Amazing Fantasy Omnibus

The comics collected in this omnibus edition cover a Marvel title that was in flux for most of its short life: from Amazing Adventures to Amazing Adult Fantasy, to simply Amazing Fantasy (the first issue of which contained the debut of Spider-Man). The numbering remained constant though, so Spidey’s first appearance was in Amazing Fantasy #15, even though that was the first in the serie to be so titled.

Anyway, Marvel was spinning its wheels a bit here trying to find its core programming, not yet having landed on superhero fare as its bread and butter. Titles like Fantastic Four and The Hulk were just starting at the same time and in the recurring adventures of Doctor Droom in Amazing Adventures we can see an obvious precursor to Doctor Strange. Instead of superheroes, Amazing Adventures was mainly about monsters, while Amazing Adult Fantasy (“The magazine that respects your intelligence!”) was more like a comic version of The Twilight Zone.

It’s always nice to read an honest critical introduction. In his intro to the Amazing Adventures section Stephen Bissette makes the point that, well, these weren’t great comics. Nowhere close to being up to the level of EC ten years earlier (admittedly pre-Code), they’re only juvenile and silly, culminating in the giant Ssergo being yoinked from the surface of the Earth by a “large sky-hook from Jupiter.” That wouldn’t have impressed six-year-old me.

“Truth be told,” Bissette admits, “what Amazing Adventures became remains far more interesting than what it was.” And what it most immediately became was Amazing Adult Fantasy. It was an unfortunate title even when it debuted in 1961. As Stan Lee tried to explain in a mailbag, “the only reason we put the word ADULT on the cover, is to distinguish our carefully-edited, and literately-written mag from the usual crop of comics which seem to be slanted for the average 6 year old with a 3 year old mentality! Anybody with brains enough to appreciate AMAZING ADULT FANTASY is our type of reader.” Remember, this is the magazine that respects your intelligence! And to their credit, the short stories in AAF (mostly written by Stan Lee’s brother Larry) are all pretty interesting in the Twilight Zone style I mentioned, with lots of last-panel plot twists. “The Terror of Tim Boo Ba!” which graces the cover of issue #9 as well as this omnibus edition is a great example. And there are even a couple of stories that riff on the classic Twilight Zone “To Serve Man” episode. But whether I’d call this stuff brainy is another question. The stories rely pretty heavily on simplistic caricatures, like the guy who builds a fallout shelter in his backyard and says things like this as he locks himself away:

“Goodbye, you poor fools! I don’t care what happens to all of you! But I shall live safely in my shelter and laugh at you when the bombs fall! Nothing can harm me here – nothing! Not even a direct hit by a nuclear bomb! I’ve enough provisions and oxygen to last five years! No matter what happens to the others, I shall survive! And if any of them try to get in to share my safety with me, I’ll laugh at them! I paid for this shelter . . . it is mine alone! . . . Nothing can harm me! No one can hurt me! Ha ha ha . . . let the rest of mankind perish! Who cares?!! I’ll be the last man alive on Earth!”

I don’t have to tell you that things don’t work out quite as he expected.

Still, as corny as it all is these stories are a lot of fun, and Steve Ditko’s art gives them an extra jolt. There’s a thing throughout of placing all-red figures against all-yellow backgrounds that has an electric effect. It’s all about heightening the impact, the visual correlative of the all-caps, all-exclamation mark speech bubbles that were the fashion at the time. I mean, when you have a character introduce himself matter-of-factly by saying “My name is Henry Burke! I’m a scientist!” then you know there’s nothing that isn’t going to feel like it’s being yelled or screamed in your face.

But in our own age of eye-ball grabbing headlines and click-bait thumbnails I think we have to smile. You do what you have to do to get attention in the media economy, and if that means always being dialed up to 11 then so be it.

Graphicalex