Page 2: 01/1963 - 06/1963
The second page brings us the end of one book and the start of two more. There are fewer red scare villains here, but certainly not zero. This page has seven books.
Journey Into Mystery (1952) #88-#93: The Thor book is mostly the same as it was the previous page. He has more Loki stories which are pretty decent, but his more grounded stories are still dissapointing. I think there were more stories of him losing his hammer and turning back into Dr. Blake, which would be more interesting if the solution was anything other than literally just "Dr. Blake gets the hammer back and then wins." It has its ups and downs compared to the previous page, but I'm still giving it the same grade. B-
Strange Tales (1951) #104-#108: I still dread the Human Torch solo stories, but it has gotten noticably better in a couple ways. First, they drop the "Johnny tries to keep his identity a secret" plot in the funniest way: Sue telling him to his face that everybody knew all along and were just being nice to him. Second, he gets a pretty fun issue where he duels Namor. The issue spends very little time setting up the conflict, and instead spends the page count on showing the two of them going at it. It's silly and cheesy but it has more action than most of the other books in this era, so I give it extra points. It's still not a great book though, because they keep giving Johnny the most absurd powers. I'm real tired of seeing him make hard-fire constructs like he's the freakin' Green Lantern. Still though, it's a marked improvment over the last page. C.
Fantastic Four (1961) #10-#14: The Fantastic Four has some of the best writing and action of the current batch. It also has the best recurring villains. It's even dipping into crossovers with the Hulk and that's done about as well as you'd think an early crossover story would be done. And with Johnny having his own book, I think they got most of the absurd powers out of their system and are starting to let some other team members do interesting things. Other team members, that is, as long as they aren't the Invisible Girl. Reed and Ben get to have cool powers now, but this book is incredibly sexist toward Sue. Between telling off the readers for expecting her to be more useful to having the Thing make a snarky comment about being surprised a woman can "keep her mouth shut" while he's saving her from drowning underwater, I'm going to be docking the book an entire letter grade until they can drop it. B-.
Tales to Astonish (1958) #39-#43: I think the thing that's holding the Ant-Man stories back is that they're focusing on the least cool powers that he has. Most things that Hank does (that couldn't be done by any other observant guy with a secret identity) are based on either a) Being Small or b) being Friends With Ants. You'd think that being small would be his most interesting power, but I think size-changing is cooler than having an extreme size. For example, the very last issue from this page included a scene where Ant-Man got dropped into a trash can that he couldn't climb out of, and he grew back to normal size to just smash it. That was cool! They just don't do enough like that. All of the size-changing that Ant-Man does is when he's just getting into constume, but it's the variability that makes him interesting to me. It's still not great, but I am starting to see some improvements. C+.
Incredible Hulk (1962) #6: The Incredible Hulk book got cancelled after #6, so this was the swan song. I know that the Hulk gets more, cooler stories later, so it's disappointing that he doesn't get his own book for a while. But this issue was mostly fun at its own expense. The Hulk has to use a machine to transform himself back and forth from Bruce Banner, which isn't great on its own (one of the most compelling bits from the first couple issues was how unpredictable the Hulk was), but now it's on the fritz! The Hulk now has Bruce's face! Good thing he has a bunch of rubber masks of the Hulk just laying around so he can put it on. Oh no, the military notices that he's wearing a mask! Good thing that his face turned back to normal before they can take it off. Defeating the villain with the ol' wooden gun trick would have been more fun if the cartoon Mister Fantastic vs Magneto didn't already do it (I know that this twists the timeline, but I can't help that I'm exposed to Marvel out of order). They definitely could have done better with the Hulk, and I hope that that happens soon. No matter how bad the stories, though, the Hulk is a cool character and that earns the book some points. B.
Tales of Suspense (1959) #39-#41: Tales of Suspense brings us Iron Man! And he's not great! The first issue made two big impressions: first, the book was really racist in its portrayal of Vietnamese people, and second, the writers had no idea what a transistor was. The big clunky Iron Man suit is dopey, and the way that he unfolds it to put it on is dopier still. The worst of it all is that his villains are all stupid and he beast them all in really boring ways. I'm still not sure that the gold armor was any better than the drab gray was. This is probably my new least favorite book of the batch, though it's still not as bad as Strange Tales was last page. C-.
Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #1-#2: Spider-Man gets his own book, but it picks up right where Amazing Fantasy left off with his origin. This book is good. Every story feels like it is telling us something new about Peter, his powers, and the world he lives in. J. Jonah Jameson is a world-class hater right out of the gate, and it makes Peter's decision to keep his identity a secret actually meaningful and interesting! It's not interesting because of fear that it might get revealed, but it's interesting because now he, as Peter and not as Spider-Man, has to make different decisions. Heck, even though I've known that Peter Parker sells pictures of Spider-Man as his day job for actual decades, him getting the job on panel was exciting! It's no wonder that Spider-Man is among the most popular superheroes of all time with a book that started this good, heads and shoulders ahead of the competition. A.