Marvel Premiere #35
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeMarvel Premiere #35 marks the first appearance and origin of 3-D Man (Chuck and Hal Chandler), one of Marvel's most unusual Bronze Age creations — a retroactive Cold War-era hero who existed in the narrative gap between the end of Atlas Comics' superhero line in the mid-1950s and the Silver Age debut of the Fantastic Four. Writer Roy Thomas used the character as a deliberate act of retroactive world-building, a technique he had already honed on The Invaders, helping to populate a decade of Marvel history that had previously been narratively empty. The issue also established the character's innate ability to detect Skrull infiltrators, a power that gave the character renewed relevance decades later during Marvel's 2008 Secret Invasion event. Though 3-D Man never graduated to an ongoing series — unlike Iron Fist and Doctor Strange, who had used the same tryout platform — the Chandler brothers' debut remains a distinctive example of Bronze Age nostalgia-driven storytelling fused with genuine superhero invention.
ComicBooks.com Value
This exact issue on ebay
Raw — VF/NM ▾ $4.99–$114 3 listings
Raw — VF ▾ $4.49–$34.95 5 listings
Raw — FN/VF ▾ $4–$7.6 4 listings
Raw / ungraded ▾ $2.99–$39 25 listings
More listings for this title
Sell my copy
Have this issue — or a whole collection? Get a fair offer from us, skip the marketplace fees and the hassle.
We Buy Collections ▸History
Roy Thomas conceived 3-D Man as a tribute to the 1950s 3-D movie craze and, specifically, to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's single-issue Captain 3-D. Thomas originally planned to publish the character as a backup story in an actual stereoscopic 3-D Spider-Man one-shot; after young Canadian artist Jim Craig had already begun work on the project, Thomas informed him the budget for 3-D printing was prohibitive and the plan was scrapped. Without the 3-D gimmick, the standalone format no longer made sense, and Thomas folded the material into a three-issue arc beginning with Marvel Premiere #35. Craig's research burden was unusually heavy because every panel had to accurately reflect late-1950s America — cars, fashions, and architecture — requiring extensive library visits. Thomas also borrowed design elements from the Lev Gleason character Daredevil (the red-and-green color split replacing the original red-and-blue), and named his protagonist Chuck Chandler after Crimebuster, another Lev Gleason character whose civilian name was the same.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance and complete origin of 3-D Man (Charles 'Chuck' Chandler and Hal Chandler) — cover-dated April 1977, released January 4, 1977.
- Written by Roy Thomas; interior art penciled by Jim Craig and inked by Dave Hunt; cover painted by Jack Kirby (with inking by John Verpoorten).
- Roy Thomas also served as editor on the issue, making him both writer and editorial gatekeeper for the character's debut.
- The story is set in 1958 Cold War America — a deliberate retroactive continuity insertion into a period of Marvel history that had no active superhero characters between the Atlas Comics cancellations of the mid-1950s and Fantastic Four #1.
- 3-D Man's powers are tripled human physical attributes (strength, speed, stamina, senses) and a psychic ability to detect Skrulls in any disguise — a power that would prove central to the 2008 Secret Invasion tie-in storyline in Avengers: The Initiative.
- The character was originally conceived for an actual stereoscopic 3-D one-shot alongside Spider-Man; budget constraints killed that format and the story was reassigned to Marvel Premiere as a standard three-issue arc (#35–37).
- Marvel Premiere was Marvel's primary character tryout anthology (1972–1981); despite appearing in the same book that launched Doctor Strange and Iron Fist into their own ongoing series, 3-D Man never received a solo title.
- The character's next significant appearance after the original three-issue arc came in What If? #9 (1978), where 3-D Man joined a 1950s proto-Avengers team assembled by FBI agent Jimmy Woo — a concept that seeded the later Agents of Atlas mythology.
Full credits
Reprints
↩ Reprints [Marvel Hostess Ads] #14 (1977)
Reprinted in Namor #9 (1980), Heroic Age Magazine #[nn] (2010), Marvel Firsts: The 1970s #3 (2012), The Avengers Omnibus #6 (2025)
Key issues in Marvel Premiere
Reviews
Reader reviews
No reader reviews yet.