Someone recently commented that they got a kick out of Stan Lee running a credit on the splash page thanking the publishers of Spider-Man for allowing the use or loan of the character to guest-star in the pages of the FF, etc.
"Spider-Man appears by kind permission of the publishers of "The Amazing Spider-Man" magazine", etc.
That started me thinking about other sly or not so subtle references or plugs for other Marvel magazines that occurred in the early issues of Marvel's Silver Age. Before the notorious footnotes that referenced specific issue numbers, whether in that title or from another series.
(I used to love those, because they helped me figure out what was going on in the issues that were not in my collection, or that I had missed. Starting buying Marvels in the spring of 1966, it was difficult, if not impossible to find back issues, and other kids who have sold their books on yard sales or at school white elephant sales would have hit or miss issues available. But it was THE QUEST to find and fill in the missing issues or story elements from, say, the prior three years that really hooked me into Marvel Comics. That, and reading Stan's bullpen page, letters pages and feeling like we were all part of a giant fan club of his... a calculated intent on his part that worked!)
Anyway, one of the most vivid examples of this cross-promotion of titles occurs in Fantastic Four #2, when Reed shows clippings from "Journey into Mystery" and "Strange Tales" to the skrulls to convince them that Earth had impressive defenses against the Skrulls.
At the time, I only knew that "Journey into Mystery" was frontlined by Thor....and "Strange Tales" was a split book between Dr. Strange and Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD but had one time had Human Torch stories as well.
So, references to monsters or sci fi was puzzling to me at the time.
Can anyone help id the images or concepts that are shown as examples in FF#2, page 18, panels 1, 2 & 3? The images are of Crab-like monsters (Mole Man's creatures?) that walk upright in panel 1 as "Earth's most powerful Warriors. Panel 2 has an example of "thousands of those hidden space mines"... and Panel 3 shows "an army of giant monstrous insects" (probably ants).
Were these concepts (if not images redrawn) taken from actual issues? Or am I looking too deep for actual references in a light fantasy story?
(Remember, the resolution to this story, or non-resolution in some opinions, forms the basis for not only the opening of the Kree-Skrull war, but also the recent Secret Invasion that just dominated the entire Marvel line-up for the last seven or eight years. Don't dismiss this seminal story too quickly!)
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Sorry but I don't recognize the images. I don't think they're real.
Unless the FF are cartoons in their own universe, Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales must have been movie magazines on their world, probably similar to Famous Monsters of Filmland, instead of comic books.
I think the original premise was that the Skrulls apparently had no visual media on their planet, and therefore, were unable to distinguish comic book fantasy illustrations from photographs of actual creatures. One would think a race of shapeshifters would be more visually acute, and not less, but whatever. Once the Skrulls were backdated to have been active on Earth since at least the 1950s (3-D Man, et al), it became increasingly unlikely that they could have been so easily fooled. On the other hand, most of Marvel's 1950s Giant Monsters have been established as actually having existed on Earth-616, so I supposed there was now no trickery involved in the original story at all--Earth really had repulsed all those aliens & monsters by the time the FF met the Skrulls!
"Spider-Man appears by kind permission of the publishers of "The Amazing Spider-Man" magazine" sounded better than "I'm Stan Lee, and I approve of my characters meeting each other!"