Spencer Keen

Few characters can claim roots stretching all the way back to the dawn of Marvel's Golden Age, but Spencer Keen is one of them — debuting in Mystic Comics #1 in 1940, courtesy of creator Harry Douglas, right at the very birth of the superhero era. Sharing those early, electric pages with the likes of Blue Blaze, Keen emerged from one of the most fertile and wildly experimental moments in comics history. Though the catalog counts only a handful of appearances, the fact that his legacy was revisited as recently as 2011 — preserved in the celebrated Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Mystic Comics — speaks to the enduring fascination collectors have with these foundational figures. For anyone who loves digging into the rich, pulpy soil from which the entire Marvel universe grew, Spencer Keen is a name worth knowing.