FIRE!

A Tale of the Marvel Universe

by DarkMark

Part 2

All right. I've just told you about what happened that first year...most of it, anyway. The Fantastic Four. The Hulk. Dr. Doom. Sub-Mariner. Me. But there were other heroes, and other villains. And if people thought the whole super-hero thing was going to fade out after a year or so, 1963 proved 'em wrong.

There were a few other independent heroes by that year. Two of 'em worked together. They were Ant-Man and the Wasp. Like me, they had insect-type names. Unlike me, they were insect-sized. Ant-Man was Henry Pym, a biochemist whose first wife had escaped from behind the Iron Curtain. That was what we called the division between Commieland and the Free World. The Pyms were dumb enough to go back on a visit to her homeland. She thought nobody would recognize her. She was wrong. She got abducted by KGB guys, and everyone thought they killed her. Pym got bashed over the head, woke up in the American embassy, and swore to track down the guys that got her.

He couldn't do it. He went back home and worked on his projects: a shrinking gas, and a device to communicate with insects, specifically ants.

By the time some Russian agents broke into the place where he and some others were working on something else, he'd already tried the shrinking serum, found out it worked, and had a really hairy time of it inside an ant hill. Since then, he'd perfected the helmet that let him talk to ants, and made a steel-mesh costume to protect himself from stings and bites. At that size, you could bet those things might've been fatal.

As it was, he turned into Ant-Man, and rallied an army of ants to help him take down the Commies. Oh, so that sounds funny to you, youngster? Suppose I take you out and sit you in the middle of an ant bed. And those critters won't even be under intelligent direction, the way Pym's were. Now you get it? If you see a wave of those little buggers crawling across the floor at you, surging up your legs, stinging the hell out of you all the way...yeah, you get the picture.

So Ant-Man was getting back at the Reds with red ants, and black ones, too...he had to keep 'em separate, 'cause they made war on each other. He decided to turn into a part-time super-hero. Fought some bad guys. Later on, he met with a girl named Janet Van Dyne, whose dad was a scientist. He got killed by an alien he'd attracted to Earth. Jan went to Hank Pym for help. He told her he was the Ant-Man, gave her a hormone injection that let her sprout wings and antennae when she shrunk, and turned her into the Wasp. They got the alien, and they went on to fight a bunch of other bad guys. Later on, Hank Pym found out an overdose of the gas he used to enlarge himself to normal could turn him into a giant, so he called himself Giant-Man when he did that.

He had a bunch of other names over the years, and a bunch of other costumes. Called himself Goliath, and then Yellowjacket. I know it's confusing, youngsters, but by '72 he was back to being Ant-Man. The Wasp just stayed the Wasp, and they got married in '69. It was a long time before I could get used to her. Spiders 'n' wasps, you know...it just was.

Then there was Thor. I mean, you talk about impressive. This guy was the ne plus ultraissimo of super-heroes. He was so strong, every time he associated with us, it must've been like slumming. Thor was a real-live Norse god. The god of thunder. I mean, I didn't believe it at first, but he convinced me after seeing him in action. He was built like Charles Atlas would've fantasized about being, long blonde hair, winged steel helmet, red cape, blue suit, big yellow boots, plus a hammer that could smash down a mountain when he threw it. He was every bit as strong as the Hulk, but he was a good guy, and that was lucky for us, believe me.

I learned a long time afterward what some of his backstory was. Evidently his dad, who was called Odin and was the head honcho in Asgard, where the Norse gods lived, decided he needed a lesson one day. Don't ask me what for, maybe he just interrupted too much, like you, sonnyboy. And don't you giggle too much, darling, or I'll take you with me next time I walk across the ceiling.

Now, then: evidently Odin made Thor into a regular human guy, and he stayed that way until he went to Norway one time, met some aliens--yeah, there were a lot of aliens back then. Aliens, supervillains, and Commies. Just couldn't have gotten along without 'em. The trinity, we used to call 'em. Anyway, he got chased by some aliens, found something that turned into Thor's hammer and turned him into Thor, and he ended up chasing the aliens away. Then he came back to the States and set up shop as a super-hero. This kind of attracted some other business, because his half-brother Loki, who was the god of evil, decided to come down here and harass him. Thor kind of divided his time between Earth and Asgard. Everytime he got bored fighting one kind of bad guy, he switched places and fought another kind. It was real convienient, especially since all he had to do to travel was swing his hammer a certain way.

Then there was Iron Man. I never really got all the straight skinny on him. He was the bodyguard of Tony Stark, and he wore mechanized armor full of weapons and boot-jets and repulsor rays from his hands and all sorts of other stuff. When he had the armor on, he was powerful enough to trade punches with the Hulk, as long as he didn't take too many himself. Evidently he had something to do with Stark when the guy went to the Nam in early '63 to test some weapons. Stark tripped over a boobytrap, took some grenade shrapnel in the chest, and got captured and patched up by the Viet Cong. They wanted him to build weapons for them.

Instead, he built the armor, gave it to a guy who'd been taken prisoner with him, and turned the guy into Iron Man. They got out of Nam together, after they killed the Commie that took 'em prisoner. Then, just like Thor, Iron Man started fighting bad guys in the States. A lot of 'em were Reds, and no wonder. Stark paid him to be his bodyguard, and he did a good job of it, I'd say.

All four of them got together one day to fight the Hulk, who'd been framed up by Loki. That's Thor's bad-guy brother, remember? He wanted to lure Thor back to Asgard for a rematch. Well, once things got sorted out, the five of 'em decided to start a team, and called themselves the Avengers. They never stayed still very long...the Hulk cut out pretty soon afterward...but they were the Big Guns as far as superheroes went. Thanks to Thor and Iron Man and a few others, they made other super-teams look anemic.

I got invited to join 'em a few years later. I turned 'em down. Why? It's a long story, kids. Remind me to tell you, someday.

The same month the Avengers were formed, another group of heroes showed up. Only this team wasn't a bunch of independent operators coming together. We had no idea these guys even existed before this, and here were five of them, plus one guy behind the scenes. What brought it about was a really tough bad guy named Magneto. He was what you called a mutant, with inborn super-powers...his was magnetic force. All by himself, he took a missle base over. But these five teenagers in black and yellow costumes turned up, called themselves the X-Men, and asked to get a crack at him. They drove him off, which was pretty fitting, 'cause they were mutants, too.

Back then, the X-Men were made up of Cyclops, the Angel, Iceman, the Beast, and Marvel Girl. The guy who bossed 'em was a Daddy Warbucks type called Professor X. He was a mutant, and a telepath. The X-Men didn't go in much for solo stuff, they worked as a team. They were kind of like in-training heroes. Mostly, they fought mutants. They kept things in-house like that for awhile. Yes, I met them. I met everybody, youngster.

There was also a guy called Dr. Strange. We didn't know much about him. He didn't advertise. He didn't fight super-villains. He was a magician. I met him first when I got involved in a case against this wizard called Xandu, and...well, it was a pretty creepy case. Doc and I took the guy down, and we did pretty well together. But we didn't associate much afterwards, which was fine by me. Strange gave me the creeps.

And that's the way it was, back in '63. There were lots of heroes, and lots of villains to fight 'em. The Fantastic Four even got to the moon. They tied with Ivan Kragoff, which didn't please the government very much. Reed wouldn't turn over his spacecraft design to the government, so they had to keep on with their own project to get to the moon. They didn't manage it till 1969.

But, heck. We lived for the battles. All of us did. We fought crooks and super-villains and Commies and guys from outer space. We all lived in New York City, except for the Hulk, and we all met each other at one time or another. We thought it could go on forever.

We thought there was nothing a super-hero couldn't handle.

Wrong.

On November 22nd of that year, President Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, made that trip to Dallas, Texas, to drum up some votes. I'd never met him, but Iron Man and some of the others had. I was in school when we heard the news over the PA system.

They told us that he'd just been shot.

Then we found out he'd been killed.

How could something happen to him in Dallas?

There weren't any super-heroes down there to protect him.

There weren't any super-villains down there we needed to protect him from.

There wasn't any battle, even. Just some shots one day, and one shot a day later.

The guy who did it wasn't even much of a Commie. The Russians wouldn't even have thought of using a loser like him. He wasn't the Crimson Dynamo or the Destroyer or the Radioactive Man or the Red Ghost. He was just a little punk in a lousy job who'd managed to buy himself a rifle.

And he killed President Kennedy.

There wasn't anything we could do about it.

I didn't exactly have phone numbers of the other guys in the business. A lot of them had secret identities, just like me. But I talked with 'em later, and we all pretty much had the same reaction. It was as if we'd betrayed our trust, somehow. Even though there wasn't anything, anything at all, we could have done about it.

We had all those powers. We could change the weather, knock down brick walls, fly, stretch ourselves, turn invisible, walk up walls, change our size, do magic...and none of it was any good against that.

Iron Man was really hurt, because, like I said, he'd met Kennedy personally, with Stark. The X-Men were shaken, because they were mutants, they were always afraid that normal people would turn on them, and something like this seemed to yank a lot more solid ground out from under them.

For a week or two, there wasn't much heroing around New York.

Then the super-villains started showing up again, like Sub-Mariner, the Hulk--he was a bad guy again--the Mole Man, and, in my case, the Living Brain. We had to saddle up and do our numbers. It was kind of like therapy. We got back into the groove, but we all knew the truth from then on: that there would be some things we just couldn't handle.

Some cases in which power wouldn't be enough.

Not long after the assassination, someone seemed to come back from the dead. It was like an exchange. This time, we got Captain America. The real Captain America, not any of the substitutes who'd worn his costume in the late Forties and Fifties. Cap had been frozen in an iceberg since 1945, and the Avengers found him, thawed him out, and brought him back to America. Cops cried at the sight of him when he showed up in New York. We thought he'd been gone for ten years. It turned out to be almost twenty.

Cap became an Avenger in short order. If there's anybody that symbolized the good in America more than him, I've never met him. But there was something else about him. Two things, actually.

First, he'd failed to save his partner, Bucky, from getting killed. That happened in the same incident that got Cap frozen. Eventually, Cap tracked down the Nazi responsible for it, and made him pay for it. But he never really got over it. There was some part of Cap that never stopped living in World War II, before Bucky's death, and that same part wouldn't let him get close enough to somebody who might get killed the same way.

Second, he really had a burden on his shoulders with the American symbol thing. Literally, Cap was unable to accept himself messing up. Because if Captain America was seen screwing up, doing anything badly, blowing a mission, it would almost be seen as America screwing up...that's not the way I thought, but it was the way Cap saw it. So he held himself to impossible standards. And he almost always met them. Almost. He was the best man to have on your side at any time. But I never envied him. Not a single day.

Then there was Daredevil. Ol' Hornhead showed up about a month after Cap returned. He was a loner super-hero, like me. He didn't seem to have any powers, but he could duke it out with the best of 'em. He could do acrobatic tricks like nobody's business, and he did them without benefit of spider-powers or the Beast's mutant abilities. We first met up when a creep called the Ringmaster blew into town, and he helped get me out of a hypnotic spell. We worked together a few times after that. If I'd ever wanted a steady partner, DD would have been my first choice.

Am I boring you kids yet? Well, let me tell you something without super-heroes. It happened that summer.

Two U.S. destroyers in Viet Nam were fired upon. We're not sure by whom, but it's a pretty good guess it was the North Vietnamese. We sunk two North Viet PT boats and bombed their bases. Lyndon Johnson was president by that time. He asked the Congress to give him power to escalate the war, our participation in it. They did, with maybe one dissenting vote.

We were into the Sixties, kids. For real.

Do you still want to hear about super-heroes? There weren't too many new ones after that, for awhile.

Three old super-villains saw the light, became heroes, and signed up as new Avengers when the old guard left. They were Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and the Scarlet Witch. You didn't know they'd been bad guys? Read your history books.

Then there was SHIELD. I bring them up because a lot of us super-types had dealings with them. They were a worldwide spy organization based in America, the Supreme Headquarters for International Espionage and Law-enforcement Divisions. They weren't super-heroes, just some secret agency run by a World War II vet named Nick Fury. They fought a bunch of bad guys called Hydra. Hydra agents wore costumes, so maybe they were super-villains...I don't know.

That was how we occupied our time. In the Nam, they had other ways of doing things...killing, and getting killed, and hearing the leaders back in the States talk about light at the end of the tunnel. The problem was that nobody knew how long that tunnel went. Or how far down.

I was draft bait back then, but I didn't have to go. I was lucky. Some of my friends, including Flash Thompson, weren't. Yeah, Flash and I more or less patched things up afterward. Not the best of friends, but not really enemies. So.

Then came the Fire.

It started, near as I can remember, back in '65.

In Watts, black men vented their frustration with a white system. Remember, integration hadn't gotten very far then, and for a lot of people, it was just too little, too late. Most of us white people had no idea what a black man's life was like. Now, we were getting a forcible education.

They burned. They burned Watts.

People rioted. People got shot. It was the opening act...

The fire...the fire.

Watts was a long way from New York City. Some of the heroes wanted to go down there and offer their services to the cops. I wasn't one of them, since I was local, not national. But that very week, Mayor John Lindsay got in touch with the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and even the X-Men. That last he had to go through the FBI to do, because the X'ers had some agency connections. But he got Captain America, Thor, Reed Richards, the Thing, Iron Man, and Cyclops into his office, and he laid down the law.

The Feds said that they didn't want any super-hero involvement in Watts, or other political situations.

The authorities were having a hard enough time keeping things contained as it was. All super-heroes at the time were white. They had enough ties to government as it was...some of them had to, in order to keep operating...and the guys in charge thought that it'd look like Uncle Sam was unleashing a bunch of super-powered running dogs on the rioters, if they got involved.

The guys couldn't believe it. Thor protested that he could stop the burning just by stamping his hammer enough times. But Reed Richards told him that'd only work for so long. Then Reed asked what'd happen if the dissent spread to New York City.

Hizzoner said that if and when it happened, they'd rely on New York's Finest to keep order. The heroes were supposed to take care of the super-villains, Lindsay said. The city government, and the cops, would take care of the city.

There wasn't a lot more they could say. Not if they wanted to stay in good with the government, and, considering our vigilante status, that was always a tricky thing. So they left, and they let the rest of the heroic community know what had gone down. Some of 'em even thought that the Puppet Master had gotten to the mayor, but that wasn't the case. I heard about it from a story in the Daily Bugle.

I hadn't planned on getting involved in California, like I said. But now it seemed like even my hands were tied...and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Even Thor couldn't fight City Hall.

So we did our jobs. There were always super-villains to fight, and we fought them. We could save the world on a regular basis.

But we couldn't do much of anything to save America.

It would have to save itself.

A lot of change came down under Lyndon Johnson, or despite him. The Sixties were like one big pressure cooker. If you were young, you were facing the draft...facing Viet Nam. If you were nonwhite, you were starting to resist a system that was keeping you under. If you were white, you were threatened by those same resistors. There were people talking about making violent revolution against the government, overthrowing it. There were some people who were more than talking about it.

All over the nation, the fire spread. More cities went up in flames. More protests against the War, a lot of 'em getting violent...on both sides. More kids, barely out of high school, getting cut down like unripe wheat in Nam. Revolutionary talk, revolutionary action. Mainstream American kids, getting into drugs on a large scale for the first time.

All of this, within ten years of Eisenhower.

All over the nation, people wondering if the country could just hold together...and not at all certain that it could.

Killing was going on everywhere. But we only seemed to notice it when the victims had familiar names. Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy...they were just the most visible ones.

The fire. The fire claimed them all.

How could this be happening in America, we wondered?

How long would there be an America, we wondered?

How long would the Fire burn?

Dick Nixon got elected on a pledge to bring America together again. He at least kept things running, dampened a few flames here and there, but the stuff kept smouldering. He said he had a secret plan to get us out of the war, and it must've been some secret. Four years of his administration, and we were still in it.

That's talking about 1972. Let me backtrack a bit.

There were a few more heroes by that time. The Inhumans, the Black Panther, the Vision, the Black Knight, the Black Widow, and some that even didn't have the word "black" in their names. The only one who was really black was the Panther, who was an African king. He joined the Avengers. I won't run down all of these guys right now, but I will tell you that somebody else appeared in 1966.

He was the Silver Surfer.

The Surfer was a guy from another world. He was called the Silver Surfer because he was coated all over with some flexible metallic substance that looked like silver, and because he rode a flying surfboard. That's right, a flying surfboard. He had the power to do just about anything he wanted, with this Power Cosmic that Galactus had given him. Yes, that Galactus, the one who came to Earth in 1966 and wanted to eat it. The Surfer was Galactus's herald, his advance man. When he came to Earth, the Surfer got convinced that his boss was really going to do a terrible thing, and he joined with the Fantastic Four to stop him from doing it. They managed it, but Galactus sentenced the Surfer to be bound to Earth for going against him. Since the Surfer came from a really peaceful and humane planet, from what I hear, and since he'd been flying all over the universe looking for planets for Galactus to eat, this was very much like being in prison. Mostly, he tried to stay out of human affairs. Sometimes he couldn't, and he ended up doing super-hero stuff.

Yes, I met him. I told you. I've met everybody.

I haven't told you about many of the super-villains, because there just were too many of them. I had my group of waltzing partners...Doc Ock, the Sandman, Electro, Mysterio, the Kingpin, all the rest. There were lots of others, tons of 'em every month. Mostly old faces, some new ones every time around.

My number one enemy, even though I didn't fight him as much as I did some of the others, was called the Green Goblin.

He wore a green and purple suit that made him sort of look like a goblin, he had gimmicky weapons built into his suit or stowed in his carrying pouch, and he rode a bat-glider that was jet-propelled. For the longest time, I didn't know who he was. But he found out who I was, the only one of my baddies that ever did. And I found out who he was. He was the father of one of my friends, Harry Osborn. His name was Norman Osborn. He caught me one night and he was planning on doing me in. He unmasked before me, told me all the whys and wherefores of his life. But I broke free, and during the fight, he took an electrical shock that gave him amnesia. He forgot all about his Goblin identity. After that, he was a straight-up guy, and my friend.

Except for three other times, when he remembered he was the Goblin again, and I had to fight him.

Back in 1970, I got out of college. So did the girl I loved, and we got married. That was Gwen and me, and her dad, Captain George Stacy, who had been a cop, got to give her away. Aunt May was there to see the wedding. So were Flash, and Harry, and Mr. Osborn, and Betty Brant, and a lot of other folks I knew. But no super-heroes. I was kinda glad of that. I got into grad school, started making ends meet as a teaching assistant and taking photos for J. Jonah Jameson down at the Daily Bugle...I'd been doing that since '63...and Gwen started learning how to be a fashion designer while doing some modelling. No, I will not show you the photos! You're too young yet.

But Captain Stacy died. He...well, he got killed during a fight I had with Dr. Octopus. I tried to save him, but I couldn't manage it. He let me know...his last words to me...he let me know that he knew Spider-Man was really Peter Parker.

Then we buried him. That wasn't a month after the wedding.

I had to tell Gwen about my secret, then. I wasn't sure how she'd take it. She left me for a few days, to get her head together, she said, and I was afraid it'd take her forever. But she was back after four days. She said that she'd made the vows, in sickness or in health, for richer or for poorer, and she figured that also covered whether I was Spider-Man or not. So we stayed together. And I was...and I was very glad.

In '71, George was born. I'd done an interview with Stark Industries by that time. I wanted to go into their chemical division.

By that time, most of us who were in the hero business had been in it for over eight years. We were getting tired...really tired. Every month, the same old thing...fight a villain, try to keep him from killing you, knowing that it wasn't helping keep the country from falling apart. And what would happen to the world, if America really did fall apart?

We didn't know it, but there was one guy who seemed to have a clue.

Back in '70, Iron Man fought a villain...a one-timer, or so we thought. He had armor a bit like ol' Shellhead's, only he could throw fireblasts from his hands. He called himself Firebrand. The thing that made him stand out a bit is that he wasn't like other villains. He wasn't out to steal big bucks or take over the world.

He was a revolutionary. He wanted to overthrow the government, tear down the Establishment, the whole nine yards. He appeared once, on the side of some black militants. He threw as much invective and firey oratory as he did flame-bursts. Iron Man fought him, and he disappeared.

At least, as far as we knew.

But he knew a lot more than we did.

He knew about the Fire.

To be continued...