Strange Tales 73

In this issue:

Grottu, King of the Insects!
6 pages :: Jack Kirby/Bill Everett
reprinted in Strange Tales Annual 1, Where Monsters Dwell 3, Monster Masterworks

I have a question, Why did Marvel unleash two very similar characters so close to each other, namely Grottu and Krang?

How about a story where they team up and then possibly turn on each other or are defeated by a common enemy?

How about both being brought back to life at the same time to serve a common master, i.e. The Mad Thinker?

What do I think?!? Why my poor noggin is spinning over the possibilities! Imagine the next Spider-Man movie featuring our favorite wall crawler facing off against the towering Krang as he attempts to take over the world with an army of gargantuan bugs. And why not involve the Mad Thinker just to sweeten the pot?

As for Stan and Jack's reuse of the giant ant theme, it makes perfect sense to build upon an initial idea. Poor Grottu only got 6 pages and was downed by a bunch of itty bitty brethren. Krang appeared 10 months later and got a full 13 pager before getting ground into paste. I have to admit, though, that I liked the idea of Grottu being the accidental result of secret commie nuclear testing.

I loved the giant ants! It reminds me of a funny story in a recent JK Collector. In an interview Kirby was asked how he envisioned giant ants so well. He replied to the effect of “you should have seen the size of the bugs iin my apartment when I was a kid!”

If you read many of these monster comics, you see frequent recycling of themes, sometimes with minimal changes. “Bruttu” and “The Brute That Walks”, for example, are the same story with slightly different endings.
Although the monsters are different, the stories about Colossus (the statue who later became known as It the Living Colossus) and Grogg (the orange dragon) are also very similar to that of Fin Fang Foom (the green dragon): freedom fighter tricks rampaging monster into smashing the Commies.

These may have been cases of “Oh, I had a better idea how to handle this theme”, but more likely it was just “Readership turnover is so rapid, we don't care”! I have noticed that some of the '60s non-monster stories are minor retellings of some of Lee's '50s “suspense” stories.

GROTTU! KING OF THE INSECTS is a cool story. One thing that I noticed as a kid about the pre-superhero Marvel comic books is that the covers were always better than the inside stories. The monsters rarely looked the same on the inside as the cover artwork, and most of the time, the monster was more sinister on the cover. As soon as you looked at the splash page, you could see that the creature was different, and sometimes, that made me mad, as I was a big fan of the early Marvel covers. I collected a lot of different comic books as a kid, but nothing matched the Marvel cover artwork, and the pre-superhero covers were the best. One major disappointment as a kid: I thought that FIN FANG FOOM should have remained green like the cover art, but he became orange on the inside pages. No matter what color, monsters such as GROTTU & FIN FANG FOOM still rule after all these years!

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