Comic Book Review: Essential Marvel Two-In-One Vol. 1 by Various Creators
Much like DC, Marvel Comics also had dedicated superhero team-up series. Marvel Two-in-One featured perennial favorite character Benjamin Grimm, the Thing of the Fantastic Four–and I’ve never done a review of anything with him before, so first, a bit of character history!
Fantastic Four was Marvel’s first modern superhero comic book series, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby when publisher Martin Goodman decided that the market was right for another go-round on brightly-costumed adventurers with awesome powers. In the November 1961 first issue, brilliant scientist Reed Richards has built a rocketship designed to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. For…reasons, the U.S. government decides to scrap the project. Reed convinces his best friend, test pilot Benjamin J. Grimm, his young sweetheart Susan Storm, and her teenage brother John Storm to help him steal the ship and fly it to the moon to prove its worth.
However, while leaving Earth’s orbit, the ship runs into an unusually strong storm of cosmic rays. Its shielding proves woefully inadequate and Ben is barely able to guide it back to Earth and a survivable crash landing. By great good fortune, the cosmic radiation does not kill the quartet, but instead changes them in other ways. Reed becomes the stretchable Mr. Fantastic, Sue the see-through Invisible Girl, Johnny the hot-headed Human Torch…and Ben becomes the misshapen monster known as “the Thing.” Reed manages to distract them from the darker implications of these changes by proposing that they become a team that uses their powers for good and the advancement of science, the Fantastic Four.
Stan and Jack wrote the Fantastic Four very differently than previous superheroes. They bickered and fought amongst themselves, and had personality clashes when not bonding as a family. Continuing subplots gave a soap opera feel to the series, and it helped revitalize the Marvel Comics line as other novel superheroes were added.
The readers especially took to the Thing, who was very different from any other character on the market. He was a blue-collar joe who moped about his grotesque appearance, but reveled in his great strength. Eventually he got a relatively steady love interest, the blind sculptor Alicia Masters. And this series, the first volume of which I’ll finally get around to talking about.
The first two issues are actually Marvel Feature #11-12, as a try-out before launching Two-In-One. Ben’s origin is recapped when he refuses to try another of Reed’s “cure” attempts, then he’s kidnapped and set against the Hulk (one of his most frequent sparring partners) as part of a bet between two supervillains. The villains are defeated, but the Thing is stuck in the desert until the next issue, when he and Iron Man battle a couple of minions of Thanos (see my review of Essential Captain Marvel for more on that struggle.) Iron Man is so drained he can’t carry Ben out of the desert, so our rocky friend just has to keep on walking.
The first issue of the series proper has Ben get to a town and learn of the existence of Man-Thing, a swamp creature of the Florida Everglades. The Thing thinks this is a little too close to his own moniker, and detours to the Sunshine State to have it out with the Man-Thing. Except that this bout is interrupted by the son of Molecule Man, also code-named Molecule Man, who is seeking revenge for his father’s ignominious defeat many issues ago. Steve Gerber, the writer of this and the next few issues, had a distinctive authorial voice that went well with the two monsters that are actually the heroes of the story.
The next issue introduces the running subplot of Wundarr, Steve Gerber’s riff on the Superman concept. Wundarr was rocketed towards Earth as an infant when his scientist father mistakenly believed their planet was about to explode. But instead of arriving as an infant, his body aged in “real time” so that he arrived on Earth as a strapping young man given superpowers by the terrestrial environment, but with his mind still that of a baby who’s just learned to walk. To make matters worse, shortly after he arrives in New York City, “peacekeepers” from his home planet show up to kill Wundarr lest he return and upset their society in revenge for his father. Ben has to defend the man-child and winds up becoming an honorary uncle.
After that, it’s issue after issue of the Thing teaming up with other superheroes for short adventures. A particularly notable one is a Christmas adventure with the Ghost Rider, where the villain tries to create a blasphemous recreation of the Nativity story in a massive display of hubris.
And then there’s the multiple-issue time travel story where Ben goes time-traveling to World War Two twice, teaming up with both the Invaders (Roy Thomas’ teaming of the major WW2 Marvel heroes) and the Liberty Legion (the same author’s team of lesser Golden Age heroes.) It’s especially notable for being one of the last times Marvel specifically mentioned that Reed and Ben were World War Two veterans, before the sliding timescale made that a no-no for continuity.
For some reason, this collection skips issue #21, which has the Thing team up with his Fantastic Four teammate the Human Torch, so we don’t find out how they got into the situation we see them in starting in #22, where Ben and Thor battle the Egyptian god Seth.
The volume ends with #25, as the Thing and Iron Fist are kidnapped to “train” warriors of an obscure East Asian country, only to learn that they’re actually needed to rescue a princess–to stop a war with a fate worse than death.
This was one of Marvel’s lesser titles, so frequently switched writers and artists, but they’re all pretty solid. It’s fun seeing the contrivances used to get Ben and the guest stars involved in whatever’s going on, and which obscure villains the writers picked to revive. One story is even titled “Does Anyone Remember…the Hijacker?”
Content note: Superhero violence; several people die, most notably when “living vampire” Morbius is the guest star.
This isn’t Marvel’s best, most essential stuff, but is good old-fashioned Marvel Comics, and well worth checking out at your local library for a trip down memory lane.
