Journey Into Mystery 86

On The Trail of The Tomorrow Man

by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber & Jack Kirby

"I'm happy to play a part in keeping the free world strong and secure against the forces of tyranny" 

-Thor

The year is 2262. Earth has progressed to the point where they have no need of weapons. War is a foreign concept here. As the people joyfully fly through the air on their hovercrafts, one man is not happy. He is a scientist named Zarrko. Life in this peaceful future has grown too boring for him. Constructing earth's only time travel device, Zarrko prepares to carry out his plan. He uses a time scope device he's invented to view previous eras. Spying on the modern age (1962) he discovers that mankind was using atomic bombs back then.

On a US military testing site, the mighty Thor is helping the military conduct new research. First by outracing an anti-missile missile. Then they start to set off a cobalt bomb right next to him. Thor claims he can bear the brunt of it's blast. As they start to countdown to the explosion, Zarrko in his time machine appears out of nowhere. The soldiers halt the countdown and in the ensuing confusion Zarrko makes off with the cobalt bomb. With a toss of Mjolnir, Thor nicks some of the metal off of the time machine before it can fully dissipate.

Thor tracks down the Tomorrow Man. With an okay from the military, Thor takes the bit of metal from the time machine with him. He flies from the desert to a high mountaintop. Up there he uses his hammer to create a thunderstorm. In the midst of the storm, the thunder god summons his father, all-seeing Odin. Odin's head appears in the sky before his son. Thor asks Odin if he will permit him the ability to breech the barriers of time to follow the intruder Zarrko. Under Odin's command, Thor attaches the shrapnel to Mjolnir and spins it around as a time compass. Odin reminds Thor that the power to travel through the 4th dimension of time is always with him as long as he has that hammer. Thor dissipates.

Appearing in the future time of 2262, Thor quickly has a following among a crowd of onlookers. From them, Thor gets the information he needs. Zarrko returned a month before Thor. Since then, he has lorded over the populace with the cobalt bomb. Thor reassures them that he has a plan to defeat this tyrant. The next day, as Thor approaches Zarrko's castle, the scientist has heard of Thor's arrival. Fuming in his headquarters, Zarrko is unsure of how this man has followed him through time. Zarrko commands his guards to go out and deal with him.

Thor puts his plan into action. As the guards ride out on their hovercrafts, a mysterious figure in a gray robe knocks a tree down in their path. As soon as the guards collide with the tree, Thor leads the robed figure into Zarrko's fortress. When they get inside, Zarrko pulls a lever that drops Thor down into a pit of magnetic mirrors. The mirrors pull and fling Thor all over the chamber. Just then the man in the robe reveals himself. It's Thor.

Thor attacks Zarrko. He smashes his magnetic controller with Mjolnir. With the device in pieces, the man who was disguised as Thor in the mirror chamber is now safe. Zarrko confronts Thor with a gun that will shoot him into another dimension. As Thor is shot into this other dimension, he exhales a breath of hurricane force. This pierces the dimensional veil before it can fully close. Thor emerges to chase down a fleeing Zarrko.

Chasing the Tomorrow Man, Thor ends up in a room with giant robots. The robots are able to snatch Thor's hammer from his grip, leaving the thunder god only one minute to execute a plan before he turns back into Don Blake. As the robots encroach him, Thor starts tearing up the floor underneath. With his tremendous strength, Thor quickly finds what he is after, water pipes. He pulls the pipes apart with his hands, which start to flood the room. The water invades the robots' circuits, causing them to short and malfunction. They release Thor's hammer; without a second to spare Thor holds it aloft.

Thor continues his pursuit of the man from tomorrow. With C-Bomb in hand, Zarrko boards a spaceship and takes off. If he can't enslave the world, he'll destroy it instead. Thor summons a raging storm to stop the spaceship. The spaceship is thrashed in the air, forcing the bomb to dislodge and fall out. Thor races the bomb to the ground, like he raced the missiles at the testing ground earlier. Successfully grabbing it, Thor carefully lowers to the ground. Zarrko's landing is not as sound.

As Zarrko crawls from the wreckage, some EMTs gather him up. His memory, by all accounts, seems to be gone. The people of 2262 praise Thor for saving them from the tyranny of Zarrko. Thor says his farewell and takes the cobalt bomb back to 1962. A short time later, as Don Blake, he approaches his nurse Jane Foster. She is reading the newspaper covering Thor's recovery of the bomb. She wishes Don could be less dull and more like Thor. Don wonders if she'll ever figure it out.


Notes:

Here we have the first of many alternate future earths. This one will later be designated as Earth-6297. The earth we are most familiar with in the Marvel Universe is Earth-616. These designations generally (but not always) correspond with the date the comic was published. Earth-616 = 1961, June - Fantastic Four #1's release date. Earth-6297 = 1962, September. (I'm not sure where the 7 comes from, unless it was the exact date of the 7th when it was released.)

More Firsts: appearance of Zarrko, the Tomorrow Man. Mostly a Thor villain. He doesn't show up a whole lot. Also our first major appearance of Odin. He will show up a whole lot. We learn that Thor's hammer has the power to travel through time.

General Cameo ?: This Thor story could be considered the first Marvel crossover. Without going by name, there is a military general (second panel posted, general on the right side) at the testing grounds with Thor who looks a whole lot like General "Thunderbolt" Ross from the Hulk comics. Now given they don't mention him by name, we can't say for certain that this is the first evidence of a shared universe between the titles. But it would make sense if it was a cameo by him.

Attempting to analyze deeper: This story is mostly about Thor's opposition to tyranny, as stated by the quote at the top and his need to stop Zarrko. There's also a motif that shows up about racing against time; Thor races against the missiles at the testing site. He races against Zarrko to get the bomb back. He loses his hammer against the robots and has his race against his own humanity. Then he races the bomb itself before it can hit the ground.

The List

1. Amazing Fantasy (Spider-Man) #15
2. Fantastic Four #1
3. Fantastic Four #4
4. Incredible Hulk #1
5. Fantastic Four #5
6. Amazing Adult Fantasy (X-Men) #14
7. Fantastic Four #6
8. Journey into Mysetry (Thor) #85
9. Journey into Mystery (Thor) #83
10. Fantastic Four #2
11. Journey into Mystery (Thor) #86
12. Tales to Astonish (Ant-Man) #36
13. Tales to Astonish (Ant-Man) #35
14. Journey into Mystery (Thor) #84
15. Tales to Astonish (Ant-Man) #27
16. Fantastic Four #3
17. Incredible Hulk #2
18. Fantastic Four #7
19. Incredible Hulk #3
20. Strange Tales #101

Next Time: The Human Torch is put in a battle of wits when he faces The Wizard.

Fantastic Four 5

Prisoners of Doctor Doom!
by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby

"Fantastic Four!!! Heed my words! This is Doctor Doom!!" -Doctor Doom

In a castle far away from New York, a man in an iron suit and dark green tunic vows to defeat the Fantastic Four and make them his pawns. He then takes off in a sharkcopter to their headquarters.

The Fantastic Four are battling among themselves inside the Baxter Building. Johnny Storm is reading the first issue of Incredible Hulk. When he points out how the Hulk remind him of the Thing, Thing naturally loses his temper and snatches the comic. Johnny responds by igniting his hand and burning the comic as well as Thing. Reed and Sue manage to calm their quarrel when suddenly the lights go out. An asbestos net drops over the building and the man in the sharkcopter announces his presence, "Fantastic Four!!! Heed my words! This is Doctor Doom!!"

Reed Richards recognizes Doom's voice. When he was in college there was a student named Victor von Doom who had an interest in the occult. He also had a brilliant mind for science like Reed himself. Doom created a device against the university's wishes to attempt to contact the netherworld. He failed however and the device blew up in his face. Doom was expelled. The last Reed had heard he was in Tibet searching for more mystical secrets.

Doctor Doom calls for Sue to come out first as his hostage. Thing grabs for the net, but is immediately electrocuted. Sue complies and once on board Doctor Doom's sharkcopter, the rest of the group follow. Doom imprisons them in a cage dangling from the copter and carries them all back to his castle. Once they are inside the castle, Johnny, Thing and Reed stand before Doom in his throne as he has Sue off to the side. His pet tiger glaring at all of them. Doom explains that he has invented a time machine. He wants the three of them to go back to pirate times and steal Blackbeard's treasure for him. He must remain behind to man the time machine and he's keeping Sue hostage to insure their success. With Doom pressing a button, the three men vanish from the platform they are standing on.

The male members of the FF have 48 hours to find and procure Blackbeard's treasure. They stumble upon two pirates arguing over a bundle of clothes. Thing rushes out to scare them off and Johnny and Reed go through the clothes so they can look the part. Once they have disguised themselves, they make way to the nearest bar to make a plan. As they do, some other pirates drug their drinks and shanghai them back to their ship.

Some hours later Thing awakes in the cabin of a ship headed out to sea. He bursts up through the floorboards of the deck and starts battling everyone on board. Reed and Johnny are roused by the commotion and quickly join their partner. Suddenly another ship loaded with loot starts firing cannons at them. They presume it may be Blackbeard and the Torch flames on to take on the attacking ship.

The Fantastic Four confront Blackbeard. While the Torch assaults the enemy ship, Mr. Fantastic stretches between the two vessels, creating a bridge for the pirates to march across. Thing tears off the mast and leads the pirates in their attack. With the foes defeated, the pirates declare Thing their leader, Blackbeard. While this is going on, Reed and Johnny have found a treasure chest and since the ship now belongs to "Blackbeard" it's just what they need. However, Reed replaces the jewels in the chest with a chain to fool Doom. Thing then announces that he is going to stay behind where he is accepted among people.

When Reed and Johnny protest, Thing gets his men to wrap them up in sails and forces them onto a lifeboat. Just then a storm hits them out of nowhere, completely demolishing the ship. They all wash ashore on a deserted island with the treasure chest, just in time for Doctor Doom's time machine to finish it's 48 hour circuit and pull the three men back to the modern day of 1962. After Doom welcomes them back, he seizes the treasure chest while explaining that the jewels inside have mystical properties for they once belonged to the ancient sorcerer Merlin. Outraged at finding only the chains, Doom attacks them. Thing clobbers Doom, but the figure explodes for it was only a robot. From the ceiling a surveillance orb descends and the real Doom locks them inside a chamber that he is quickly robbing of oxygen.

Doctor Doom is so engrossed with the three men, he forgets all about Sue. She quickly turns invisible and manages to short circuit the chamber computer so that it blows up right in Doom's face. The Invisible Girl races to the chamber before her partners suffocate. She hits a button to lift the door to the chamber. Reed unties her still bound wrists and the four of them are finally back together. Stretching out of a barred window, Reed ties himself around the bars and grabs onto a boulder across the castle's moat. He tenses himself to the point where the castle wall gives way and the other three can escape. Human Torch tries a new trick where he burns at an atomic intensity so that he can make the moat water solidify so his sister and Thing can cross without worrying about the crocodiles.

With the Four escaped, the Torch encircles the castle with his flame in order to smoke out Doctor Doom. Doctor Doom uses a jet pack to fly out of his castle. Johnny gives chase, but his flame quickly dies down from all the previous activity and like Sub-Mariner before, Doctor Doom escapes.

Notes:

Reed Richards shows that he's not just scientifically smart, but he can outwit his opponents too. We also learn a bit about his history, that he went to college. The same college as Doctor Doom. That they are peers.

Sue Storm show yet again how capable she is. She is the only one of the entire team to actually hurt the real Doom when she blows that computer up in his face and then she saves everyone. She is relegated yet again as the hostage as she was in the last couple stories.

Johnny Storm doesn't have a whole lot to do in this story. His fighting and bickering with Thing has gotten a tad tamer and more lighthearted. He is reading a copy of Incredible Hulk #1, which we'll later learn that Marvel Comics are indeed published within the Marvel Universe.

The Thing is still feeling incredibly lonely and alienated. He goes so far as to wanting to stay behind during pirate times where he is accepted, he casts the friends he does have away.

Doctor Doom's desire for Merlin's jewels seems a little inconsistent with him. My head-cannon for this is that Doom merely wanted to test his time machine, but in case it didn't work right he used the FF as his guinea pigs. The castle he is in in this issue is not in Latveria, it's supposed to be in upper New York somewhere.

Notes:

After the jewels are lost at sea, Johnny worries if the Sub-Mariner should one day get them. As far as I know nothing has ever come of this and it's just a reminder that Sub-Mariner is still a threat to the group.

This is the first introduction of both magic and time travel in the Marvel Universe. Both things which become very significant as the world continues to expand.

The List

1. Fantastic Four #1
2. Fantastic Four #4
3. Incredible Hulk #1
4. Fantastic Four #5
5. Amazing Adult Fantasy (X-Men) #14
6. Fantastic Four #2
7. Tales to Astonish (Ant-Man) #27
8. Fantastic Four #3
9. Incredible Hulk #2