The first hints of Marvel Comics’ eventual ascendency in American popular culture came in June 1967 and July 1968.
A scant half-dozen years after the first appearance of the Fantastic Four, articles about Marvel were already popping up in national magazines and Spider-Man and FF cartoons were already airing on Saturday mornings.
Then one day, at the local newsstand, I was amazed to find a paperback novel featuring the Avengers.
Tellingly, the first two novels about Marvel superheroes spotlighted not Spidey or the FF, but Captain America. Why? My guess is that Cap was the Marvel superhero that readers who were adults in the late 1960s would have been most likely to remember from their childhoods.
I enjoyed both of those first Marvel Comics paperback novels, noting that their design clearly owed more than a little to the then-popular Bantam Doc Savage paperback reprint series.
Reportedly Stan Lee objected to the choice of veteran comics writer Otto Binder to pen the Avengers novel. But Binder went over Lee’s head to the publisher to land the job. That may explain the fact that Lee did next to nothing to promote the paperbacks in the comic books, and therefore my surprise at the newsstand.
The super villain in the Avengers novel, Karzz, is obviously a retooled version of the Kang the Conqueror, the archenemy first encountered by the comic-book team in September 1964. Both were time travelers with personal force fields and a vast array of futuristic weapons. Why Binder didn’t simply just use Kang in his novel, I don’t know.
“ ‘Finish them off, Goliath,’ ordered Karzz. ‘Pick up that iron club and see that nothing recognizable remains of them. Go… do as I say.’ But Goliath was hesitating, a bewildered look on his face, like that of a man coming out of a dream. ‘But they… my friends,’ he said brokenly. ‘Won’t… can’t harm them.’
“The Wasp helplessly watched Karzz shine his headband device at Goliath, who again subsided into a mindless slave with slack jaws and transfixed stare. In a trance the mighty man picked up a huge spiked iron club that lay ready and strode ponderously toward the nearest limp Avenger.”
Another oddity is that although Iron Man is a main character in the Avengers novel, he is not featured in the cover painting. Thanks to the popularity of the Robert Downey Jr. movies, that’s something that would never happen today.
The Captain America novel, written by Ted White in an Ian Fleming-influenced style, was markedly better.
“Steve Rogers – Captain America – was a man out of his own time. Some times the memories would come – as they had earlier this day when there were no diversions and no escapes left – but they were painful memories, and not at all the memories of normal men.
“Captain America was not, in any sense of the word, a normal man.”
Those two paperbacks were probably only the fourth and fifth novels to feature comic book superheroes, after the Superman hardcover based on the 1940s radio show and two Batman paperbacks inspired by the 1960s TV show.
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