THE PRE HERO MONSTERS
The Marvel monsters of the pre-superhero era remain favorites among fans, and many collectors are beginning to appreciate the value of these comic book appearances. While several of these creatures share names with characters Marvel would later introduce, they are otherwise completely unrelated.
To understand these monsters, we have to start before Marvel was Marvel—when the company was Timely & Then Atlas Comics.
Timely made its name publishing the adventures of characters like Captain America, The Human Torch, and Sub-Mariner, who battled the Axis powers during World War II. Sales of their various titles reached into the millions. However, as the war ended and American soldiers returned home, readers' tastes changed. Superheroes fell out of favor, and the comic book industry found a new genre that sold in enormous numbers: horror.
Adults enjoyed the lurid tales and outrageous plots, while kids loved them because anything Mom thought was terrible had to be worth reading. No publisher embraced the genre more successfully than Bill Gaines' EC Comics, which produced now-classic horror titles such as The Haunt of Fear and Tales from the Crypt.
Ironically, that success helped bring about horror comics' downfall. As public concern grew over the supposed corrupting influence of comic books, Congress began investigating the industry. In response to mounting pressure from parents and lawmakers, publishers attempted to stay ahead of potential legislation by creating the Comics Code Authority. The Code effectively outlawed explicit horror, gore, and many of the very elements that had made horror comics so popular.
EC Comics abandoned comic books altogether, reinventing itself as a magazine publisher and enjoying decades of success with MAD Magazine. Meanwhile, the remaining publishers—including Atlas—adapted by producing a new generation of tamer, more family-friendly monster stories.
One of the best-known examples is "The Monster at the Window" from Tales to Astonish #34. This unnamed creature, said to hail from the Sixth Dimension, has since earned the fan nickname "The Tootsie Roll Monster" because of its resemblance to the famous candy.
Another standout from this period is Fin Fang Foom, one of the few Atlas monsters to successfully make the leap into the Marvel superhero era. He would later battle the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and the Incredible Hulk, becoming one of Marvel's most recognizable giant monsters.
Torr, from Amazing Adventures #1, represents many of the creatures from this era. Whether they came from other dimensions, outer space, beneath the sea, or secret laboratories, these monsters were largely "toothless" because of the restrictions imposed by the Comics Code. They couldn't be truly terrifying—but they were undeniably fun.
Many familiar Marvel names actually appeared first as Prototype monsters. Magneto and doom both predated the more famous Marvel characters that would later bear those names. There were several different "Things" before Ben Grimm claimed the title, and long before Bruce Banner was transformed by gamma rays, a creature called The Hulk was already terrorizing the countryside in the strange and wonderful world of Marvel's pre-hero monsters.
