Larry Lieber

On December 10th 1963, Marvel Comics published Tales of Suspense #39 by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Don Heck, which introduced the world to the cool exec with a heart of steel, Iron Man. Throughout his comics career, Iron Man has always provided an opportunity for creators to tell more complex and mature stories within the superhero genre, and the character has emerged as a household name thanks to a number of successful feature films.

On June 5, 1962, with a crack of thunder, a new hero burst on the scene. Well, not a new hero exactly. A very, very old hero who'd been reimagined for a modern world. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby at the height of their (dubiously balanced) creative powers, with scripting help from Stan's brother Larry Lieber, took a millennia-old Norse god and made him into a superhero in Journey into Mystery #83, the debut of the Mighty Thor.

The Marvel Unlimited app is a gigantic, messy cache of awesome and terrible old comic books: a library of 13,000 or so back issues of Marvel titles, available on demand for subscribers with tablets or mobile phones. Like any good back-room longbox, it’s disorganized and riddled with gaps, but it’s also full of forgotten and overlooked jewels, as well as a few stone classics. In Marvel Unlimited Edition, Eisner-winning critic Douglas Wolk dives into the Unlimited archive to find its best, oddest and most intriguing comics. Two spin-offs of Guardians of the Galaxy launch in recent weeks: The Legendary Star-Lord and the already-surprise-hit Rocket Raccoon. Marvel Unlimited's got a fairly thorough, if not quite complete, selection of most of the Guardians' previous appearances, especially the ones in the Annihilation/Annihilation: Conquest/Annihilators sequence. But their prehistory is worth digging into, too, and there's some choice proto-Guardians material in the archive.

I think it's safe to say that Spider-Man has been through some pretty weird stuff in his time, right? I mean, that's a fifty-year saga that started with a radioactive spider-bite that gave him limited psychic powers and super-strength that he immediately used to try to find fame as a professional wrestler, and the fine folks over at Marvel Comics have somehow managed to top that for weirdness time

Once in a generation, a story comes along that completely redefines a character. It happened with Batman in the '80s with Frank Miller's game-changing stories, it happened recently with Grant Morrison and All Star Superman, and now, it's happening again with Spider-Man...