1963: A Year In Review

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1963 was a big year at Marvel comics. You could tell as the year started to progress that the superhero line had been successful and they were here to stay. Coming into the year you had Fantastic Four, Tales to Astonish, Incredible Hulk, Journey Into Mystery and Strange Tales as your Marvel line. At the end of 1963 you have Fantastic Four, Tales to Astonish, Journey Into Mystery, Strange Tales, Amazing Spider-Man, Tales of  Suspense, Avengers and X-Men. As you can see the line exploded quite a bit.

The Incredible Hulk fell victim to cancellation in the early part of the year. It wasn't a surprise in hindsight though. Reading those 6 issues, you could just see that they didn't know what to do with the Hulk early on. It seemed like every issue they were taking a different approach to how the character worked. He returned after about a 6 month absence in Avengers #1. They seemed to have a much better grasp on the character with his return. It's more like the character that everyone knows and loves today.

The shared universe really came into being in 1963. The Hulk arrived to battle the Thing in Fantastic Four #12 and that kicked off a year of the heroes and villains appearing in each other's books. Granted, the majority of the books are Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four crossing over. The shared universe also hit critical mass when the Avengers formed. Iron Man, Hulk, Ant-Man, Wasp and Thor formed the Avengers to defeat Loki when the Fantastic Four were out of town. By the last issue of 1963 you really feel like these characters exist in the same world.

Speaking of Spider-Man, his book hit in 1963 and it seems to have taken the world by storm. It went monthly after just a few months and you can see them really pushing the character. He's easily the second most popular character behind the Fantastic Four at this point in the Marvel history.

To end this article. I thought I would just do a list of some of the big first appearances for the year of 1963:

Iron Man
Wasp
X-Men
Dr. Strange
Magneto
Super Skrull
Mad Thinker and Awesome Android
Vulture
Doctor Octopus
Sandman
Lizard
Watcher

Posted in: 1963,Year Recap