Written by Stan Lee – Penciled by Jack Kirby – Inked by George Klein – Lettered by Art Simek

A cosmic accident transforms four astronauts — and quietly launches a new era at Marvel.

This is an issue I’ve probably read a dozen times in various reprints, but I realized I hadn’t actually sat with it in nearly twenty years. Reading it now feels different. Less like “the birth of the Marvel Universe” and more like something raw and slightly unhinged trying to figure itself out in real time.

One thing that really struck me this time: they are all menaces.

Reed fires a flare into the sky, and each of them has to use their powers in disruptive, destructive ways just to regroup. Ben smashes through walls. Sue causes panic. Johnny quite literally sets the sky on fire.

They aren’t polished heroes. They’re volatile. It feels less like a triumphant team debut and more like a public disturbance unfolding across New York.

And visually? They haven’t quite settled that yet either. These aren’t costumed heroes. They’re monsters and scientist. Early Ben isn’t the brick-patterned icon we know — he’s lumpy, uneven, almost melted in places. More creature than character design. Johnny doesn’t look like a man on fire so much as fire vaguely shaped like a man. Even Reed smoking a pipe while chaos erupts around him feels like he’s modeled after every 1950s B-movie intellectual tasked with saving the world. Sue, meanwhile, sometimes reads less like a superhero and more like a 1961 society debutante who wandered into the wrong genre — which makes the tone even stranger.

The coloring also jumps out in a way I don’t remember noticing before. There’s a campy, almost horror-comic atmosphere to the underground sequences with the Mole Man. It leans closer to 1950s monster pulp than the superhero mythology Marvel would later build.

And then there’s the storytelling logic — or lack of it. The Mole Man simply develops his subterranean powers and command over monsters. No long explanation. No scientific grounding. The book moves too fast to worry about plausibility.

That looseness is part of the charm. You can feel something forming, even if it hasn’t quite crystallized yet. The bickering, the powers, and the tone shifts between monster story and super powered explorers hint at what is to come.

But it is still in its infancy. A superhero comic from a company that doesn’t do superhero comics. In a way, that dichotomy makes the whole book feel like a Frankenstein’s monster version of what Marvel had been publishing up to that point — stitched together from its parts. There’s monsters (Mole Man and his underground creatures). There’s horror (Ben’s transformation and volatility). There’s science fiction (cosmic rays and reckless experimentation). And there’s even a touch of romance comic energy in how Sue is written.

The whole thing is a little messy and disjointed, but it feels like the beginning of something that hasn’t decided what it is yet.

They’re monsters without a home.

Marvel in the 60s – Entry #1