Spanker

A curiosity from Marvel's gloriously weird Bronze Age, Spanker made their debut in 1976's Marvel Treasury Edition #12, brought to life by the irreverent Steve Gerber and the reliable Sal Buscema — a creative pairing that signals this character emerged from one of Marvel's most delightfully unhinged eras. With a name like Spanker and a birthplace in the oversized, anything-goes treasury format, this is exactly the kind of offbeat figure that made Bronze Age Marvel such fertile ground for the strange and satirical. Sharing pages with the likes of Valkyrie and Iron Man, Spanker occupies a genuinely peculiar corner of the Marvel Universe — obscure enough to be a collector's trophy, yet durable enough to earn a spot in the All-New Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A to Z, Marvel's own stamp of canonical legitimacy. For fans who love digging into the weirder margins of the House of Ideas, Spanker is a minor marvel worth tracking down.