Dr. Reed Richards and Ben Grimm, along with Sue and Johnny Storm, steal a rocket and are bombarded by cosmic rays! Dr. Bruce Banner is caught in a gamma bomb explosion while saving the life of teenage Rick Jones! High School student Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider! Dr. Donald Blake finds a magical hammer in a cave in Norway! Dr. Henry Pym, um, figures out how to shrink himself to the size of an ant! It's Marvel New York in the Sixties and superheroes are popping out of the woodwork! But they're nothing like what had come before. It's a New York of paranoia, Red Scares, alien invasions, and the superheroes are as monstrous as the supervillains they fight!
Paul Brian McCoy returns to the Sensational Sixties to read and react to the creation of the Marvel Comics Superhero Universe, month by month, issue by issue! Sometimes irreverent, sometimes way-too-serious, he looks on in wonder at one of the greatest feats of world-building in Pop Culture, sharing insights and laughs along with heaps of praise and sprinkles of embarrassment (yes, Ant-Man, I'm looking at you).
Originally published as a series of columns on www.comicsbulletin.com, Mondo Marvel is a no-holds barred look back at what worked and what didn't in that creative explosion engineered by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko that launched the Marvel Superhero Universe. Volume One covers comics from Fantastic Four #1 through everything published with cover date December 1962. Two more volumes are already underway covering 1963 and 1964, with more coming after that!
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