My next little bunch of updates has been added. As per my last blog post I tackled three big name Atlantean characters that are integral to the Sub-Mariner's history. Here are some notes:
- Most of the stuff about Emperor Thakorr was already added by myself when I went through pretty much every hero comic from the 40s and 50s over the past few years. The only things that needed to be added were additions to his mythos later on. For the most part Thakorr's history has remained unchanged from the Timely/Atlas Era to now. The only massive change per-se was how he was depicted. In the 40s and 50s most male Atlanteans were depicted as being more fish-like, with massive eyes, and catfish like stalks growing out from under their noses and green skin. As all Atlantean characters that have appeared since Fantastic Four #4 Thakorr has been rendered as a blue-skinned humanoid with no fish-like characteristics.
- There have only been minor additions to the life of Thakorr since the golden age. Namely identifying that he was killed in Sub-Mariner #1 when Destiny decimated Atlantis in the 1950s. There were other minor references. Additional embellishes were some history Namor the Sub-Mariner #20, the Namor series, and Sub-Mariner Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1. It wasn't until he was resurrected as a vampire in Namor: The First Mutant did he really have any more characterization.
- Speaking of which, reading Thakorr's history it appeared that -- depending on the writer -- Thakorr's opinion of his grandson varied from disgust, to acceptance, to pride, to absolute hatred.
- Dorma was one of those pages that hasn't really been touched since it was created. It had no reference tags and the only thing people tended to add were little thing about her powers, first appearances and so on. Nobody wanted to bother doing any fact checking or anything. In 2012 I started doing an "Expanded History" of Lady Dorma, but as I began chronicling her golden age appearances it became apparent to me that she didn't have quite the grand history as I thought she would. So the Expanded History page was dumped, and everything was put on the main page. Also like I have with other dead characters, I have put in a legacy page, because as usual, with her death, there were other people's lives affected by it.
- Not really much you can say about Lady Dorma. She had a very small part in the golden age stories as a potential love interest for Namor, but he soon moved on to surface dwellers like Betty Dean, and Lynne Harris. When they began introducing female sidekicks in the late 40s poor Dorma was overlooked for Namora and completely ignored as a character for the rest of the 40s. She had some brief appearances in during the short lived super-hero revival of the 1950s. It wasn't until the 1960s when they started bringing back Namor's Atlantean supporting cast did they really do much of anything with Dorma. But for the most part, she just kept on getting captured and needed to be rescued by Namor all the time. Most attempts to do more with her character were quickly reversed or dropped and her only real valid contribution to these later stories was her death. Pretty harsh.
- When I first loaded up the page I saw that someone labelled him "Krang the Conqueror". Wow. That's such terrible research I don't even know where to comment on that.
- Krang was a heavily used character in the 1960s as a recurring antagonist for the Sub-Mariner, but as soon as the 70s hit he kind of fell by the wayside. Between the 1970s and his appearances in the more recent Last Defenders, Namor: The First Mutant and Vengance series, he had only made a 8 appearances in total. I suppose it just takes the right writer to do the right thing with the character.
Coming Up Next
The next few issues of Fantastic Four are issues 19, 20 and 21 feature only a handful of characters that I haven't touched yet. And I think it's going to be one of the more complicated characters I'll be tackling:
- Rama-Tut - In order to get it all out, I think I'm just going to do history pages for all the incarnations of Nathaniel Richards of Earth-6311. So expect pages for Iron Lad, Rama-Tut, Scarlet Centurion, Kang the Conqueror, Kid Immortus (which doesn't have a separate page, but I think it should) and Immortus. This is going to be big.
- Molecule Man - Only 63 appearances, going to take a look at the page, but so far as I can see nobody has bothered doing any sort of intensive research or adding references to any appearances prior to his part in Dark Avengers.
- Hate-Monger - Only 30 appearances of the Hitler clone. Should be fairly simple. IT's also another page that has sloppy research. Hooray for re-writing everything.
- Nick Fury - This is going to be another big one, obviously it's going to be an Expanded History Page. With other characters that were introduced in the 60s, I'm going to do all their pre-"first appearance" stories. So in the case of Fury, this includes his early life, his time during World War II, all the way up to the first 10 years of Marvel publications that feature him (So his appearances in Strange Tales and Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD) I am going to attempt to be as thorough as possible and cover all his flashback stories from the war and beyond, but with a character that has been so heavily used this is going to be tough, I probably won't catch everything on my first go around but as I continue to go through other decades I'm sure I'll be able to pick up whatever is missing and add it as I go along.