This weekend’s light-hearted and escapist superhero blog post looks at the early stories featuring the Femizon called Thundra, who started as a villainess before reforming.
FANTASTIC FOUR Vol 1 #129 (December 1972)
Title: The Frightful Four – Plus One
Villains: The Frightful Four (The Wizard, Sandman, the Trapster and Thundra)
NOTE: This was Thundra’s first appearance.
Synopsis: The Wizard, Sandman and the Trapster are still at large after their recent clash with Spider-Man and the Human Torch in Marvel Team-Up #2. Meanwhile, at the Baxter Building headquarters of the Fantastic Four, the Human Torch drops a bombshell on his teammates – he is quitting the team to go live with his true love Crystal of the Inhuman Royal Family.
Crystal, Johnny Storm’s longtime girlfriend and former member of the Fantastic Four, was forced to move back to the Inhumans’ hidden city of Attilan due to her body’s negative reaction to air pollution in the human world.
After a fierce argument in which Invisible Woman (Johnny’s sister) sides with the Torch, Johnny flies off in the Fantastic Four’s plane to reach Attilan. The arguing is reignited by Agatha Harkness (still in the years BEFORE she tutored the Scarlet Witch) who tells the Fantastic Four that she has urgent business and they must come pick up Reed and Sue’s son Franklin Richards at her Whisper Hill home. Continue reading
GRIPS 
As I indicated in the title of this blog post, I consider the Grips tales to be what low-budget, disreputable Grindhouse movies of the past were to glossy, professional films from major studios. The writing and artwork in Grips seldom approached the standards of the Big Two publishers, but the visceral violence, profanity and often taboo subject matter more than made up for the overall shoddiness of the finished product. 
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol 1 #183 (October 1980) 
The remaining evil forces on Apokolips – led by Granny Goodness (a Kirby creation, needless to say) – have raided New Genesis and abducted most of the inhabitants, then taken them as slaves back to their own planet. They did it with the help of three Earth-Two villains – Icicle, Shade and the Fiddler – so the New Gods use the annual get-together of the Justice Society and Justice League to recruit the two teams to help them recover their kidnapped population. 
THE HERETIC 
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol 1 #123 (October 1975) 
YELLOWJACKET 
Powers: Yellowjacket was a probable mutant with the power of mentally controlling bees. He used his armies of those insects to sting, distract or harass opponents in battle. In addition, this hero was in peak physical condition and excelled at unarmed combat. 
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol 1 #82 (August 1970) 
NELVANA OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
BLACK WING 
Powers: Black Wing was in peak physical condition and excelled at unarmed combat. He was also a superb pilot and had the advantage of flying the high-tech craft he had stolen from the Nazis. 
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol 1 #21 (August 1963) 
The company’s method of adapting more “up to date” versions of their Golden Age heroes without losing the copyrights on those figures was to state that the original versions of all their old heroes came from an alternate Earth, designated Earth-Two. The Earth with the newer heroes was called Earth-One, since they were the newer, CURRENT versions. 
SKULL THE SLAYER Vol 1 #1 (August 1975) 
It is not truly the Earth of millions of years ago, because it is anachronistically populated by dinosaurs and primates that were never alive during the same time periods. The only survivors of the plane crash are Scully, a young Native American man named Jeff Turner, an African American physician named Raymond Corey, and Corey’s young research assistant Ann Reynolds. 
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