ᴛᴀʟᴇṩ  ᴏғ  ṩɪʟᴠᴇʀ  ᴀɢᴇ  ᴛɪᴍᴇ  ᴛʀᴀᴠᴇʟ Can  You  Name  Them  All?

tales of SILVER AGE TIME TRAVEL travel back to FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #3 (SEP 1965)

—How about if I give you a Marvelous puzzle using none other than the cover of Fantastic Four Annual #3, which I first nabbed in late summer of 1965?

All you have to do is name each of the Silver Age characters depicted on the cover by JACK KIRBY and MIKE ESPOSITO shown below. Here are some clues to get you going (scroll down for a larger version of the cover):

Clues!

1. By my count, there are 24 good guys who had fairly regular gigs in Marvel superhero comics at this time (the fall of 1965), including PROFESSOR X (he was a superhero to me, the future professor myself) as well as GIANT MAN and the WASP (who had no ongoing series at that time). The montage includes 21 of the 24, one of which appears twice (or maybe the second one is someone else, but who could he be?). Additionally, I think the best known, non-powered, Marvel sidekick of the time appears (although I may have misidentified him as RICK JONES); and the best known Western hero, the TWO-GUN KID, also pops up. That makes for 24 good guys on the cover, although some (such as HAWKEYE) began their lives as villains. [By the way, the three who do not appear on the cover are Professor X, Giant Man, and . . . can you name the other?]
2. You’ll also find 25 or 27 bad guys, depending on whether you separately count the BLACK KNIGHT’S HORSE and one of the RED GHOST’S APES. Of course, some of those bad guys (such as the good DOCTOR VICTOR von DOOM) were more misunderstood than truly bad, and some (such as MEDUSA) were destined to become semi-heroes at a later date. Of those 27, I can provide a pretty definite ID for 23. I think I can also identify the MELTER and DIABLO, although their coloring may be off. And the other two? I like to think that 1965 Mike could have identified them, but the present-day Professor Mike cannot.
3. Finally, you might spot one more character, just underneath the BEAST’s knee and above QUICKSILVER’s head. Hard to tell whether he’s a villain or a hero, even when I tell you that he’s my self-portrait, colored in by hand decades ago because I wanted to be included with the gang.

The Kirby Cover!

So with those clues, how many of the 51 characters can you identify? I’ll provide you with my answers after you’ve had a shot at it yourself. (You can click the image for a larger copy to print if you wish.)

My Answers

Back in the ’60s, I remember laying a piece of tracing paper over the cover and outlining each of the characters so that I’d have a separate sheet to write their names on. I don’t remember whether I named all of the characters or not, and sadly, I no longer have the sheet of tracing paper (although the cover has definite indentation lines from my tracing).

In any case, if you click on the small image below, it will enlarge and you’ll see my present-day who’s-who. Please let me know if you can help out with any of the question marks!

And the one headliner good guy who doesn’t appear is DOCTOR STRANGE.

Four Time Travelers and a Wedding

You can get a good idea of how SUE and REED’s wedding went just by looking at the cover. Somehow, everyone who’d ever had a grudge against the Fantastic Four show up on the wedding day to settle their grudges. But how did that happen, you ask? The answer involves . . .

Time Traveler #1. Dr. Doom

Given that the good doctor always had a thing for Sue, you can imagine his reaction when he read this headline:

You probably noticed that Doom’s x-ray vision allowed him to read a front-page headline from the back side of the paper, and he also made use of his mirror-image reading ability for that trick. Those are just two of his lesser known powers. (He’s never been one to brag about such things, so it’s left to me to ensure that the world knows.)

Anyway, Doom—the first of today’s time travelers—uses his high frequency emotion charger to fan the flames of hatred in the heart of every evil menace in existence. Does this involve time travel? Of course it does, because the charger draws all emissaries of evil from out of the past, the present, and in one instance  the future . . .

Time Traveler #2. Kang, the Conqueror

Yes, Doom’s emotion charger reaches into the future where it brings back KANG, who earlier fought the FF in his guise of Rama Tut. The panel shown here is one of only two places where Kang appeared in the issue, although I do wonder whether he might be one of the villains I couldn’t identify on the cover. If so, he’s undergone a temporary color transformation, possibly as a side effect of the emotion charger.

Time Traveler #3. Doctor Strange

The next time traveler in the story is a good guy—Doctor Strange!—who has traversed the byways of time more than once. In this story, the Master of the Mystic uses his powers to easily vanquish the Red Ghost and his apes:

I usually don’t count shifting to a different dimension as time travel, but I decided to stretch the rules since STAN LEE explicitly mentions that the nebulous red guy and his simian companions have gone to a different space-time continuum. This did make me wonder why Doc Strange doesn’t do this to all his nemeses, or at least to all those who crashed the wedding. Lo and behold, it seems that our fourth time traveler had a similar idea:

Time Traveler #4: The Watcher!

Yep, my second-favorite character in the Marvel Universe showed up near the end of the melee, with much the same idea that I had about sending all the bad guys back in time! Of course, being as how the WATCHER has sworn to never interfere in the affairs of lesser beings, he cann’t send the villains back through time himself, but he (like I) enjoys stretching the rules by taking Stretcho back to his own home, where Reed finds the one thing that can save the day:

And with the mysterious device, Reed saves the day!

I Am Inspired

Really, Stan? REALLY? You had Reed transport all the bad guys into the immediate past and forget everything that happened? Again?! Using time travel to reset the past was getting under my skin.

Perhaps you remember that my GRANDPA MAIN had given me a homework assignment of writing a time travel story that made it literally impossible for that sort of dues ex machina to occur. I admit that I hadn’t made much progress on that assignment, but when I read this ending, I redoubled my effort in that direction. As extra inspiration, I cut out the story-resolution that you see above and pinned it to my wall along with three other bits from the story. The first bit came from the very end of the story, to remind me that even Stan and Jack had their challenges:

The second, of course, was STEVE DITKO’s one contribution to the story, a single panel of SPIDEY swinging over the city:

The purpose of this panel was to remind me that I didn’t have to be perfect because not even Jack Kirby was perfect. That’s right: He never did manage to draw a believable Spider-Man, so the panel you see above was swiped from page 13 of Ditko’s Spider-Man #19.

And the third panel was to remind me to always aim for happy endings:

Coming Soon!

Coming soon! See the Mighty THOR face his most dangerous foe ever—the mortal journalist HARRIS HOBBS!! (Oh, and maybe LOKI and the ABSORBING MAN, too). Don’t miss it on the first Wednesday of March!

fantastic four annual 3 cover by jack kirby and mike esposito with interior images by jack kirby and vince colletta, ©1965 marvel comics group. spider-man image by steve ditko, ©1964 marvel comics group.