This weekend’s light-hearted, escapist superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog looks at the early stories of Marvel’s Black Goliath (Bill Foster, PhD).
POWER MAN Vol 1 #24 (April 1975)
Title: Among Us Walks Black Goliath
Villain: Black Goliath
Synopsis: In California, Luke and his white friend D.W. find the missing Claire Temple, and the couple have a private talk while D.W. leaves them alone. Claire admits she left to help her ex-husband, Bill Foster, PhD, the former colleague of Dr. Henry Pym aka Ant-Man aka Giant Man aka Goliath aka Yellowjacket.
NOTE: Bill Foster had worked with Hank Pym since the 1960s and had appeared in old issues of the Avengers with him.
Since Pym has given up his Goliath identity, Bill experimented with Pym Particles to try to gain Pym’s old growing powers. A misfire caused Dr. Foster to be unable to shrink back down to normal size, stranding him at 25 feet in height. While working on a cure, Bill has been hiding with a traveling circus.
Claire says she cannot abandon Bill during a moment of crisis like this and was afraid Luke wouldn’t understand. Dr. Foster unexpectedly finds Power Man and Claire together and misunderstands the situation. Revealing to Luke that he is now the costumed figure Black Goliath, he attacks Power Man.
After a while, their clash is interrupted when the people who run the circus that Black Goliath has been hiding with reveal that they are really the longtime supervillain team called the Circus of Crime. (And who had battled Spider-Man, Daredevil, the Hulk, Thor and the Avengers up to this point.) Continue reading
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