Articles with the Tag Fantastic Four

Recoloured characters or restored colouration?

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An interesting find by Sean Kleefeld: Marvel may have recoloured background characters in their Masterworks series to make their early comics slightly more diverse:

On the one hand, I can appreciate that they were trying to be more inclusive in 1987 when the Masterworks book first came out. As minimal an effort as this was. But what that also does is change the historical record so that it misrepresents where Marvel was at socially in 1962. It makes the company look more progressive than it was. The truth is, as of FF #8, Marvel was not thinking about equal rights or showing people that didn’t look like anyone in their offices.

original and recoloured panels from Fantastic Four 8

However, I’m somewhat skeptical about it that Marvel really was thinking about diversity in 1987, not a period in which it had many titles starring women or characters of colour. Nor can I see the point in just recolouring some random background characters. To me, it looks more as if that character was always supposed to be black, but miscoloured in the original printing. The story was recoloured for the Masterworks edition by Glynis Oliver. Has anybody talked to her to see what she remembers about why this character was recoloured?

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 49: Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 07

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cover of Fantastic Four Vol. 07


Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 07
Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas, Rich Buckler, John Buscema and friends
Reprints: Fantastic Four #138-159 and more (September 1973 – June 1975)
Get this for: The FF enter the Bronze Age — three stars

For the penultimate entry in this series we got Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 7, the first volume to feature neither Jack Kirby nor Stan Lee. Instead Gerry Conway handles writing duties for most of the run collected here, both on the regular series and on the five Giant-Size issues also included. Roy Thomas takes over from him with #156, after a fill-in issue by Len Wein. The art is taken care of by John Buscema, then Rich Buckler.

The period of The Fantastic Four collected here is one I know relatively well, having read these issues in Dutch translation years ago, buying them for a guilder at a time from a market stall. These were doublesized with cardboard covers and like the Essential collections, in black and white, so I had something of a deja vu rereading this.

At the time I first read these issues I wasn’t what you call critical of what I read: if it had superheroes and villains, especially new ones, that was good enough for me. Rereading them again it’s clear that these are not nearly of the same quality as even the worst of the Lee/Kirby collaborations; they’re quite mundane in fact, for all their non-stop action and attempts to emulate Kirby’s creativity. Lee and Kirby created the Inhumans, the Watcher, the Kree and Skrulls, the Black Panther and Wakanda and so on, basically creating the whole Marvel Universe from scratch. With Conway, we get a race of abominable snowmen, who are reverted to normal humans at the end of the story — not quite the same, is it?

Not that Gerry Conway and later Roy Thomas were bad writers, but they missed the creative spark of the Lee-Kirby collaborations. Instead both fall back on reusing established villains and soap opera to hold the reader’s interest. So we get the return of the Miracle Man, last seen in issue 3, Annihilus and Doctor Doom on the one hand and the maritial problems of Reed and Sue Richards on the other. Most stories also take more than one issue to complete, not always a good thing. It’s not all bad: I quite like that very distinctive, early seventies energy these stories have and both Conway and Thomas keep them flowing, sweeping you along with them.

On the art side there’s little to complain off, with first John Buscema and then Rich Buckler as penciler. Again, if you compare them to Kirby, both are a bit on the bland side here and certainly Buscema had and has done better elsewhere. I think that , as with the writing, the art suffers a bit from being forced into the Marvel Housestyle, trying to ape Lee and Kirby when it would’ve been better if both had followed their own paths.

Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 07 collects a low period in the Fantastic Four’s existence, when the title was in a creative slump. There are some points of interest, but they’re few and far between. For me it was an exercise in nostalgia reading these issues, going back to a time when I was much less critical of comics and could still enjoy these kind of stories for what they were.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 42: Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 06

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cover of Fantastic Four Vol. 06


Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 06
Stan Lee, Archie Goodwin, Roy Thomas, John Buscema and friends
Reprints: Fantastic Four #111-137 (June 1971 – August 1973)
Get this for: The Fantastic Four within Kirby or Lee — three stars

Curse my luck! Just as with the Essential X-Men yesterday, I never managed to get volume five of Essential Fantastic Four either, which means I missed the end of the Lee-Kirby run. Instead volume six offers Big John Buscema on art duties, with Stan Lee, Archie Goodwin, then Lee again and finally Roy Thomas handling the writing. Good though these gents are, their work can’t compare to what Jack Kirby brought to The Fantastic Four. Even though Stan Lee himself is still around for a while here, the chemistry he had with Kirby is gone. Kirby and Lee could always spark ideas of each other, now Lee had to do it all himself.

It’s not all bad though. For a start, this volume contains the first Fantastic Four comic I ever read, #113, translated in Dutch as Vier Verdedigers Classics #59 which an uncle had in his collection — and I have now. That issue was the start of the Overmind saga and its cover is burned in my memory. It was not just the first FF comic I read, but must have been one of the earliest superhero comics I ever saw and it fascinated me. It’s a typical late Silver Age Marvel issue, continuing directly from the previous issue, with cameos from the Hulk and Agatha Harkness and a guest star appearance by the Watcher, while the action never stops, all drawn in that wonderful expressive, larger than life John Buscema style and it’s just crack to a certain kind of geek boy (or girl) like me. It may not have been half as good as what Lee and Kirby had been up to before, but I didn’t know anything about that.

The whole Overmind story showed that some of the creativity of that earlier run was still present in The Fanastic Four, as the Overmind turned out to be the last living survivor of an ancient alien race, the Eternals, scource of the cosmos, who had conquored all before them until they reached the planet Gigantus, which dwarved Galaxies and was their doom. As the Eternals’ own planet died beneath them, they put all their mental power into the Overmind and send him into the universe to sleep and wait until the time was right for the Overmind to come from beyond the stars and crush the universe! The Fantastic Four are helpless before him, even need to teamup with Doctor Doom to fight him but even that is not enough, though Doom does get his crowning moment of awesome as he fights an unequal battle with the Overmind but keeps standing for he is … DOOM! In the end though it’s the Stranger, revealed to be the combined might of the people from Gigantus who tames the Overmind.

The Overmind is however the only original villain to fight the Fantastic Four this volume, as for the most part they fight old enemies and even menaces originally introduced in other series. Diablo and Galactus return for rematches, they get involved with the Inhumans again, the Frightful Four come back with a new member, and so on. There are other changes in the status quo though. Roy Thomas lets Sue Richards quit the FF and makes Medusa of the Inhumans her replacement, while the relationship of Johnny Storm and Crystal also ends, as the latter falls for Quicksilver, the mutant Avenger. On the whole The Fantastic Four is much more soap opera orientated then before, less interested in exploration as well, more going for fighting “conventional” villains. It’s not as wild as the Lee-Kirby runs, but it’s far from bad either.

As for the art, John Buscema is as great as Kirby in his own right and I do like the grandeur he gives a character like the Watcher, as well as the body language he gives his characters. A more conventional artist than Kirby perhaps, but you can hardly fault him for that. I love how he poses his characters, the stances he gives them which betray their emotions and character. Every now and again, often in just some small throwaway panel I just have to stop and study his art, bask in it.

A letdown after the sheer mastery of the first four Essential Fantastic Four volumes? Perhaps, but Buscema’s art and the efforts of Lee, Goodwin and Thomas make up for a lot.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 34: Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 04

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cover of Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 04


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.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 27: Fantastic Four vol 03

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cover of Essential Fantastic Four vol 3


Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 3
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and friends
Reprints: Fantastic Four #41-63 and Annual 3-4 (August 1965 – June 1967)
Get this for: Lee and Kirby at the peak of their game — Five stars

Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 2 ended with the Battle of the Baxter Building, in which a powerless Fantastic Four, with the aid of a blind man, Daredevil, had to defeat their most dangerous enemy Doctor Doom. That was a great story to end the volume with and hard to top, yet Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 3 almost as strong with the return of the Frightful Four who kidnap and brainwash the Thing to use against his partners. That story leads into the wedding of Reed and Sue, followed by the coming of the Inhumans, spanning no less than five issues. But that’s just the start, as the FF have to immediately face the threat of Galactus and the Silver Surfer. Perhaps the best story Lee and Kirby ever did together, but the very next issue has another strong candidate for that title: “This Man… This Monster” in which an unnamed embittered scientist takes over the Things powers and learns just in time the true meaning of heroism — Stan Lee’s sentimental instincts honed to perfection. All this only takes us up to #51, with the rest of the volume also seeing the introduction of the Black Panther, the continuing struggle of Johnny Storm to rescue the Inhumans from their prison, the menace of Klaw, Doctor Doom stealing the Silver Surfer’s cosmic powers and more.

As I’ve said before, The Fantastic Four started out as relatively realistic series, in as far as a series starring an orange rock monster, a rubber man, invisible woman and a human torch can be realistic and then slowly started to abandon that realism for more grandiose, imaginative visions. You could already see this happening in the first two volumes, but here Lee’s and especially Kirby’s imagination has been completely unshackled. Great big chunks of the Marvel Universe are seen for the first time here: Galactus and the Surfer, the Inhumans, the Black Panther and his home country of Wakanda, Klaw, Blastaar, the Negative Zone and so on. All these would be further developed later on, both by Lee and Kirby themselves as by other writers and artists but the core concepts were created here.

With this enormous burst of creativity came an expansion in story length. Had earlier FF stories been either single issue or rarely double issue in length, here not only do stories run for three, four or even five issues, they flow into each other, with subplots being carried over and developing for the best part of a year or longer. It’s still possible to pick up a given issue and know what’s going, if only because of the inevitable recaps Lee gives at the start of each issue, but it definitively helps to have been reading the series for longer. Again it’s Lee and Kirby pioneering a style of storytelling that would become ubiquitous at Marvel in the decades since.

Also evolving because of the greater length, complexity and grandeur of the stories, is Kirby’s art. He started out subdued and realistic back in volume one, was already starting to experiment in the next volume but here he has unshackled his imagination. His old strengths are still there, but they’re now coupled to a sense of design that few since have equalled. His characters are fluid and constantly in motion, he’s still the master of fight scenes, equally adept at illustrating the more quiet scenes, but he really comes to live when he gets to create a new civilisation. Both the Black Panther’s Wakanda and the Inhumans great refuge are places of super science, but you could never mistake the one for the other.

In short, this is Lee and Kirby at their very best and if you can get only one Essential Fantastic Four volume, get this one.