Thursday, September 26, 2013

The Lyingest Cover In Marvel Comics History--Marvel Feature #8!!

Oh, for the glory days when Marvel published well nigh unto infinite number comics that had Marvel in the title: Marvel Premiere, Marvel Spotlight, Marvel Super-Heroes, Marvel Triple Action, Marvel Spectacular, Marvel Adventure, Marvel Chillers, Marvel Double Feature, Marvel Presents, Marvel Tales, Marvel's Greatest Comics...I could go on and on. Sure, most of them devolved into reprint books, but it was Marvel, Marvel everywhere!

Oh, yeah, and then there was Marvel Feature:

This was the first volume of Marvel Feature, that started out by debuting The Defenders, and ended up launching Marvel Two-In-One. In between? Ant-Man.

Oh, the cover itself isn't technically a lie. It accurately portrays that the insides feature a Dreaded Deadlin Doom-required reprint of the Wasp's origin story from Tales To Astonish #44 (1963). (And when you couldn't make deadline in a bi-monthly comic? Sheesh, Craig Russell was born 40 years too early, as today that would be considered a great pace for a superstar artist!) So kudo to an accurate cover.

The premise of this series, though, that was a bit of a lie: Henry Pym was trapped at tiny size, and didn't have his ant-controlling helmet. So he had to go all "Power Of The Atom" against full-sized foes such as Egghead, Whirlwind, and mean cats. Still, even though he wasn't being much of an Ant-Man, back in the day you probably couldn't call him "Dr. Pym," so I'll give 'em a pass on the title.

Still, this cover is one of the Lyingest Covers In Marvel Comics History. Why?

There has never been a heralded Ant-Man spectacular, let alone a most-heralded Ant-Man Spectacular.

Hiiii----yoooooooo!!

Marvel Feature #8 is from 1973

3 comments:

inkdestroyedmybrush said...

would we like to take some guesses as to who did what on the cover? clearly a starlin monster "cosmos", and that might even be his wasp and the musculature on antman looks right. Wasp has been cleaned up however, and isn't fully starlin. The color hold Pym head? your guess...

snell said...

GCD credits the cover to Jim Starlin (pencils) & Mike Esposito (inks)...

SallyP said...

I also don't consider Jan to be very Wonderful.