Larry Lieber

This collection is a bit of a mixed bag.

It starts with two story arcs from the Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain Weekly anthology title which were ok, but nothing special.

Then has a fantastic two-part Marvel Team-Up story by Chris Claremont and John Byrne where Captain Britain actually teams up with Spider-Man (as opposed to just sharing title duties on a book) and they face off against Arcade in his first appearance ever. It's amazing seeing how many of the classic Arcade story beats and iconic character points are present right from this first story.

Then, finally, we move to Hulk Comic (another anthology title) and its Black Knight stories because, after the cancellation of Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain Weekly, CB was not seen as a viable or interesting character. But editor Dez Skin, writer Steve Parkhouse and artists Paul Neary and John Stokes wanted to give CB another shot so reintroduced him as a side character in the Black Knight series. They grounded the character further into Arthurian legend and successfully set him up for the upcoming seminal run by Alan Moore and Alan Davis and the introduction of the Marvel-616 designation for the main Marvel universe as part of the Jasper Warp storyline (coming up in volume 4).

Overall, worth the read for the Arcade story in the middle and the Captain Britain backstory which helps setup the best X-book ever: Excalibur!… (more)

Many superheroes exhibit powers that defy easy logic, chosen instead for their look on the 4-color page or for the concept. Ant-Man is one of those. Not only does Henry Pym figure out a way to miniaturize himself, but he also can communicate with insects and can withstand behind shot from a catapult-like device to nearly any part of the city (the G-forces must be tremendous) where he lands on a hill of ants that have congregated on the exact spot he was aiming for. When Lewis Carroll asked us to believe several impossible things before breakfast, Stan Lee wants us to accept even more before lunch and dinner.

The addition of the Wasp to the stories helped, mainly to give Pym someone to talk to because Lee’s characterizations of women in the 1960s had more issues than the number of comics he was publishing at the time. For every case where the super-heroine came through with an independent attack and saves the day there’s a dozen instances of the same heroine decrying her lack of make-up, her fashion, or expressing her infatuation for some male. Lee also loved to put those women in Damsels in Distress roles, often forgetting they were supposed to be heroic as much as the men. (He did get better, and comics in general would improve upon this in later decades).

And, as much as Ant-Man’s powers are hard to believe, the villains here are almost equally outrageous, including, for example, the Human Top, who spins his way into banks, etc., to complete his burglaries.
Better things are to come with these characters, especially the reboot that occurred when Ant-Man became a Marvel Universe movie franchise. Reading these early stories is only for the historians and those interested in the development of the characters.… (more)

Like the other early iterations of the now classic Marvel superheroes, this volume of Thor’s early adventures is a mixed bag. For the most part, the stories rely on the conflict between Thor and his evil half-brother, Loki, who, while imprisoned in Asgard, has the ability to cause problems with his magic. Some of these stories are inspired; others, like the one where Thor gets knocked in the head in a certain spot that turns him evil, are not. The soap opera aspect that Stan Lee added to the genre is here in the unrequited love that Thor and his alter ego, Dr. Don Blake, have for his nurse, Jane Foster. Because Odin has ordered Thor never to reveal his true identity to a mortal, Thor/Blake cannot tell Foster his secret, and she, like so many others before her (I’m looking at you, Lois Lane), can’t figure out the tie between Blake and Thor. Other than Loki, the villains here are mostly forgettable.… (more)