Journey Into Mystery #63 - Dec 60
     "Gigantus" - Stan Lee & Jack Kirby with Dick Ayers
Strange Tales #73 - Feb 60
     "Grottu, King of the Insects!" - Stan Lee & Jack Kirby and Bill Everett
Tales Of Suspense #28 - Apr 62
     "Titan, the Amphibian From Atlantis!" - Stan Lee & Jack Kirby with Dick Ayers
Strange Tales #89 - Oct 61
     "Fin Fang Foom!" - Stan Lee & Jack Kirby with Dick Ayers

Review/plot: These are Ancient Menaces, some of whom can clearly interpreted as Deviants. Great, crazy stories. It gets to be a bit much reading them all at once, but they're still a lot of fun.

The highlight is obviously Fin Fang Foom.

You have to love that he's wearing boxer shorts. He'll eventually be colored the standard Marvel villain colors, green with purple accents. But he's orange in the original story.

His power is such that he can snap the Great Wall of China like a bull-whip.

Foom's story is that he's an ancient sleeping dragon, awoken briefly by an anti-Communist and led on a goose chase around China, causing destruction before he's eventually put back to sleep. It'll later turn out that Foom is an alien. It's a complicated backstory! The guy who wakes up him is Liuchow Chan (he's called Chan Liuchow in this story, based on the Chinese practice of putting surnames first). Liuchow is half-American, half-Chinese. Years later, he will join an obscure group called The Legion of Night.

Fin Fang Foom will later be colored green, but he's orange here. Like a lot of monsters in this section, actually. Foom is green on the cover.

Grottu, on the other hand is your basic giant ant.

What's interesting about him is they way he's killed. He's covered in sugar and devoured by his own ant army. Gruesome!

The character who defeats Grottu will be revealed in Roger Stern's Marvel Universe comic to be Ulysses Bloodstone.

A word regarding the story from Journey Into Mystery #63: The creature's name (and the title of the story) was originally "Goliath, the Monster That Walks Like A Man!", but the creature's name was changed to "Gigantus" when it was reprinted in Where Monsters Dwell #10 (Thanks to the awesome Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe for that info). My trade paperback reprint keeps the name from Where Monsters Dwell.

In any event, Gigantus is a giant fish-man from "the sunken continent of Atlantis". In later appearances, this will turn out to actually be Mu, or Lemuria, the Deviant city destroyed by Celestials. He's been sent to the surface as an advance scout for an invasion. He's rather polite about it.

The humans trick him by building a giant fake robot and pretending he's an alien invader.

Gigantus is sort of overshadowed by Fin Fang Foom in this collection, but he's another monster that made it out of the Monster Age to appear in mainstream super-hero comics. So congrats to him.

Titan is also a big orange fish-man from Atlantis.

To my knowledge, no attempt has been made to reconcile all of these Atlantis-es with the Sub-Mariner's.

Quality Rating: B

Historical Significance Rating: 4 - First appearance of Fin Fang Foom, first Gigantus

Chronological Placement Considerations: Monster Age! See the note at the Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe above which makes an argument saying that this appearance of Gigantus should actually come after his appearance in Marvel Universe #7 due to a tangential relationship relating to Marvel: The Lost Generation #2. But neither i nor the MCP (judging by their Dr. Druid entry) agree with their placement of Marvel Universe vs. Marvel: The Lost Generation. Plus, you know what? It doesn't really matter.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Monster Masterworks

"To my knowledge, no attempt has been made to reconcile all of these Atlantis-es with the Sub-Mariner's."

Part of my brain wants to say that the official Marvel stance on Atlantis is that it really existed as the standard "above-the-seas, super-advanced society, hubris, etc, sunk-beneath-the-waves" mythological version, and that it sunk during a war with Lemuria (ie, the Deviant homeland). And that "Homo Mermanus" (ie, Namor's people) found the ruins a very long time later and rebuilt them into their undersea kingdom.

If that's the case, then it would be easy to assume that other groups could easily have found other ruined parts or outposts which were part of "Atlantis" and just used the name, leading to multiple unconnected Atlantises (Atlantii?).

Sort of like if North America sunk, and some merpeople rebuilt New York into an undersea kingdom while some aliens dredged Los Angeles back out of the ocean and rebuilt it while at the same time it turned out that Denver never fully sank and still exists as an island with the descendants of the original inhabitants, and all three places are called "America".

"The world has not heard the last of Fin Fang Foom and his awesome underpants!"