Strange Tales #101

The Human Torch

By Stan Lee with Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers

Villains: The Destroyer

Guest Appearances: The Fantastic Four

So, What Happens?

Johnny Storm is testing his speed against some of the military’s nuclear missiles before returning to his asbestos lined room to get some sleep. Next day on the way to school he and his chums look in awe at the town’s new funfair.

Little do they know that the town’s newspaper publisher, Charles Stanton, has received a threatening note from someone calling themselves the Destroyer threatening to damage the funfair. Stanton decides not to publish it.

The next day the funfair’s roller coaster is sabotaged and the Torch has to stop riders falling to their deaths. With no publicity from the newspaper the Destroyer’s work is put down to structural failure. He sends another letter to the papers saying he will strike again.

On his next visit to the funfair Johnny notices a parachute ride buckling, threatening to send its occupants to their deaths. He creates a flaming diversion so he can preserve his secret identity from the crowds and then manages to weld the ride safe.

The next day’s newspaper contains another message from the Destroyer, this time challenging the Torch to battle at a cabin outside town. Johnny turns down the offer of help from the Thing and goes there alone. He gets trapped by the Destroyer who, luckily for Johnny, then flees when some kids arrive.

Johnny decides to check out the roller coaster to see what could be annoying the destroyer and from the top of it manages to spot a Russian sub moored in a nearby bay. Johnny flies out over it and warms up the sea until the Russians surrender. He then heads back to the coast and captures the Destroyer himself, actually newspaper publisher Stanton who wanted the funfair closed so that nobody on the roller coaster would spot the sub.

So is it any good?:

No, while it theoretically exists in the same world as the Fantastic Four it has a totally different style.

It’s tempting to think that the teenager with a secret identity angle was a way of combining the FF with Spider-Man but the regular Spider-Man series hadn’t actually started at this point and actually what this in fact is, is just a very dull super hero tale in the DC style.

It reads like a fairly poor Batman mystery from one of that title’s blander periods. It attempts to introduce a mystery with the masked villain but the villain doesn’t really ever confront the Torch, he just sabotages the funfair a few times and then passes up the chance to defeat the Torch because some local kids are walking past.

Even at the end the Torch just jumps to the assumption that Stanton is the Destroyer and goes and captures him in a single panel. Very few of the Marvel stories to this point had actually featured heroes battling villains physically, the villains so far had largely been masked bad guys whose identity was the core of the story rather than their plans.

There is quite a lot of unintended comedy in a very dated story but it isn’t a very auspicious debut.

Are there any goofy moments?

So many. The Human Torch’s secret identity would be the cause of much stupidity in the next few issues. This issue creates the problem by insisting that while everyone in town knows that Sue Storm is the Invisible Girl nobody has worked out that Johnny is the Torch. In an incredibly bizarre and detailed caption Stan reveals that four people had previously known but they were all now in the army, at college or working in Chicago. As Johnny regularly has to leave people in danger while he tries to secretly change identities this is all a little bizarre.

The detailed description of Johnny’s room contains an asbestos bed, carpet and wall paper. I guess Johnny felt that between risking his life with the FF and flying with nuclear missiles to relax he didn’t have to worry too much about his long term health.

The panel where Johnny spots, and of course shouts, ‘A Commie Sub’ is a classic.

Stanton throws away the threatening letter he himself wrote to his own newspaper and doesn’t bother to print it because it is seemingly the work of a crank.

Trivia:

The Destroyer never appeared again. The code-name was of course quickly reused for the Asgardian ultimate weapon which, along with this stories own flaws, probably stopped this version returning.