Cover-dated at the same time as the third issue of Fantastic Four, The Sorcerer was another of Marvel’s proto-superheroes.
Drawn by Jack Kirby for Journey into Mystery 78 (March 1962), the moody tale tells of a mysterious young man who alks into an isolated gas station of out an out of a raging sandstorm.
The mystery man, named Aaron, a mysterious young man who walks into an isolated gas station, barely has time to fall in love with Lucy Scott, the daughter of the station owner, before three sorcerers walk through the filling station wall and demand that he return with them to their realm.
Aaron refuses, and a battle of transformation and counter-transformation ensues (Disney would showcase a similar duel shortly in The Sword in the Stone).
Stalemated, the magicians agree to leave if Aaron gives up his powers. He surrenders them happily.
I wonder whether Stan Lee or Jack Kirby named the protagonist “Aaron,” and whether that was a conscious or unconscious nod to the biblical Aaron, the brother of Moses who wielded magical powers of transformation (Aaron’s rod became a serpent, and also produced blossoms and ripe almonds).
The concept of secret societies of super people kept popping up in Marvel Comics — here, in the July 1962 story The Man in The Sky in Amazing Fantasy 14, in the September 1963 introduction of the X-Men, and in the introduction of the Inhumans in December 1965.
The Sorcerer has marked similarities to the Steve Ditko-drawn The Man in the Sky, which appeared a couple of months later. In both, mysterious young men with vast powers are pursued by other super-powered people. Tad Carter is a mutant, and Aaron is a magician.
Aaron’s character also invites comparison to Dr. Strange. Kirby’s take on magic is much more physical — fire, rain, and animal transformations — than Ditko’s esoteric energy-based spells.
It’s interesting to consider that as super beings started appearing to populate what would become the Marvel universe, Aaron could only watch them in wonder with the rest of us, quietly aware that he had been one.
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