Thursday, June 22, 2017

100 Days Of The King - Day 33


The Sub-Mariner created by Bill Everett is in many ways Marvel's most fascinating character. A half-human, half-Atlantean monarch mutant who is impossibly strong, durable and can fly to boot thanks to his handy dandy ankle wings. He's always been a complex personality, filled with rage at the weird and complicated circumstances of his birth which isolated him within his community. His rage as resulted in him attacking the surface world many times, oftentimes alone, but sometimes with a literal army in tow.


When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby revived the Sea King in the pages of Fantastic Four, it not only gave us back one of Marvel's finest characters but gave the Fab 4 one of their best and most complicated opponents. Jack Kirby seemed to love to draw Namor as these images attest. Kirby's Subby is less lithe and kinetic than Everett's magnificent template, but I think somehow a bit more noble.

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2 comments:

  1. How could Namor possibly fly with those tiny wings ?? But I suppose anything is believable in the world of comics :)

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    1. I don't know the answer, but I bet you Mark Gruenwald and his associates had an answer in the old Handbooks of the Marvel Universe series. I just read an old issue in which he absorbed water like a sponge and then exuded it like a fire hydrant. Weird.

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