One aspect of the first issues of Fantastic Four that readers might find striking is the breakneck, frenetic pace with which they approach story. Inciting incidents are set up before being all but abandoned with each subsequent chapter, tossing the members of Marvel’s First Family into new concepts and conflicts as the issue moves on.
Even issues introducing major FF villains tend to veer wildly into new lanes of narrative. The fifth issue introduces Doctor Doom, who kidnaps Sue in the first chapter (ensuring the rest of the team’s surrender) before the book sends the boys back in time to steal pirate treasure; Ben Grimm inadvertently becomes Black Beard, a tornado strikes their ship, and after they deliver a chest full of rusty chains to Doom, he jet-packs off.
He goes power-mad for four whole pages.
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That’s several stories’ worth of wildly different adventures in twenty-odd pages.
In issue #9, Namor tricks the Fantastic Four into starring in a Hollywood film about themselves (classic aquatic subterfuge?), and this sends each member into their own chapter’s worth of conflicts (cyclops, fire-proof African tribe, Namor wrestling match, and. . . another Sue kidnapping). Sequential, varied, hectic.
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Famously Marvel’s return to superheroes – and the birth of the Marvel Age – Fantastic Four sprang from a release schedule filled with sci-fi/fantasy anthology books like Journey Into Mystery and Strange Tales; it seems likely that several of the Fantastic Four plots were cobbled together from concepts initially meant for those books. If one were to brush away the superhero trappings, extraterrestrial invaders like Kurrgo of Planet X and his Day the Earth Stood Still-styled robot, who form the bridging narrative of issue seven, feel all the world like Orrgo the Unconquerable. The story’s twist (Reed shrinks Kurrgo’s race down to save them from Planet X’s inevitable destruction, but the would-be world-conqueror Kurrgo gets left behind) even reads like one of the final-panel twists of the anthologies.
This seems important. Well, moving on…
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Issue #13 features the team racing the Red Ghost and his super apes to the moon. It also introduces the Watcher and his race and briefly drops the bombshell that an ancient culture once lived in the mysterious Blue Area of the moon (we’d later realize that this civilization was the Skrull, the Kree, the Cotati; eventually the Phoenix would be tried there, and the Inhumans would live there). All three of these disparate concepts – apes, Watchers, ancient civilizations – is enough for a story of its own; they’re enough for one issue of an anthology book.
This might be the secret to Fantastic Four’s early success: the book never rested. Each issue had just as much action and content as any of Marvel’s other sci-fi books, but now there were characters to care about. They weren’t yet superheroes as we know them today – even the introductions of Doom, Namor, and the Hulk fail to take them off on the sorts of adventures readers could see in Detective Comics and Superman.
The issues collected in Fantastic Four Epic Collection: The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine represent the company’s slow but frenetic transition. These are also the issues that changed the very face of American comics; that they had barely shifted from Marvel’s existing catalog somehow made the change all the more amazing.
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