Monsters 2: The Marvel Monsterbus

Quality. Hours of enjoyment. Solidly put together. Great chronicle of comic book history. Reasonable price when it’s on sale.

When I was a kid, my friends collected super hero comics, Spiderman, Batman, Superman... I loved collecting "Where Monsters Dwell", House of Mystery... later Creepy and Eerie, which lead me to underground comic artists like Richard Corben. I have always been a big fan of monsters and aliens, and a huge fan of Jack Kirby!!! So when Marvel and others began to reprint the old comic collections in hardcover editions, I was thrilled! I have other collections in hardcover, but the one I waited for... prayed for.... was this!!! And now it's here, and I am reading through them with great joy! The reprints are beautiful!! Better than the prints I remember! Bold colors! Crisp artwork!!! The stories are not disappointing, but I love the cheesy fifties monster/alien stories!! Thank you Marvel!!!

As an omnibus, this volume is a fantastic production. The pages are thick and shiny and the spine is sturdy. The remastering is great. This volume is the second of two reprints of the 1950s and early 1960s comics from Marvel (before the company of Marvel). The stories are a sign of the times and some will find the portray of eastern cultures to be offensive. I love these omnibus volumes where I can read a run of comics all in come sitting without worrying about missing issues. To be fair, these stories are only 5 - 10 pages longs and they don't span across different issues. It is fun to read comics before the silver age explosion of superhero comics.

Boy, the only thing I have to complain about after two volumes of this stuff is I'm sad there won't be a third. Why? 'Cause they frigging reprinted EVERYTHING Kirby did for Atlas/Marvel before he and Stan and Steve changed the industry forever. And speaking of that, I somehow never quite realized how much the look and feel of their seminal superhero comics came from the giant monster genre. You've gotta understand this stuff was my introduction to the world of four-color fantasy way back in the early 70s, and as a horror movie-loving kid it will forever be known as the decade "where monsters dwell." And those early FF, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, etcetera stories? They’re basically the same ones the boys had done a jillion times before, except after getting exposed to radiation or chemicals or magic or whatever and developing crazy powers and/or mutating into big ol' you-know-whats, the characters just put on costumes and became superheroes and super-villains. Simple as that. And now I HAVE to point out the story "Bully Boy" (from Tales to Astonish #32) in this Monsterbus volume. All I'm gonna say is read it, ruminate on it, and—if you're not already familiar with the claim—Google “Did Jack Kirby help create Spider-Man?” Then check out the dates on when "Bully Boy" and the first Spidey story came out. Do it. You may be surprised. Oh, and speaking of surprises, I would LOVE to be surprised by a STEVE DITKO Monsterbus. To Marvel Comics: It shouldn’t take an artist passing away to crank out a long overdue and ridiculously well-warranted collection like that. By the power of the Vishanti, make it so!

Before Stan Lee and Jack Kirby made history by inventing the likes of the Fantastic Four, The Hulk and Spiderman, they spent the late 50s and early 60s writing short stories mostly centered around alien invasions, giant monster attacks and other wacky, weird events. The stories are pretty brief, usually only about ten pages, and not too sophisticated. Probably for most of the stories not a great deal of time went into writing them, as Lee/Leiber and Kirby churned them out for the local drug stores every month as quickly as possible. Not sophisticated literature, but of course, it was not meant to be, which is why Stan Lieber became "Stan Lee." Stan Lee became his pseudonym for the kids' stories and later his real name, Stan Lieber, was reserved only for when Stan wanted to be known as the more sophisticated writer of adult fiction. Many of the stories are hamstrung by the comics code authority that prevented Stan and Kirby from creating anything too truly scary for the kids. The stories tend to be about alien invasions/giant monster attacks, with a few AI robots, wacky science and supernatural stories thrown in. There are the usual dire warnings of nuclear war and man's paranoia leading to destruction, coupled with the conflicting messages created from stories in which humankind's problems are resolved by just blowing up the aliens and giant monsters. Some stories don't fit well in today's more progressive values, such as one story titled "The Thing from the Swamp." In this story an "unattractive" woman (note the woman is depicted as plain looking and not horrible or disfigured in any sense) that is made physically beautiful by an alien that has crash landed on Earth. At the end of the story, she notices that people are finally noticing her, and the story ends with her exclaiming: "I have been given the precious gift of beauty...by a monster." What really made this omnibus worth getting is the Kirby artwork, presented with brilliant, vibrant colors on a large format with glossy paper. Interestingly, for the very last two stories of the omnibus we see Kirby's artwork really come alive, as Kirby starts to come into his own as an artist, producing some of the same bombastic and brilliant art that brought his run on the Fantastic Four to life. However, all of the art by Kirby (also with some finishes by Steve Ditko and Dick Ayers) in this collection is great. The contrastive use of saturated color makes the art really stand out. Check out the powerful color contrasts in the scenes photographed, it's as if Piet Mondrian had been unleashed on a comic book. A great collection for those who love their Marvel history.

What's not to like? 😁

Memorable tales from the time lost. A must have for all lovers of Monsters weird and imaginative.