Read Fantastic Four #51 for the first time.

I'd seen the cover loads of times but never ventured into the actual issue before.

I guarantee you'll be disappointed qith FF Annual #3: sloppy plotting, sloppy art, the best part is the villain pin-up pages.

Cei-U!
I summon the serious letdown!

The mighty Thor #134-135.

It never ceases to amaze me... How Jack Kirby could create classic characters and concepts one after the other, bam-bam-bam-bam, without breaking a sweat. Characters that would be re-used, rehashed, exploited and (eventually) ruined by less talented people over the course of decades. And Stan Lee's grandiloquent dialogs, added to Kirby's concepts, made for a truly unique reading experience.

Here we meet the High Evolutionary and his New Men for the first time. Nothing is said about the High Evolutionary's origin; nothing needs be said. As Isaac Asimov once explained, one key to a good story is that the author must know when to start: too much background information before the main event puts people to sleep, and too little causes readers not to understand what's going on. An author must find the Goldilocks zone where the tale begins.

Here the timing is just perfect: a strange being with great scientific acumen (who are a dime a dozen in comics, so we get the idea) is able to "evolve" animals into more advanced life forms. Nothing more need be said! In fact, if we tried to give the High Evolutionary a proper origin to make him more realistic, we would fail; we would fail because it's not possible to create a machine that "evolves" living things! That's not how evolution works! And no amount of name-dropping about science degrees at MIT or in a Hydra secret base would make the concept more palatable.

Much better, I think, to just accept it: there must be a rational explanation to the High Evolutionary's existence and another for the way his machines work, but they're irrelevant to the story itself and we don't need to dwell on them. Way to go, Stan and Jack! On to the action!

One thing that struck me is how the story's villain, the Man-Beast, is strikingly different from (and much more awesome than) his later appearances in Warlock. Man-Beast is a wolf that was changed by the High Evolutionary's tech, and in Warlock he was presented as looking a bit like Man-Wolf; a shaggy human with a wolfish head, a bad attitude, and some mental powers. But in these issues of Thor, he's way more interesting.

First, he's not shaggy at all for all that his skin is orange-brown. He looks kind of glossy. He does have somewhat lupine features, but doesn't look like a werewolf. He looks strange and distressingly alien. Even more interestingly, as per Stan and Jack's story, he's not a mere wolf evolved by the High Evolutionary; he's a wolf who, like the H.E. himself a bit later, was pushed to the limit of the system (due to, in a typically ridiculous fashion, Thor interrupting the experiment with his complaints about his girlfriend's whereabouts. Comics in those days just loved those nonsensical plot twists).

The Man-Beast is thus not only a wolf who looks more like a man than his ancestors; he's the ultimate version of a living being, or at least the closest to it you can get when starting with wolf material. That's no doubt why he's strikingly dissimilar to dogs who went through the H.E.'s evolutionary process, even though wolves and dogs belong to the same species, Canis lupus. (Self-conceited that we are, we humans naturally assume that the same process applied to someone would produce a creature more divine-looking, which doesn't make much sense, but that's how we got the "modern" H.E. by that story's end). Man-Beast, accordingly, is at first MUCH more powerful than his creator, who is still just a smart human; he's not only very strong and agile, but also has incredible mental powers.

It is unfortunate that Man-Beast's full potential was not often used in Warlock, where he mostly played the role of telepathic werewolf. It explains better, however, how he could sometimes manifest reality-bending abilities and play the role of Satan convincingly in Adam Warlock's ersatz Temptations in the Desert (back in The Power of Warlock #2).

Given their respective origins, it also means that Man-Beast was biologically more advanced than Warlock himself, even if the latter was built in a lab to be a perfect version of a human being or something. I had always assumed that Man-Beast was, you know, just a Wolf 2.0. But no, he was probably on the level of many of Marvel's cosmic beings.

Anyway... another lovely creative frenzy by the architects of the Mighty Marvel age of comics.

Say, wasn't Thor featured in this comic? Yes, probably. I got distracted!