and that he’s not going to bring in [non GM] a farmer is not likely to go out and source his own.”

The lizard Droom grows to such an enormous size -- and somehow becomes bipedal -- that he is impervious to shelling from tanks and it can swat fighter-bomber jets out of the sky before they drop their nuclear payload.

To stave off the impending destruction of population centers the armed forces launch plan 'X.' Solar-powered rockets are attached to Droom, blasting him into deep space where he spends tens of millions of years twirling in suspended animation:

. . . Until he finally came to rest on a large, primitive, water-oxygen world, a world where he would be the first of a new species -- where he would rule the planet, until the day his breed died out! A world which millions of years later would be known as . . . Earth!

In "I Saw Droom the Living Lizard!"Stan Lee is telling us that if from the present you think yourself far enough into the future you actually arrive at the past, a past where dinosaurs are revealed to be a product of Western science. That's chutzpah!