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AVENGERS #6 — the villain who couldn\'t take his mask off.
Cover-dated July 1964, this is the issue that gives the Avengers their first real organized opposition — and gives Captain America the enemy who would define him for the next sixty years. Baron Heinrich Zemo arrives with a grievance that is entirely Cap\'s fault: during the war, a fight between the two of them left Zemo\'s hood permanently bonded to his face by his own Adhesive X. He has been wearing it ever since.
That detail is why the character worked. Marvel\'s other Silver Age villains wanted power or money. Zemo wanted Steve Rogers to look at what he had done. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby built the Masters of Evil around that grudge — Zemo recruiting the Black Knight, the Melter, and the Radioactive Man into the template every Marvel villain team has followed since, right through to the Thunderbolts.
Kirby and Chic Stone handle the cover and interior art, with Lee scripting. Paste-Pot Pete turns up in a cameo, a few years before he became the Trapster.
This copy grades CGC 8.0, Very Fine, with off-white to white pages — genuinely strong for an early Avengers newsstand book that has now been in circulation for sixty-one years. The cover gloss and color hold up in hand better than the grade suggests.
CGC 8.0 · Off-White to White pages · 1st Baron Zemo & the Masters of Evil · Kirby, Stone & Lee · Marvel, 1964
Ships in a Gemini graded-comic mailer with honeycomb kraft void fill, fully insured, within one business day of cleared payment.
The Memory Shop of Concord — curated Golden, Silver and Bronze Age keys at memoryshopconcord.com
