Another First Appearance in 1962

Tales to Astonish #30: Quogg

Just as I feel like I’m hitting the final stretch of comics for 1962, the Complete Marvel Reading Order adds another issue. Apparently it’s been determined that Quogg needs to be part of the order. For me, I’ve never heard of this character, but the list is maintained by people much more knowledgeable than me so I’ll just go with it.

TTA30 contains the first appearance of Quogg in the last story of the issue. In it, we have what seems to be typical of this year’s short tales…a criminal trying to evade the police.

The story takes place in Africa and the lucky criminal manages to evade the authorities. In doing so, he runs into a local villager who warns him that Quogg lives nearby. Ignoring the local, the thief figures he can hide out and impersonate this ficticious Quogg and dominate the backwards and primative villagers. Of course, Quogg turns out to be real and the thief gets what’s coming to him.

This is a nice little tale, but follows the pattern of quite a few of these early stories. Nothing really stands out and I still really don’t know anything about Quogg other than what he looks like.

With the similarities to other stories Stan and Jack put together back then, and the lack of extra something, I don’t think this deserves anything higher than a C-.