Time, or possibly past time, for another edition of my very occasional recurring feature in which I discuss weird-ass old comics from my stacks. With The Fantastic Four: First Steps now in theaters, it's appropriate we check out an adventure of The Thing, with The Human Torch in support, paired with none other than...
...The Man of Bronze himself, Doc Savage. It's an issue of Marvel Two-in-One from November of 1976.
But wait, I hear you object (if you're a nerd), how can such a pairing be? The Doc Savage pulps were set in the 1930s and '40s, while The Fantastic Four began in the early '60s.
Well, Marvel finds a way. As the issue begins, we see storylines in two periods on either side of the pages, ingeniously paralleling each other across the decades...
Apparently this clever conceit wasn't thought sustainable, as a few pages in writer Bill Mantlo trumps up a time warp which drops Doc and his cronies together with The Thing and The Torch.
Perplexed as they are at each other's presence, they team up to take on Black Sun (later known as The Nth Man) in his debut appearance, a supervillain created when a power mad rich guy and his equally power mad son are joined into a single formidable fiend through the power of the stars.
It ends rather anticlimactically. But the beginning is quite an ingenious use of the Two-in-One format; a shame they didn't try to take the parallel plot gimmick all the way through to the end.
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