As we saw in the last installment, before Smilin' Stan Lee jumped on the superhero renaissance bandwagon that would be known as the Silver Age of Comics, his attention was focussed on the proliferation of SF anthologies which kept him and his cohorts in work.
All of these anthology titles would later be used as a safe place to try out new post-FF superhero ideas, especially since there was a contractual limit to how many different titles Atlas (or Timely or Marvel or whatever they were called that month) could publish at the time.
Amazing Adventures [June 1961 cover date] was the fifth such anthology title the nascent Marvel produced, and from the start it was noteworthy in its early attempts to formulate a regularly published superhero strip five months before the first issue of Fantastic Four hit the racks.
Yes, it's the fantastic Dr Droom!
Pretty much a prototype for Doctor Strange (created by Lee and Steve Ditko some years later), Droom appeared in five of the six published issues of Amazing Adventures before sinking into obscurity.
But that was not the last we saw of Droom, as he would later achieve notoriety when he was retconned into the Marvel Universe under the rather underwhelming name of Doctor Druid, becoming one of the more bizarre members on the Avengers' roster.
So what have we to learn from this fantastic Dr Droom?
That in the 1960s, having slanted eyes and a moustache were the essential assets needed to become the nemesis of all occult powers that are sinister and corrupt!
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