Curious Comic Character Curation

For Christmas, I got this wonderful comic poster that features a raft of classic character headshots wrapped around the words, "Make Mine Marvel." It's a nice commemoration of both our trip to the Marvel Heroes exhibit back in November and Marvel's 80th anniversary, which it calls out via a logo in the corner. I finally picked up a frame for it today and hung it in the basement, as it is not really a "main floor" sort of deal.

Glory, the one who had given me the poster looked at it with me and tried her hand at identifying the characters. She did pretty well for someone whose primary exposure has been through movies and television rather than comics, with a number of partial hits - her first two guesses were "Spider-Lady" and "Power Fist" for Spider-Woman and Iron Fist.

With the exception of Medusa on row two, she nailed the next two rows, fanned on Doctor Strange, and then struggled with a bunch of the Inhumans. As I went through it with her, I realized there were some other fairly deep Doctor Strange cuts in this poster: Clea, his paramour and one-time wife; Baron Mordo, his arch-nemesis; the Ancient One, his teacher and the Dread Dormammu, one of his most powerful villains (as seen in the 2016 movie).

Valkyrie on row seven felt like an odd inclusion, as did Maximus the Mad, another Inhuman, on the bottom row next to Nova, the Human Rocket. And who was the redhead three heads to the right of Maximus? If it is supposed to be Crystal (yet another Inhuman), where's the signature black stripe running across her hair?

By this point, however, I was far less concerned about the inclusions than I was about two notable exclusions.

The first was the conspicuous absence of even a single member of the Fantastic Four. In addition to being Marvel's First Family, the debut issue of their comic in 1962 effectively created the Marvel universe!

The Inhumans were introduced in the pages of FF in 1965, and yet eight of them make it onto the poster and not The Thing? No Human Torch? How bizarre!

Secondly, the poster is celebrating 80 years of Marvel Comics, which really only works if you count books published by Timely and Atlas, Martin Goodman's companies in the 40s and 50s that eventually evolved into Marvel. And yet, the sole character from this period on the poster is Captain America. (You could technically say that another Golden Age character is present in a technical sense, but I don't think it's an intentional choice - more to follow)

The two that would have made the most sense would have been Namor, the Sub-Mariner, and the original Human Torch. Rivals in the 1940s who eventually teamed up against the Nazi menace, both characters reappeared in (you guessed it) the Fantastic Four.

60 pages for ten cents? (Swoon)

The original Human Torch was an android who could wreath himself in flames, whereas his namesake in the FF was a teenaged rocket crewman exposed to cosmic radiation that gave him the same power set. He is also the one who reintroduced Namor to Silver age audiences in the fourth issue of Fantastic Four, burning away the beard of a homeless amnesiac in New York's Bowery to reveal the half-human/half-merman ruler of Atlantis.

The technical inclusion I mentioned has more to do with the waste not/want not nature of comics continuity: Android character The Vision (row 6, far left) was initially created by the villain Ultron out of the android body of the WWI Human Torch.

And, to be fair, this Vision was based on another Golden Age character of the same name with a virtually identical look, so perhaps I do need to give credit for both.

But as cool as it is, this poster does need some more Fantastic Four, regardless. And don't even get me started on the fact there's no X-Men in there.