Jack Kirby Tribute Month 2025, Day 20, and the theme all month has been the Fantastic Four and related characters. Today’s prompt is the Mole Man! The Mole Man was there at the very beginning, both of the Fantastic Four (issue #1), and the Marvel Comics universe.
As mentioned yesterday, those early issues of FF were kind of transitional. They still read and felt a lot like the monster stories Atlas/Marvel had been doing previously. FF #1 gave us a character in Mole Man who had control of a whole army of monsters, hiding in his underground realm. Today, we would probably call him a “kaiju master,” as some of these monsters were quite sizable.
Mole Man’s debut seemed to be rooted not only in Marvel’s previous monster comics, but also in kaiju films like Godzilla, and a tradition of “underground world” stories (such as Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, or the Burroughs Pellucidar stories).
For extra interest here, I added one of the monsters from that first story which caught my eye. It appeared to be made out of some kind of dark, living rock! It wasn’t given a name in that story; no idea whether later creators might have given it a name or not.
I also did the Mole Man for last year’s Jack Kirby Tribute Month. You can find it here.
This is my favorite villain depiction this year so far. The monster in the background is intriguing. If you go back and look at some of his other work, particularly “The Demon” and “Sandman”(seventies version), he was drawing crazy creatures like this often. Nice job!
Thanks! Yeah, a study of Kirby’s work overall reveals that he could come up with some of the wildest looking creatures, seemingly with no effort at all. And I guess that makes sense he would be able to do that, given the evidence of all those monster stories he’d been doing previously in the Atlas/Marvel days.
Looks like I did not hit send yesterday. My apologies.
The Mole Man was a whirlwind beginning for the FF. The pathetic individual seeking retribution and revenge in our current era has become too common in reality. But Mole Man (at least at this stage of the FF) for me had some empathy. Stories of the taunted work better for me if after being driven to payback, the character enjoins in a self-discovery and makes other choices. I must add eventually that occurs. No need to be in the same book/issue. You got MM’s haircut down. Thanks much.
Glad you enjoyed this, but don’t feel that you are required in any way to comment here on everything I post.
I think while there were some Marvel villains that were just 100% villainous, one of the things that was interesting as the the Marvel Universe developed was that you also had characters like the Mole Man, who actually had sympathetic elements to their back story. Plus it’s just cool that MM had command of those underground kaiju and the hordes of moloids.