Immortus makes his first appearance in this issue by interrupting a meeting. The Masters of Evil are plotting; a robed figure appears and informs them he intends to join. Marvel would spend the following thirty years establishing that this man is Kang the Conqueror, much older, having lived long enough past his conquering years to become something closer to a librarian of time — but in November 1964 he is simply a new villain with an unusually large idea.
The idea is Limbo. Immortus can reach into any moment in history and remove someone from it, and the issue makes full, unembarrassed use of that: Hercules, Merlin, Attila, the biblical Goliath, and Paul Bunyan are all pulled out of the past and pointed at the Avengers. It is the kind of premise that only works at this exact moment in Marvel’s history, before the company had decided what its rules were, and it remains a genuinely enjoyable comic sixty years later.
Stan Lee scripts, Don Heck and Dick Ayers handle interiors, and Jack Kirby and Chic Stone supply a cover promising that the Avengers break up — with Captain America and Giant-Man in each other’s faces and Immortus looking on from the right edge. A Captain America pin-up closes the book out. The letters page carries a published letter from Gene Day, well before his own tenure drawing for Marvel.
CGC 6.5, Fine+, off-white pages, certification number 1203599009. Standard edition — not the magenta printing-error variant.
Ships in a Gemini graded-comic mailer with honeycomb kraft void fill, fully insured, within one business day of cleared payment.
Immortus makes his first appearance in this issue by interrupting a meeting. The Masters of Evil are plotting; a robed figure appears and informs them he intends to join. Marvel would spend the following thirty years establishing that this man is Kang the Conqueror, much older, having lived long enough past his conquering years to become something closer to a librarian of time — but in November 1964 he is simply a new villain with an unusually large idea.
The idea is Limbo. Immortus can reach into any moment in history and remove someone from it, and the issue makes full, unembarrassed use of that: Hercules, Merlin, Attila, the biblical Goliath, and Paul Bunyan are all pulled out of the past and pointed at the Avengers. It is the kind of premise that only works at this exact moment in Marvel’s history, before the company had decided what its rules were, and it remains a genuinely enjoyable comic sixty years later.
Stan Lee scripts, Don Heck and Dick Ayers handle interiors, and Jack Kirby and Chic Stone supply a cover promising that the Avengers break up — with Captain America and Giant-Man in each other’s faces and Immortus looking on from the right edge. A Captain America pin-up closes the book out. The letters page carries a published letter from Gene Day, well before his own tenure drawing for Marvel.
CGC 6.5, Fine+, off-white pages, certification number 1203599009. Standard edition — not the magenta printing-error variant.
Ships in a Gemini graded-comic mailer with honeycomb kraft void fill, fully insured, within one business day of cleared payment.
