Marvel Boy #1

Marvel Boy #1 (1950)
by Stan Lee & Russ Heath

After two disastrous attempts, the company that would one day become Marvel Comics finally manages to create a character named Marvel Boy that sticks around… kind of.

We begin with the discovery of a new whole continent that just came out of the water.

Which is kind of silly, yes, but at least they point out that something like this would be utterly catastrophic.

Amazingly we even get coordinates

And since we have coordinates, you know what that means: unnecessary geography time!
It can’t POSSIBLY be latitude 50°N…

…but latitude 50°S would by in the middle of nowhere.

Not only this gets surprisingly geographically accurate for the Golden Age… it’s trying to be realistic with what would happen if a new continent appeared in 1950.

Too bad the first ship to discover the new continent is by a bunch of pirates, which as we all know is basically all-powerful against all the major powers of the 20th century.

And my praises on the realism of this story end when the scene moves to Uranus, which has been listening to the radio waves received from Earth.

But we also discover there’s a human living on Uranus, a scientist named Matthew Grayson who disappeared 16 years earlier…

…and his son Bob, who I have a hard time believing is a day younger than 30 but is only 17.

The scientist left Earth in 1934, after his wife and daughter were accidentally killed by Nazis.
Well, they say accidentally, but you never know with Nazis.

So Marvel Boy’s origin is kind of a reverse of Superman’s: instead of being sent to Earth from a doomed planet, he’s sent from a doomed Earth to another planet.

Technically Dr. Grayson wanted to go to the Moon, but he was taken to Uranus against his will.

In real life, Uranus is a ball of mostly ammonia and methane four times the diameter of Earth, without a real surface and with an atmosphere of -371°C (-224°C)… so Dr. Grayson is lucky he didn’t land on the real Uranus!

Uhm, shouldn’t “the average IQ on Earth” be 100 by definition?

Dr. Grayson has decided that Earth needs a superhero and has decided to send his son back.
So I’m guessing he didn’t really care all that much about what going on during WWII, right? Sure at the time his son would have been too young, but come on!

I thought they were going to do the whole “super-strong because he grew up on a planet with higher gravity”… but Marvel Boy is not going to be particularly superstrong.
Which actually tracks, because Uranus has a LOWER gravity than Earth: despite being larger, it has a low density… so Marvel Boy should theoretically have 86% of a human’s strength.

That’s ALMOST what is happening here, although the culprit is the atmosphere and not the gravity.
So interestingly enough we have a superhero who is naturally WEAKER than a regular human and has to take medicine to stay alive!
I find it truly fascinating that even this far back, Stan Lee was creating “superheroes with super-problems”.

The fact that he’s given those jeweled bands is almost an afterthought here. Which is quite a contrast with how important they will become.

He looks SIGNIFICANTLY better than the two previous Marvel Boys, doc, but let’s not go overboard.

Well at least we tie back to the continent.

Speaking of the continent, its would-be conqueror has a kind of compelling backstory.
He’s from Bosnia, which is already unique on its own since I don’t think Bosnia is EVER mentioned in a comic book before the 90s. But it’s also interesting to notice he namedrops both Turkey and Hungary, since both the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian empires had ruled Bosnia… before it was annexed by Yugoslavia in 1929, so the guy IS right about Bosnia not being a country for over 30 years at this point.
I’m guessing Stan Lee was SOMEWHAT familiar with Serbia. His father was born in Romania and his mother was probably from Eastern Europe, but I couldn’t find a reference to where she was from. Maybe he knew someone with Serbian ancestry? I ask because Stan was notoriously all over the place whenever he mentioned Europe, so it’s interesting to see something that tracks.Although “Varron” does not appear to be a particularly plausible last name for the area.

I have a really, really, REALLY hard time believing that a bunch of pirates would be able to hold the claim to an entire continent without the consent of at the very least the United States or the Soviet Union.

Case in point: they’re stopped by a single superhero armed by his fists and a powerful flashlight!

But complicating things is the fact that the new continent is inhabited by mole and/or fish people.

Future stories will retcon this one into oblivion, but in retrospect this COULD have been integrated with other almost-human races.
If I had a nickel for every Marvel continent that sank beneath the ocean to give rise to a civilization of water-breathing humanoids… I would have three nickels, but it’s weird it happened three times.
Heck if you remove the “water breathing” part, it happened FOUR times.
(if you’re curious: these guys, Atlantis, Lemuria and Lemuria. Yes, there are two Lemuria.)

(also: is “desendents” an old-fashioned spelling or a typo?)

Unsurprisingly, the pirate doesn’t really care about the natives.

The pirates kill the first natives they see, and Marvel Boy just… kind of stands there?

Yeah I can’t fault the natives for not trusting him.

And then the continent starts to sink again. For a second I thought this was somehow thanks to Marvel Boy’s super-science… but nope, it’s all happening on its own.

Which means THE HERO’S PRESENCE WAS COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY.

Historical significance: 6/10
Marvel Boy is basically a footnote for the longest time, but he does start a legacy… and he even comes back.

Silver Age-ness: 8/10
All things considered, the Uranus stuff is kind of tame… but then the continent that comes and goes is completely unexplained!!!

Does it stand the test of time? 4/10
It’s not the worst origin story, and as a variation on the Superman theme it has a lot of potential.
Too bad the rest of the story is very bland and that Marvel Boy has absolutely no personality.

How close is this to the modern character? 3/10

Marvel Boy chose the worst time to start his career because 1950 wasn’t a great year for superheroes.
His book was retitled “Astonishing” with issue 3, and the last time he would be on the cover would be issue 5. Issue 7, where he’s not even on the cover, is his last Golden Age story.

So I’m guessing few readers recognized him when he showed up as the crazed Crusader in Fantastic Four #164.

So why WAS he crazy in that story? For that we have to go to Fantastic Four #165, which slightly updates his origin to tell us that the super-advanced civilization lived in a domed city on Uranus.
Which still shouldn’t have a surface, but close enough.

But we also learn that Marvel Boy needed medical supplies for his father… but couldn’t find the money he needed to save him in time.

That story says the colony on Uranus was destroyed by natural forces. It’s actually way more complicated than that… we will learn on Quasar that the Uranians basically committed mass suicide out of boredom (!!!)… but the whole experience drove him insane.

Marvel Boy ends up dying at the end of the story, disintegrated when his bands draw too much power.

The bands would later be used by the fourth Marvel Boy who debuted in 1978, and who wouldn’t use that name for long: we better know him as Quasar.
Marvel Boy’s bands would be revealed to be the massively powerful Quantum Bands, which are basically Marvel’s equivalent to a Green Lantern ring… and he just used them as a flashlight.

Another influential Marvel Boy story is in 1978’s What If #9, where we saw an alternate version of him founding the Avengers in the 1950s.

And that was basically it for the longest time. There was an unstable duplicate of Marvel Boy created by Thanos that went around for a couple of issues of Quasar in 1993, even teaming up with the Punisher for reasons.

And considering that yet another Marvel Boy, the Kree one, would debut in the year 2000, you could be forgiven for thinking the original would never come back.
Until 2006 when the miniseries “Agents of Atlas” basically recreated the 50s Avengers in continuity, as we have seen with Namora.
And they did bring back the original Marvel Boy, now calling himself Uranian and with vastly different… well, everything.

He’s much more alien now… both mentally and ESPECIALLY physically.

This heavily retconned the original. We already knew from other stuff that the Uranians were Eternals who settled there… but in the series we meet the natives.

And the Crusader was just a sort of android.

He’s kind of a tragic figure. He doesn’t fit with humans or with the Uranians.

That’s the version still around, mostly through the Agents of Atlas. But he did manage a 3-issue miniseries in 2010, which retcons the 1950 stories as being comic books inspired by his actual adventures.

It’s a good story, but I can’t stand the artwork of the miniseries.
You’re better off reading Agents of Atlas in all of its various incarnations, it’s mostly good stuff.

What else was in Marvel Boy #1?

A completely unrelated science fiction story with Sol Brodsky artwork; the writer is uncredited.