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
ASTONISHING TALES Vol 1 #9 (Dec 1971) 
ASTONISHING TALES Vol 1 #1 (Aug 1970) 
Dr. Doom Title: Unto You is Born … the Doomsman 
JUNGLE ACTION Vol 2 #19 (Jan 1976) 
MARVEL PREMIERE Vol 1 #41 (Apr 1978) 
The crew members we meet in this debut story – 1. Captain Jordan Shaw (right), a decent man appalled at the way the Six have chosen to play God with who gets to escape and who gets left behind to die. He cooperates just so he and his wife can survive, so he bitterly knows he is no better than the oligarchs in the end. 
And 5. Phaedra (left), a mutant with telekinetic and telepathic abilities. She and Earth’s hundreds of other mutants live in prison camps at the Six’s command while their abilities are probed. They are all forced to wear facial tattoos to prevent them hiding their mutant status. 
CONAN THE BARBARIAN Vol 1 #52 (Jul 1975) 
Conan finds the Ring of the Black Shadow, thus animating a huge statue of the Scorpion God which guards the ring to keep it out of human hands. Our hero fights the statue and renders it inert again with a sword through its “brain.”
MARVEL PREMIERE Vol 1 #31 (Aug 1976) 
Superstitious people in Liberty, NM get covert glimpses of the creature and decide to raid the Pace ranch to destroy Woodgod and any other such “monsters” being created there. David and Ellen are shot to death in the attack but our main character is super-strong and invulnerable, so he survives being shot multiple times.
This weekend’s belated superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog looks at this Iron Fist adventure serialized in Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. It was penned by Chris Claremont and though it features his X-Men foes the Demons of the N’Garai and a woman called the Firebird whose schtick resembles his later retcons to the Phoenix Force, the story ultimately sucks and is an incoherent mess. 
DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU Vol 1 #19 (Dec 1975)
Iron Fist attacks the pair, joined by Colleen, who is swiftly defeated. Our hero continues fighting the Messengers and when he uses the power of the Iron Fist to finish them off, that somehow causes him and Jade to be transported from Earth to Feng-Tu. They are in the throne room of Dhasha Khan (right), who affirms that he is the ruler of this afterlife and states that he plans to strip Jade of her soul and have it damned forever.
MARVEL PREMIERE Vol 1 #1 (Apr 1972) 
The High Evolutionary studied his creation from an orbiting headquarters, kept company by 
CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS Vol 1 #6 (Sep 1941) 
Story 3: Captain America Meets the Hangman 
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