1. The women of early MARVEL: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby seemed to have a real distaste for having women engage in actual fighting, hence, their preference for female superheroes with powers that enabled them to engage the enemy at a distance: Sue Storm (invisibility and force fields), Marvel Girl (telekinesis), Scarlet Witch (casting hexes), Medusa (hair that does the fighting), Crystal (elemental control), etc.
2. Doom's tv monitor: Love how even a super-genius can only get black and white reception in the early 60s.
3. The Evolution of Doom:Interesting to see how unimpressive Doom's attire is at this stage. The shift to the cape in his next appearance was a vast improvement.
Certainly. Of course, it wasn't as if Lee and Kirby were denying the readers what they wanted with the non-physical heroines. Most of the audience of the time would find the idea of women punching it out with villains unpleasant and wrong... this has changed over the decades. Today, it's normal in TV and movies to see a woman tackle a man much bigger and stronger and beat him without taking any damage herself, but in 1962 this would seem hard to believe. I think Modesty Blaise and Cathy Gale were among the first major characters to show this; in comics, Black Canary and Harvey's Black Cat fought with men successfully, using jiu-jitsu and judo, but they were relatively minor characters
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I wonder if Silver Age Marvel Comics' greater emphasis on physical melee might been one manifestation of their comparative readiness to push the Code envelope? Consider: Captain America, the Hulk, and the Thing can be emulated a lot more completely in backyard make-believe (with the possibility of someone's getting hurt thereby) than the likes of Lightning Lad and Cosmic Boy.
I might be giving one artist too much credit, but it seems like it was Jack Kirby's emphasis on fistfights that galvanized Marvel action scenes from the start. This spread to DC as they tried to match Marvel's increasing popularity. The Thing, the Hulk, Sub-Mariner, Captain America... these characters did not defeat their foes with an energy construct or a complicated manuever at super-speed, they gave them knuckles to the face.
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1. The women of early MARVEL: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby seemed to have a real distaste for having women engage in actual fighting, hence, their preference for female superheroes with powers that enabled them to engage the enemy at a distance: Sue Storm (invisibility and force fields), Marvel Girl (telekinesis), Scarlet Witch (casting hexes), Medusa (hair that does the fighting), Crystal (elemental control), etc.
2. Doom's tv monitor: Love how even a super-genius can only get black and white reception in the early 60s.
3. The Evolution of Doom:Interesting to see how unimpressive Doom's attire is at this stage. The shift to the cape in his next appearance was a vast improvement.
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Even as a kid that sort of thing bugged me.
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