Early Tolkien References in Marvel and DC Comic Books
14 Apr, 2023
2023-4-14 6:15:57 PM UTC
2023-4-14 6:15:57 PM UTC
Here's a piece by me published in Beyond Bree a few years ago. My Days of the Craze series began in 2011, appears irregularly in BB, and is up to #41.
DAYS OF THE CRAZE #30: MARVEL COMICS GROUP BEATS DC TO THE TOLKIEN PUNCH
by Dale Nelson
Thanks to one of its chief writers, Roy Thomas, Marvel Comics in the late 1960s gave in-the-know winks to the Tolkien readers among its fans. I’ve reported before, here in Beyond Bree, about some of those Tolkienian allusions. I’ll recap those, and then set forth some very interesting additional ones. Roy Thomas has granted me permission to quote him, half a century later. I’ve discovered that Marvel’s chief competitor got into the act – tardily.
In “Days of the Craze No. 3: Marvel Comics Blends Conan, Mu, and Middle-earth?”, I summarized a multi-part 1969 story by Roy Thomas in the Sub-Mariner comic (issues 9, 10, 12, 13, with cover dates from January-August). Lemurian alchemists forged a serpent crown, which imparted longevity and magical power to the wearer, but strengthened the inclination to evil. Eventually, a Lemurian hero, Karthon, kills the priest who has assumed the crown. Before Karthon can be overwhelmed by it, Atlantis’s Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, convinces him to replace it on the priest’s corpse, and this act of renunciation destroys the crown. Responding to a letter in the fan column, the Marvel spokesman – probably Thomas himself – acknowledged a degree of conscious Tolkienian influence. More details will be found in Beyond Bree December 2011, page 6.
"In the Shadow of ... Sauron" was the cover attraction for Marvel’s 60th comic book about the X-Men, a group of benevolent mutants including also a woman, Marvel Girl, dated Sept. 1969. This "Sauron" was a human who takes a half-human, half-pterodactyl-type form. He explicitly states that he takes the name from Tolkien. Issue #61 revealed the defeat of ptero-Sauron.
Fan letters gave enthusiastic thumbs up for the Tolkien angle. One appreciative writer said that he was “afraid” that, if he turned the page, he’d see “Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf, Sam, and Sauron’s minion [sic], Gollum.” Another writer concluded her letter with “Frodo lives!” – to which the editors replied, “That he does, Leah! But, we can’t use HIM as a super-villain! Ray, Allyn, and a few other Bullpen-ers have been Middle Earth nuts for some time, and Roy thought that to have a Mutant-Menacer who had read the trilogy and had decided to assume a name of evil was one way to show our appreciation to Tolkien for many hours of pleasure!”
One letter writer, however, objected: “Using the name Sauron, from Tolkien’s trilogy, was kind of a dumb move; Sauron and ‘Sauron’ have little in common (if anything!). Sauron was a humanoid; ‘Sauron’ is a pterodactyl. Sauron was basically a wise coward, letting others do all of his dirty work, whereas ‘Sauron’ does his own hunting. There are many other things which don’t quite match up between the two.” The editors replied, “Our reasoning on the matter of Sauron’s name is a bit different from yours…our ill-starred super-villain named himself – so that it was his viewpoint that he was as evil as Tolkien’s famous baddie, not ours. The fact that he was part reptile had something to do with it as well, perhaps, since the word ‘Sauron’ contains the root word for ‘lizard’ in Latin.” I wrote about this in Beyond Bree for October 2011 (p. 5). “Tolkien References in Marvel’s X-Men Comics” should have been an entry in the Days of the Craze series – and now the substance of the earlier article is, right here in the present piece.
Marvel produced the Spider-Man, Thor, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Avengers, and Doctor Strange comics, among others. What about the competition? DC/National Comics produced Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and others. They issued mild supernatural suspense comics including The Witching Hour, House of Mystery, and House of Secrets. It’s the 87th issue of the Secrets comic, dated Aug.-Sept. 1970, that contains DC’s first Tolkienian allusion – so far as I know. That, of course, is technically too late for the 1965-1969 focus of these “Craze” columns.
The issue contains fan letters from Alan Brennert and Bill Anderson. Apparently the magazine’s mailbag was pretty limp at the time, because a third letter is from “Cain the Caretaker” of the House of Mystery. A fourth letter of four seems likely also to have been supplied by a DC staffer. It reads as follows: “Dear Editor: I’m all alone in the dungeon, and nobody will let me out. It’s getting awfully dark in here, and cold, too. All I can do is sit by this flickering candle and read your magazines. I like them very much. Will you please help me get out of here?”
The letter is signed, “Frodo, Titus Minor, Gondor.” There’s a P.S. “Please excuse the handwriting as my thumbs are broken.”
One guesses that the hoax letter was written to fill space on the letters page, and was loosely inspired by Frodo’s imprisonment in the tower of Cirith Ungol, although he was at the top of the tower rather than in the dungeon.
The DC letter was meant to be funny – as were what may have been the earliest Marvel allusions to Tolkien.
In the style of the early issues of Mad magazine, Not Brand Echh was Marvel’s venture into over-the-top humor, with comic art panels crammed with in-jokes – including Tolkienian ones.
In the 9th issue appeared the company’s parody of its own Captain Marvel comic – here, Captain Marvin. On the fifth page of the 10-page feature, written by Roy Thomas, we see a character holding a traveling bag, on which there’s a sticker reading “Vacation in beautiful Mordor!” The issue is dated August 1968.
Earlier still is Roy Thomas’s take-off on the origin of Superman, in Not Brand Echh #7, dated April 1968. One of the running gags in the story is a series of changes to Stuporman’s chest emblem (corresponding to the S-shield on Superman). On page 6 of the parody, the emblem features Elvish script – almost certainly inspired by the buttons people were wearing with Tolkienian slogans in English or Elvish; it might have been taken from the Tolkien button photographed on page 90 of The Saturday Evening Post for 2 July 1966, the Tolkien profile by Henry Resnik[sic]. Stuporman’s emblem translates as “Frodo lives,” Nancy Martsch says, albeit in non-standard orthography. On Tolkien-slogan buttons, see “Days of the Craze #17: The John Closson Buttons” in Beyond Bree Nov. 2015, page 6.
For issue #4 (cover date November 1967), Thomas scripted an X-Men parody. On page 5, a handbill taped to a wall says, “Sauron is alive and well in Argentina!” According to the delightful site Mike’s Amazing World of Comics, this issue went on sale all the way back on 8 August 1967. For context: the Star Trek first-season reruns closest to that date were “Balance of Terror” and “This Side of Paradise,” both of particular interest to Spock fans; and Top 40 music hits included the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” and Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” The shocking movie Bonnie and Clyde was released on 13 August -- so much for the “Summer of Love.”
Anyway, August 1967’s offering of Not Brand Echh #4 contains the earliest wink to Tolkien that I have found in the comics so far. Here’s Roy Thomas’s reminiscence about Tolkienian allusions in late-Sixties Marvel comics. He refers particularly to the bit of tengwar on Stuporman’s chest in NBE #7.
"I don't recall if it was [artist] Marie [Severin] or me who did this. Probably me, 'cause I've no idea if Marie ever read or liked Tolkien. I wasn't a huge fan, but I did finish reading the third volume of the trilogy in the wee small hours of New Year's Day, 1968, after a particularly dull New Year's Eve partly at Len Brown's and my Brooklyn apartment. Of course, you know that I named the were-pterodactyl in X-MEN ‘Sauron’ (we got a nasty letter from the Tolkien people about that, but that's about it--Marvel used the character later with no problems) and named the Black Knight's winged horse Aragorn. I regret both christenings, esp. the former. It just a little wink to those of our readers who were Tolkien fans... it was very much in the air back then. If I did the NBE one, I probably found the thing somewhere and had it pasted onto the art... or else Marie did, but I'm afraid I just don't specifically recall.”
As things turned out, it was sword-and-sorcery fantasy – with its roots in pulp magazines – rather than Tolkienian fantasy that prevailed in the comics. The mightily-thewed barbarians who held bloody swords in their right hands and circled the waists of scantily-clad princesses with their left arms easily made the transition to comic books, with Marvel taking up Robert E. Howard’s Conan and King Kull, as well as Lin Carter’s Thongor, while DC did a few comic issues with Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.
Before those sword-and-sorcery comics appeared, Marvel approached the genre with other ventures, including a revival and refurbishing of its 1950s character the Black Knight in The Avengers #48 (Jan. 1968 cover date). The Knight’s weird background story was given in Marvel Super-Heroes #17 (Nov. 1968 cover date). Its first page calls the story to be told in the following pages a “sword-and-sorcery saga,” making one wonder if this comic book, on sale 13 August 1968, contains the first use in any comic book of that term. Really, though, this story might cause some readers to remember Poul Anderson’s chivalric Three Hearts and Three Lions rather than the soon-to-be-abundant barbarians of sword-and-sorcery. Still, while, in that first Avengers appearance, the Knight’s winged horse was called Pegasus, in Avengers #54 (cover date July, on sale 9 May 1968) Roy Thomas bestowed on it the name Aragorn (page 9). But the Black Knight didn’t much suggest anything from Tolkien’s books.
During the Tolkien Craze, Marvel ran up the hobbit banner and fans saluted; and DC eventually waved a little flag too. It’s fitting that it was Marvel comics (rather than DC comics, or comics in general) that received attention in one article, while the Tolkien craze was the subject of another article, in the same Esquire issue, that of September 1966.
(I’m indebted to Pierre Comtois, author of several books on Marvel comics, for contacting Roy Thomas, and to Mr. Thomas himself, and further to Pierre for much of the information here and for his gift of the issue of House of Secrets.)
(c) 2023 Dale Nelson
DAYS OF THE CRAZE #30: MARVEL COMICS GROUP BEATS DC TO THE TOLKIEN PUNCH
by Dale Nelson
Thanks to one of its chief writers, Roy Thomas, Marvel Comics in the late 1960s gave in-the-know winks to the Tolkien readers among its fans. I’ve reported before, here in Beyond Bree, about some of those Tolkienian allusions. I’ll recap those, and then set forth some very interesting additional ones. Roy Thomas has granted me permission to quote him, half a century later. I’ve discovered that Marvel’s chief competitor got into the act – tardily.
In “Days of the Craze No. 3: Marvel Comics Blends Conan, Mu, and Middle-earth?”, I summarized a multi-part 1969 story by Roy Thomas in the Sub-Mariner comic (issues 9, 10, 12, 13, with cover dates from January-August). Lemurian alchemists forged a serpent crown, which imparted longevity and magical power to the wearer, but strengthened the inclination to evil. Eventually, a Lemurian hero, Karthon, kills the priest who has assumed the crown. Before Karthon can be overwhelmed by it, Atlantis’s Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, convinces him to replace it on the priest’s corpse, and this act of renunciation destroys the crown. Responding to a letter in the fan column, the Marvel spokesman – probably Thomas himself – acknowledged a degree of conscious Tolkienian influence. More details will be found in Beyond Bree December 2011, page 6.
"In the Shadow of ... Sauron" was the cover attraction for Marvel’s 60th comic book about the X-Men, a group of benevolent mutants including also a woman, Marvel Girl, dated Sept. 1969. This "Sauron" was a human who takes a half-human, half-pterodactyl-type form. He explicitly states that he takes the name from Tolkien. Issue #61 revealed the defeat of ptero-Sauron.
Fan letters gave enthusiastic thumbs up for the Tolkien angle. One appreciative writer said that he was “afraid” that, if he turned the page, he’d see “Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf, Sam, and Sauron’s minion [sic], Gollum.” Another writer concluded her letter with “Frodo lives!” – to which the editors replied, “That he does, Leah! But, we can’t use HIM as a super-villain! Ray, Allyn, and a few other Bullpen-ers have been Middle Earth nuts for some time, and Roy thought that to have a Mutant-Menacer who had read the trilogy and had decided to assume a name of evil was one way to show our appreciation to Tolkien for many hours of pleasure!”
One letter writer, however, objected: “Using the name Sauron, from Tolkien’s trilogy, was kind of a dumb move; Sauron and ‘Sauron’ have little in common (if anything!). Sauron was a humanoid; ‘Sauron’ is a pterodactyl. Sauron was basically a wise coward, letting others do all of his dirty work, whereas ‘Sauron’ does his own hunting. There are many other things which don’t quite match up between the two.” The editors replied, “Our reasoning on the matter of Sauron’s name is a bit different from yours…our ill-starred super-villain named himself – so that it was his viewpoint that he was as evil as Tolkien’s famous baddie, not ours. The fact that he was part reptile had something to do with it as well, perhaps, since the word ‘Sauron’ contains the root word for ‘lizard’ in Latin.” I wrote about this in Beyond Bree for October 2011 (p. 5). “Tolkien References in Marvel’s X-Men Comics” should have been an entry in the Days of the Craze series – and now the substance of the earlier article is, right here in the present piece.
Marvel produced the Spider-Man, Thor, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Avengers, and Doctor Strange comics, among others. What about the competition? DC/National Comics produced Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and others. They issued mild supernatural suspense comics including The Witching Hour, House of Mystery, and House of Secrets. It’s the 87th issue of the Secrets comic, dated Aug.-Sept. 1970, that contains DC’s first Tolkienian allusion – so far as I know. That, of course, is technically too late for the 1965-1969 focus of these “Craze” columns.
The issue contains fan letters from Alan Brennert and Bill Anderson. Apparently the magazine’s mailbag was pretty limp at the time, because a third letter is from “Cain the Caretaker” of the House of Mystery. A fourth letter of four seems likely also to have been supplied by a DC staffer. It reads as follows: “Dear Editor: I’m all alone in the dungeon, and nobody will let me out. It’s getting awfully dark in here, and cold, too. All I can do is sit by this flickering candle and read your magazines. I like them very much. Will you please help me get out of here?”
The letter is signed, “Frodo, Titus Minor, Gondor.” There’s a P.S. “Please excuse the handwriting as my thumbs are broken.”
One guesses that the hoax letter was written to fill space on the letters page, and was loosely inspired by Frodo’s imprisonment in the tower of Cirith Ungol, although he was at the top of the tower rather than in the dungeon.
The DC letter was meant to be funny – as were what may have been the earliest Marvel allusions to Tolkien.
In the style of the early issues of Mad magazine, Not Brand Echh was Marvel’s venture into over-the-top humor, with comic art panels crammed with in-jokes – including Tolkienian ones.
In the 9th issue appeared the company’s parody of its own Captain Marvel comic – here, Captain Marvin. On the fifth page of the 10-page feature, written by Roy Thomas, we see a character holding a traveling bag, on which there’s a sticker reading “Vacation in beautiful Mordor!” The issue is dated August 1968.
Earlier still is Roy Thomas’s take-off on the origin of Superman, in Not Brand Echh #7, dated April 1968. One of the running gags in the story is a series of changes to Stuporman’s chest emblem (corresponding to the S-shield on Superman). On page 6 of the parody, the emblem features Elvish script – almost certainly inspired by the buttons people were wearing with Tolkienian slogans in English or Elvish; it might have been taken from the Tolkien button photographed on page 90 of The Saturday Evening Post for 2 July 1966, the Tolkien profile by Henry Resnik[sic]. Stuporman’s emblem translates as “Frodo lives,” Nancy Martsch says, albeit in non-standard orthography. On Tolkien-slogan buttons, see “Days of the Craze #17: The John Closson Buttons” in Beyond Bree Nov. 2015, page 6.
For issue #4 (cover date November 1967), Thomas scripted an X-Men parody. On page 5, a handbill taped to a wall says, “Sauron is alive and well in Argentina!” According to the delightful site Mike’s Amazing World of Comics, this issue went on sale all the way back on 8 August 1967. For context: the Star Trek first-season reruns closest to that date were “Balance of Terror” and “This Side of Paradise,” both of particular interest to Spock fans; and Top 40 music hits included the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” and Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” The shocking movie Bonnie and Clyde was released on 13 August -- so much for the “Summer of Love.”
Anyway, August 1967’s offering of Not Brand Echh #4 contains the earliest wink to Tolkien that I have found in the comics so far. Here’s Roy Thomas’s reminiscence about Tolkienian allusions in late-Sixties Marvel comics. He refers particularly to the bit of tengwar on Stuporman’s chest in NBE #7.
"I don't recall if it was [artist] Marie [Severin] or me who did this. Probably me, 'cause I've no idea if Marie ever read or liked Tolkien. I wasn't a huge fan, but I did finish reading the third volume of the trilogy in the wee small hours of New Year's Day, 1968, after a particularly dull New Year's Eve partly at Len Brown's and my Brooklyn apartment. Of course, you know that I named the were-pterodactyl in X-MEN ‘Sauron’ (we got a nasty letter from the Tolkien people about that, but that's about it--Marvel used the character later with no problems) and named the Black Knight's winged horse Aragorn. I regret both christenings, esp. the former. It just a little wink to those of our readers who were Tolkien fans... it was very much in the air back then. If I did the NBE one, I probably found the thing somewhere and had it pasted onto the art... or else Marie did, but I'm afraid I just don't specifically recall.”
As things turned out, it was sword-and-sorcery fantasy – with its roots in pulp magazines – rather than Tolkienian fantasy that prevailed in the comics. The mightily-thewed barbarians who held bloody swords in their right hands and circled the waists of scantily-clad princesses with their left arms easily made the transition to comic books, with Marvel taking up Robert E. Howard’s Conan and King Kull, as well as Lin Carter’s Thongor, while DC did a few comic issues with Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.
Before those sword-and-sorcery comics appeared, Marvel approached the genre with other ventures, including a revival and refurbishing of its 1950s character the Black Knight in The Avengers #48 (Jan. 1968 cover date). The Knight’s weird background story was given in Marvel Super-Heroes #17 (Nov. 1968 cover date). Its first page calls the story to be told in the following pages a “sword-and-sorcery saga,” making one wonder if this comic book, on sale 13 August 1968, contains the first use in any comic book of that term. Really, though, this story might cause some readers to remember Poul Anderson’s chivalric Three Hearts and Three Lions rather than the soon-to-be-abundant barbarians of sword-and-sorcery. Still, while, in that first Avengers appearance, the Knight’s winged horse was called Pegasus, in Avengers #54 (cover date July, on sale 9 May 1968) Roy Thomas bestowed on it the name Aragorn (page 9). But the Black Knight didn’t much suggest anything from Tolkien’s books.
During the Tolkien Craze, Marvel ran up the hobbit banner and fans saluted; and DC eventually waved a little flag too. It’s fitting that it was Marvel comics (rather than DC comics, or comics in general) that received attention in one article, while the Tolkien craze was the subject of another article, in the same Esquire issue, that of September 1966.
(I’m indebted to Pierre Comtois, author of several books on Marvel comics, for contacting Roy Thomas, and to Mr. Thomas himself, and further to Pierre for much of the information here and for his gift of the issue of House of Secrets.)
(c) 2023 Dale Nelson
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