User blog:Nausiated/1951 -- Mostly in the Can

First off wish me a happy 31st birthday. My birthday was on Friday.

I have spent 31 years with Marvel. My earliest memory being that I used to watch the 60's Spider-Man cartoon as a kid as it played (and probably still does ad infinitum) in reruns on television.

Anyway, tonight we have hit another milestone for my contributions to this here Wiki. As I sip my vodka and ginger ale, I am happy to inform you that I am nearly finished my work on 1951. Followers of my work will note that I have been on a long running attempt to write summaries and expand on content that Marvel has published since they first began (Circa late 1939 as Timely and onward) Currently, I just blazed through 1951, and am just about finished adding summaries and such, updating character histories and such.

(Also for those of you who are not up with what I'm doing, I'm skipping all the non-continuity stuff. So no romance, comedy blah blah blah. Also, sadly, glossing over the anthology sci-fi and horror stuff. As much as I'd like to do them, I want to focus on stuff that is relevant to the franchise)

Anyhow, 1951 was quite a painful year to drag through because it was mostly westerns. If you've read any of my previous blog posts, you are going to see a repeat complaint here: redundancy. Basically there must have been five or six stock plot lines for these western stories. The writers either had to stick "rustling", "stage coach", "gold", or "fire water" into the plot and they had a story. You can read a handful of stories about various characters and you'll find that they just took a specific plot and rewrote it for a different character.

On the subject of westerns, as Timely became Atlas comics, they were changing their line up of Western heroes. As you may have noted in my blog about the year 1950, a lot of the western characters were re-branded in an effort to make them more popular. Blaze Carson go renamed Breeze Larson, Tex Morgan became Red Hawkins and Tex Taylor became the Prairie Kid. In 1951, these characters were phased out and replaced. In part by the advent of the Apache Kid and the Gunhawk the year before. Both of these characters thrived, taking up spots not only in their own titles, but also in issues of Wild Western and Two-Gun Western.

Interestingly enough the Two-Gun Kid was cancelled in 1950, and the character was not revived until 1953. Still on the publishing bill was Kid Colt and the Black Rider, who continued their own series and both still appearing in issues of Wild Western.

1951 did see an explosion of horror and science fiction stories along with westerns taking over the forefront (ask anyone who is over 50 what the Cold War and you'll understand why). There was not so much by way of revolutions in story telling. As I said, you had characters like the Black Rider, Apache Kid and Gunhawk floating around, but the western stories were drab and stagnant. Even prior to the advent of the CAC tghese stories were pretty boring. Even the biggest culprits of "offensive" material (the horror and sci-fi stories) were tame when you consider them to what is readily available now. Which is a potential disappointment if you're looking for something that is balls-to-the-walls offensive and messed up. The CAC back then was against comics that featured black people, or people doing drugs, and other conservative B.S. that was a sign of that McCarthy Era family-values garbage that still exists to this day and age (Which, if you want me to get off on a rant, we're going to start debating about Jesus and guns and eventually I'm going to get bored and my rebuttals will consist of me saying "I just farted, and it smells like pork")

Anyway, onto other things... 1951 had some milestones.. Sorry, a milestone (singular, not plural) Superheroes at the time were not popular at all. Well not unless they had "Super", "Bat" or "Wonder" in the title. But with science fiction and horror becoming popular (especially sci-fi) it was easy to create a new character in a garish costume and sell him off as a science fiction hero. It worked for Flash Gordon didn't it? So Atlas created Marvel Boy. He had his own series until issue #2 and the series was renamed "Astonishing" with the same numbering. Marvel Boy was in there up until issue #6 when they figured he wasn't making a whole lot of money and replaced him with horror and science fiction stories.

The other series that was still plugging along was Venus, the psudo romance title series that was also sort of a super hero story, but also a very blatant rip off of Wonder Woman.... at least until 1951. Like I said about the year in question is the fact that horror and sience fiction were quite popular at the time. As such, the Venus title delved into stories that involved science fiction and horror. The whole gods of Olympus thing was being divorced from the title, and they did a poor job at plot development. Namely, Beauty Magazine -- for some reason -- start reporting about other things that didn't involve fashion or beauty, but on stories about grave robbers and titanic fish people invading the surface world. An odd little point to add, the recent(ish) Wolverine villain named Azrael first appeared in the pages of Venus (Retcons my friend are a double edged sword and most always they suck.)

1951 also saw the start of Atlas comics fore into war and spy comics. None of which are considered original given that National Comics (the precursor to DC Comics) were doing those as early as 1945. That said, Marvel was getting in on the bandwagon because the Cold War was booming. People needed to personify evil in this war like they did with the Nazis during World War II. Characters who popped out of this era were few, almost all of them are of passing interest to the Earth-616 continuity, but most of them slipped through (and don't discount some of them being revived again when Marvel has to renew the copyrights in another decade). That said, the characters I'm talking about are Kent Blake and Combat Kelly. Kent Blake, in the 50s was a member of the Secret Service who fought communists and spies and the like in the name of national security. The character was originally presented as "based on true events" and the details (such as names of the real people and so on) were changed. That clearly wasn't the reality and Kent Blake eventually disappeared in the late 50s when spy books were not so popular and super-heroes were getting back into vogue. He returned again in 1979 when he appeared in. He was killed and came back as a ghost and helped Spider-Man beat Doc Ock for the umteenth million time (You know, before their battles needed a spoiler alert and a lot of angry fan boys).

The other character of course was Combat Kelly, who should not be confused with Michael "Combat" Kelly who was featured in Deadly Dozen who appeared in Marvel books in the 70s during one of their many World War II revivals. This was Hank "Combat" Kelly who was a soldier during the Korean War in the 50s. He was a womanizing, foodie who loved combat. He was a terrible character who was totally dated, but if you pick up, the dude is part of Marvel continuity. Here was the start (at least as far as Atlas was concerned, because I think DC beat them to it again) to war comics in the medium. Most of them are generic one off stories in titles like "Combat" and "Navy| much like the spy, romance, sci-fi and horror tales of the time, but there are a bunch that are actually part of Marvel continuity (which, if you read the Marvel Atlas and most recent runs of the handbook you would know.)

So what's next? Well I'm going to do my usual updates to character profiles for the 1951 year and move onto 1952. Which is more westerns and less and more boring comics that are not in the least way entertaining. There will be more obscure (yet Marvel owned) cowboys from the 50s, who have not even been addressed in anything since the original publications. Such as Billy Buckskin (Whom, I am sure, you are on the edge of your seat to read about.) More to the point there is a hiatus from super-heroes until late 1953 when Atlas tried to revive the Human Torch, Captain America and the Sub-Mariner, which was around the time that DC Comics was trying to revive their old heroes. Which, despite the fact that (personally) Marvel's characters are better, the 50s revival of these guys was terrible. They were horrible, and I will talk about them at longer length when I get to that year, but trust me, they were really bad.

And that concludes what I wanted to say. My vodka glass has been refilled like four or five times since I started writing this and somehow I'm still coherent. So... you're welcome for my consistent coherency. Enjoy it always.