Toward the end of his tenure at Marvel, Jack Kirby produced a four-part story in the pages of the Fantastic Four which promulgated an offshoot of the Skrull empire in which the shape-changing aliens had replicated the gangster society of 1930's America. Kirby loved to dabble in this era and produced lots of imaginative variations on this theme throughout his career.
But in addition to the gangsters, this story also presented the Thing as the captive and an unwilling participant in gladitorial games. In those games he came up against Torgo, a warrior from a world in which the dominant life form was machinery.
Their battles were epic and of course eventually Ben Grimm returns to Earth. But you knew that already. Many people see a hint of the classic Star Trek episodes "A Piece of the Action" and "Bread and Circuses" in these issues, and frankly so do I.
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