You knew Steve Rogers was a scrawny guy before he was given the Super-Soldier serum...
...but did you know what disease he had?
You'll learn that today!
He did???
Officially, this isn't canon, but it's not an unreasonable concept...
Technically, asthma isn't a disease, but a "medical condition" brought on by a number of causes, but this never-reprinted Marvel/Glaxo 1985 one-shot giveaway was so interesting, we decided to run it anyway!
Adventurer Doc Savage and his five associates, having survived an assassination attempt by a gunman in Mayan ceremonial garb at their NYC headquarters, are proceeding to the Central American country of Hidalgo to investigate the suspicious death by unknown disease of Savage's explorer father.
As they come in for a landing at the airport...
Are Monk's buddies dead?
Did Ham's suit get wrinkled?
And, where's the Man of Bronze when you really need him?
Tune in Tomorrow for both the Astounding Answers and This Titanic Tale's Cataclysmic Conclusion
at our "brother" RetroBlog... Medical Comics!
In the early 1970s, bolstered by the success of Conan the Barbarian, both DC and Marvel attempted to launch other pulp characters who had successful paperback reprint series as comic book titles.
Hoping that the audiences for them would carry over as Conan's had, Marvel acquired the rights to Doc Savage, while DC snagged both The Shadow and The Avenger.
The Doc title lasted only eight issues from 1972-73, but the license remained in Marvel's hands when the George Pal movie came along and Marvel invoked their right to do a comic based on the movie.
Compare with page 7 above.
Since the flick was an adaptation of the premiere novel "The Man of Bronze", which Marvel had already used as the basis for the first two issues of their previous comic, it was decided to repackage that material as a double-sized one-shot to tie-in with the movie's release.
The art was modified to match the appearance of Doc in the movie, substituting an open-collared shirt for his Marvel-created blue vest and a buzz-cut for the James Bama/Bantam paperback "skullcap" (see left).
(I always wondered why Marvel didn't go with the torn-shirt look of the Bantam paperback covers on the comics.
Maybe they didn't want people confusing Doc with their resident torn-shirt aficionado, Nick Fury.
Thankfully, Marvel returned to the torn shirt "look" on the 1975-77 b/w magazine covers by Ken Barr.)
The original two-issue comic adaptation had updated the 1933 novel to the then-present 1970s.
The Giant-Size Doc Savage "re-mastering" modified the technology back to 1930s levels, except the adaptation's replacing of the Mayan assassin's elephant gun with a laser rifle, which remained!
They also re-did Monk's hair from the incorrect black-with-blue-highlights to the red color it had in the pulp stories (and the remainder of the Marvel run).
...but none stranger than the dastardly, diseased TV super-villain whose only appearance was narrated by Morgan Freeman!
(Yes, that Morgan Freeman!)
See what happens when you don't get your inoculations, kids?
Marvel's Spidey Super Stories #2 (1974) takes the tv ep's script and uses it verbatim for this adaptation illustrated by penciler Win Mortimer and inker Mike Esposito.
Ensemble member Skip Hinnant (who played most of the Spidey villains as well as regular character Fargo North: Decoder) portrayed Mister Measles.
Morgan Freeman narrated all the Spidey segments (even ones where he appeared as regular character Easy Reader), including this one.
Unfortunately, there's no extant video of this segment, but the audio from it was taken and used on the Peter Pan/Power Records LP album Spidey Super Stories!
And we have it here!
Note: Spidey didn't speak in the TV episodes!
His dialogue was shown in on-screen word balloons the audience would read...sometimes out loud...sometimes really loud, as my screeching little brother did!
So, ensemble member John Boyd (who also wrote most of the Spidey segments) did the webhead's dialogue for the record album!
Also note: Power Records did combination record album/comic books so kids could read along a comic with the audio...like this!
They adapted a number of existing Marvel comic stories featuring the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Man-Thing, and others...including Spider-Man!
But the comics versions of the stories in this particular album were found only in the Spidey Super Stories comic book!
Besides Plastic Man, numerous Quality Comics characters fought to protect America from medical threats...
...whether from other countries or right here in the good ol' USA!
This never-reprinted story from Quality's Hit Comics #2 (1940) was written by Toni Blum (one of the few women writing comics during the Golden Age) and but the artist under the "B H Apiary" pen-name is unknown.
(An apiary is a group of separate bee hives close together)
While other characters like The Crimson Avenger and The Sandman borrowed The Green Hornet's "wanted criminal in a fedora and overcoat" motif, the Red Bee took the "colorful insect wanted by the police" concept and went in a different direction...a skintight costume and actually using live insects!
Besides trained bees (can you actually train bees?), the two-fisted adventurer used a "stinger" gun that shot tranquilizer darts (paralleling the Green Hornet's knockout-gas gun)!
(Note that bees, wasps, yellowjackets, and hornets are all from the same sub-species of insects.)
Quality's editors must've thought the concept was a winner, since the Red Bee was cover-featured on Hit Comics' first issue, plus a run of several consecutive issues a few months later.
(Most of the time, characters were rotated, with each one getting a cover every 3-4 issues!)
Despite the promotional push, the Red Bee disappeared after Hit #24.
