Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 04
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and friends
Reprints: Fantastic Four #64-83 and Annual 5-6 (July 1967 – February 1969)
Get this for: Lee and Kirby at the peak of their game still — Five stars
I’m sorry, but I have to repeat the praise from last time: gods, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were good together on The Fantastic Four. With the start of this volume they’ve already had more than sixty issues behind their belts and you’d expect that, especially after the creative burst of the last ten-fifteen issues that the pace would slacken a bit, but nothing is further from the truth. They keep on expanding the Marvel Universe, first with the coming of the Kree, including the Kree Sentry and Ronan the Accuser, then with the origin of what would later become Adam Warlock, finally with the discovery of Subatomica. Not to mention the birth of Sue and Reed’s son…
But there are also adventures with old friends, like the Inhumans and the Black Panther and old villains like the Mad Thinker and the Wizard return too. Apart from the Kree Sentry and Ronan, the only real new villain is Psychoman, introduced in Annual #5. There’s plenty of action and conflict here, but the focus does not lie on fighting supervillains, something which the Fantastic Four at any rate has never been about. The FF is at its best confronting some cosmic menace or going on a voyage of discovery, not handling the same villains that could also be menacing Iron Man next week.
There’s not much to say about the stories here, to be honest, that I haven’t said before. Lee and Kirby know these characters inside out, they know how they will respond in any situation they put them in. There’s always a bit of argument of who did what on these series and it’s no great secret that it was largely Kirby’s imagination that made The Fantastic Four so special. He gets to go wild again with Subatomica and the story introducing Him, who would later become Adam Warlock. His design work and sense of grandeur remain unsurpassed.
As does the rest of his art. It’s the cosmic decors and bizarre creatures and villains everybody remembers from Kirby, but his quiet moments are great too. He can get so much emotion from a few subtle lines in a character’s face, especially with the Thing, who wears his heart on his sleeve. You will never mistake one Kirby character for another. His story layout is excellent too, great sense of pacing and with everything he does in service to the story.
One thing that did annoy me about this volume was the neglect of the Invisible Girl, who had married Mr Fantastic the previous volume and who was now kept out of the action by her over anxious husband. It reflects the mores of the time that Sue, as a married woman, would need to be protected and kept away from danger but it comes over as incredibly sexist in retrospect. Things get worse when she’s pregnant. Obviously then she cannot join them on missions anymore, but the other three members keep her completely out of the loop for a time. There’s also Crystal, Johnny’s Inhuman girlfriend whose powers are arguably greater than any of the Fantastic Four, yet is completely wasted in most of the stories here…
That quibble aside, this is another perfect volume.