fantastic four

Before I get into the main “trying your patience” portion of this post, let me note a couple of things:

First, pal Tegan celebrates installment #1000 of her “Tegan Reads a Comic Book” video series, where she looks at that anniversary issue of Fantastic Four I discussed not too long ago. She was kind enough to acknowledge my efforts here researching the origins of that comic, and she has, as she always does, interesting things to say about the book.

Second, I just discovered a few days ago that there was a five-part podcast series looking at the Fantastic Four movies entitled “Fantastic Fouray,” which was news to me. Well, I don’t think there should be any confusion between that podcast and my overlong text pieces, but just in case: I Am Not Affiliated with That Podcast, Honest, I Wasn’t Trying to Step on Any Toes Here. Anyway, reviews of the FF films sound like fun, so go check ’em out, let me know how they are.

Now, onto the mainstream of this evening’s symposium:

So when we last met, we were at that point in the Fantastic Four run, in late 1986, where John Byrne’s direct involvement has been over and done with for several months now. However, his influence still lives on, as we saw in the extra-sized anniversary issue #296, which followed a general outline of his initial plans but shaved off some of the details. And here we are in #297, by Roger Stern, John Buscema and Sal Buscema, dealing with the emotional detritus left behind by some of Byrne’s storytelling decisions.

As you can see on this cover (which I presented last time):

…the Thing is clearly not in a great place. Don’t worry, I’m not going to spend another full post on just a cover again, but there is a distressfully dark tone to that cover. Without actually saying the word “suicide,” you clearly get what is implied here. Needless to say, ol’ Ben is not in the best place right now. I mean, this cover isn’t a patch on “This Man, This Monster” as drawn by Jack Kirby:

…but it’s of a kind.

The cover only tells part of the story of what’s inside, as it’s got subplots a’plenty in the Mighty Marvel Manner, but you’d be disappointed if it didn’t. What supposedly are the A and B plots of the issue are the Fantastic Four working on some science doohickeys for the U.S. government to address some strange fluctuations in the Sun. Meanwhile, somewhere out in space, there’s war raging on a distant planet between two powerful warlords who just happen to be brothers. Here’s a quick family photo of the two of them:

If you think those initial two plots are going to collide at some point, well, give yourself a cookie.

And, of course, the third plot, the emotional journey of Ben Grimm from “depressed” to “probably even more depressed.” Despite the A & B plots clearly being on a collision course and the apparent main driver of the book, it’s C that, frankly, we’re all going to be the most concerned with. This is likely the main reason I kept reading the book, even considering Byrne’s departure and the mostly wet thud of the anniversary issue. I wanted to know what happened to the Thing.

At this point, in the few years I’d been reading Fantastic Four and related materials, I’d seen Bashful Benjy go through a lot. Gained his humanity, lost his humanity, been devolved, been further mutated, was stuck adventuring on an alien world, found out he could always turn himself back to human but lost the ability on said alien world, lost his girlfriend Alicia to his best friend, et cetera and so forth.

It wasn’t like I was waiting for an eventual “happy ending,” as the very nature of serialized superhero comic book adventures is happy-ending-adverse. I think I was looking more for an “equilibrium,” some middle ground where the Thing could have something resembling a normal life while still going on adventures. Like, right now, in the Ryan North scripted Fantastic Four series, the Thing is married (to Alicia…yes, that whole situation is eventually resolved, wait ’til you find out how if you don’t already know), he’s not constantly mutating, he’s not emotionally tortured…that’s about what I mean when I say “reached an equilibrium.”

In this issue, though, the Thing isn’t quite there yet, as he remains in a bit of turmoil, angered and shamed by his physical condition and brusque to the man he feels put him in this position, the FF’s leader Reed Richards. Unfortunately, Ben’s attitude results in a little friendly fire involving Reed’s young son Franklin:

…which of course only exacerbates the Thing’s renewed self-consciousness about his appearance, a symptom of recent events involving mutations of his form and his stint on Monster Island from the anniversary issue.

This drives Ben to don a suit that fully covers his body:

…as seen in this bit of business, where he, somehow unseen, overhears Johnny’s proposal to Alicia:

…that of course does nothing for his current state of mind.

The ultimate payoff of this plot thread comes when the FF all hop aboard their ship and take off into space to deploy their Sun-energy-detector-siphon doohickey. Once that’s deployed, the Thing decides to just let himself drift off into oblivion, like what we saw on the cover, only to be caught in the process by Johnny (wearing a Reed-designed outfit that allows him to Human Torch-ify himself in space):

Ben just lays out the reasons why he feels he’s no longer needed (including She-Hulk’s continuing presence on the team, which comes to a head of sorts shortly). Johnny of course thinks it’s a load of bunk and drags him back to safety, nearly doing himself in due to the limited supply of air in his special suit.

By the end of the issue, Ben’s back on board the ship and ready to pilot everyone back home, until the sun-device somehow makes contact with that alien world and drags the warring brothers back to our solar system, somehow merged into one being:

…and that’s our cliffhanger for the next issue.

I didn’t say much about the whole warring alien brothers situation, because, like I said, the important part of the story is the Thing’s continuing alienation from the rest of the team, and from the rest of humanity itself. It’s just all set-up for the big action-packed conflict for the next issue, but that said, I feel there’s still a connection between these two elements of the story. The alien warlords (named Umbra and Jaagur, just for future reference) could be seen as being in parallel to the relationship between Ben and Johnny. And Reed, too, perhaps, but given the main conflict for this story is for the former pairing, that’s the match that makes the most sense.

Between Ben and Johnny, we see an emotional conflict that is…well, not “resolved” as such, but at least brought to a position of understanding. With Umbra and Jaagur, the conflict between the two brings them into outright violent physical conflict, which gets interrupted by outside forces (Reed’s machine). And one presumes being merged into the same body doesn’t resolve those issues, but we’ll see what happens in the next chapter.

The Too Long, Didn’t Read version is that we have two different conflicts between two sets of brothers, both put on hold, with Ben and Johnny in a “but for the grace of God” circumstance in relation to Umbra and Jaagur. I mean, I don’t think Ben and Johnny were in any danger of being merged into a single body or anything, but Ben does bring up the bit of business from Monster Island where Johnny was made “ugly” by the Mole Man’s machinations, so in a way they did “share” a body, or at least a circumstance…and already my Too Long, Didn’t Read summary is longer than the bit I was trying to summarize.

In the end, what we have is a deep dive into the mental state of the Thing, still feeling the aftereffects of what he’d been through as a result of Byrne’s tenure on the book. Even after being gone for most of a year, Byrne still casts a long shadow. But of the remaining explicit changes Byrne made, the Thing’s issues find an eventual resolution (or equilibrium, as I talked about earlier), with Johnny’s marriage to Alicia, and Sue Richards’ alternate identity of “Malice,” stretching on even further still. But, more on those in future installments.

We’ve reached a point in the Fantastic Four run, following the big anniversary issue, where it feels like…well, I can’t say exactly that it’s “killing time,” or “filling pages,” or “keeping a monthly Fantastic Four title on the stands while we wait for a new direction and strong creative team to capture readers and sales like it did during John Byrne’s heyday,” because, well, these are actually pretty good.

Issues #297 through #302 (cover dates December 1986 through June 1987) came out as I was in the home stretch of my high school years, with #302 being on the stands sometime in February. I missed Byrne on the title (particularly after that underwhelming #296), and while I think I kept picking the comics up out of habit, I was still a high school senior working at the local library and not exactly rolling in disposable income to be wasting on comics I didn’t like. Therefore, there must have been something to the title that compelled me to keep reading, despite the loss of the artist/writer that had hooked me in initially.

I’ve mentioned before, somewhere in the past twenty-two years plus of writing this here website that I read all of Fury of Firestorm, staring with the first issue in 1982 and buying it each succeeding issue, and the annuals, new off the rack, until it wrapped up with #100 in 1990. And whenever I bring this up, I tend to note that while the first twenty issues (give or take) of the series are excellent, and the last twenty issues (giving and taking again) are also great, there’s a 60-issue kinda saggy middle that’s just sort of “okay,” usually. Not bad, but not outstanding. Just one of those comics you bought because you liked the character(s) and wanted to see what they were up to, not a comic you picked up because it was breaking new ground in the comics medium, excelling at the art form and influencing future generations.

Do I regret reading all those Firestorm comics? No, of course not. While not necessarily “great,” they were perfectly fine serialized superhero adventure comics. When it came time for me to scour the Vast Mikester Comic Archives for material to stock the shelves at my then about-to-open store Sterling Silver Comics (located in Camarillo, CA — ask for it by name! Um, the store, not the city), the box of Firestorm remained mostly untouched. I did sell my copies of the original short-run 1970s series in the shop, since I had that swell trade paperback. Despite that, Firestorm was just one of those characters I really liked, and my affinity for the character was, in a sense, detached from the actual quality of the stories.

Well, this series of posts isn’t “My Fur-ay of Firestorm,” so let me aim this back at Marvel’s First Family. I think the ultimate result Byrne’s FF run had with me was making me invested in the characters. I wanted to know what happened next with Reed, Sue, Johnny, and especially the Thing. I adored their adversaries, like Dr. Doom and Galactus, and wanted to see more of the FF clashing with them. Byrne’s run wasn’t perfect, but as a whole it was, and remains still, a high-watermark in this superteam’s history. Anyone else who works on the book is inevitably compared to him. And Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, too, natch, but that’s pretty much a given as they’re the creators of the whole darned thing. But you get what I mean here. You’re gonna get compared to Byrne, especially if you’re there right after Byrne.

However, Byrne created a lot of goodwill, I believe, for the comic following his run. People loved his FF, and I have to imagine the entire readership didn’t just drop the series the second Byrne was gone. I imagine many were like me, hanging on because 1) they loved the characters, 2) they wanted to see what was next, and 3) wanted to see what new direction with what new creative team was going to happen. This was me, at this point of time. I was willing to follow along, even after that anniversary issue which, under normal circumstances, may have caused me to drop the book entirely. However, I was still willing to gamble a portion of my high school senior and about to enter college income on the series, because I liked what I had read in the past, and still wanted to see where it would go in the future.

And these six issues, just who was going to work on them? We have Roger Stern as writer, still soldiering on after taking over the scripting chores following Byrne’s departure. And for the last couple of issues, Tom DeFalco comes on to help with the writing chores, presaging his long (and I think, unappreciated) run on the title a few years later. Stern himself is, of course, one of Marvel’s most solidly dependable scribes. For art, we have the Buscema Brothers, John on pencils, Sal on finishes (more or less…Sal does a little pencling as well). An interesting combination, and the name “Buscema” is one that is integral to the history of Marvel as a whole, lending a lot of weight to the title in its time of need. For all my talk of “following a property despite dips in quality,” it seems like my worry was for naught, given the pedigree of talent about to take over the book.

Am I right? Not to leave you all in suspense…well, I used the word “solid” to describe Stern, and I think it’s an overall good description of this short-lived permutation of the Fantastic Four creative team. We get a couple of hte classic villains, like the Wizard and Puppet Master, we get that wedding in issue #300 (promised by Byrne when he was still on the book), we get the superhero melodrama one would expect, including more follow-up on the Thing’s mental state vis-a-vis the team. Each issue is, as my pals over on War Rocket Ajax would say, exactly One Unit of Marvel Comics — competently done, not too much, not too little. It may not reach heights, but it’s not scraping bottom, either.

We’ll be taking a closer look at the individual issues in the next installment, hopefully with a special focus on #300, which I think is the standout. And for a later installment…for all my talk of sticking with the title through thick and thin, when did I eventually drop the book? Hit those Like and Subscribe buttons and you’ll eventually find out!

So last time I told you mostly about what was supposed to happen in Fantastic Four #296, the triple-sized 25th anniversary issue of The World’s Greatest Comic. (And the time before that I just kept yappin’ about the Barry Windsor-Smith cover.)

Now, why triple-sized I’m not exactly sure. To use a variation of an expression I’ve used before, this was a 10 pound plot in a 20 pound bag, hardly requiring the space used for what the story needed. If it had followed John Byrne’s original plans, filling the pages with references to the team’s history, it might have at least made for a visual feast.

As it stands, it’s a Jim Shooter plot/a supposed Stan Lee script, and a parade of artists, starting with the aforementioned Windsor-Smith for a moody five pages focusing on ol’ Benjy Grimm:

…followed by a flashback to the origin, also drawn by Windsor-Smith but but with additional artwork by Kerry Gammill and Vince Colletta, giving it that retro-1960s feel.

It’s a strong kick-off to the anniversary issue, contrasting where we are “now” (i.e. 1986) and how things were at the beginning. Maybe a little long, given the 10 pages it takes out of the 64 total. And like i said, it’s not like there’s a whole lot of story here. In short, the rest of the FF discover that the Thing, alienated from the team and the world, has retreated to Monster Island, home of their old enemy the Mole Man, to live among the creatures there. They fly out to get him, fight a bunch of monsters, convince the Thing that the Mole Man’s plan to raise a new island is going to wipe out the U.S.’s Pacific coast, and Ben is back on the team. The end.

Of course, there’s usually more to a good Marvel story than just the plot, and that’s the characterization. I do like this bit where, prior to seeking out Ben, Sue Richards gives her husband Reed a good shouting at in regards to how he’s let the Thing guilt-trip him for so many years:

But Reed still wants to fly out to the island to settle things with his former best friend man-to-man.

And then there’s the Thing his own self…spending the issue giving the FF the cold shoulder, defending his new pal the Mole Man, determined to turn his back on his old way of life forever…but pushing back a bit when Moley calls his former teammates his “enemies.”

Speaking of the Mole Man, he is not unaffected by Ben’s decision to crash at his pad:

He also has his own private chamber that he absconds to time and again, but when Ben busts in to talk to him:

…he discovers that the Mole Man, despite his disdain for the surface world, finds comfort using holograms to pretend he is part of that world, and easily loses himself in that delusion.

It’s interesting little character bits like this that drive the story along, which, as I said earlier, feels a little overlong. While the various artistic contributions range from “nicely done” to “it relays the plot in pictorial form,” with Jerry Ordway’s lengthy participation probably being the best of the bunch next to Windsor-Smith, ultimately the story doesn’t feel that…special.

Byrne’s idea of visually including the history of the team in this issue would have at least been something. Mostly, though, this was a just a climax of sorts to some of the ongoing soap opera threads that Byrne had left behind due to his abrupt departure from the title. It wasn’t that long ago that I was talking about Justice League of America #200, and what a perfect anniversary issue that was, with the hook of great artists providing individual chapters in a storyline that celebrated the origins of the team while equally celebrating the characters that came later.

This FF anniversary was almost there, referring back as it does to the Mole Man’s appearance as the team’s very first adversary in issue #1. Plus, don’t forget that the team’s co-creator, Stan Lee, is attached to this new story. But the story just lacks…oomph. Aside from that wonderful Windsor-Smith cover, and some nice art and character bits inside, there’s nothing here that really grabs you. I don’t know how fast they had to scramble to assemble this issue, with Byrne bailing out so close to its publication, but the comic is simply…there. Not a celebration, not an exciting reflection on What Has Come Before and Where It’ll Be Going. It’s just a means to an end.

That end being that the ultimate upshot of the whole endeavor is to get Ben Grimm back as part of the Fantastic Four. He hadn’t held that position for a couple of years by this point, since the end of the Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars mini-series. It’s a restoration of the status quo, of sorts.

The one interesting thing this story does is that it doesn’t necessarily resolve the main emotional conflict, that Ben is alienated from the team. Superficially, yes, Ben had rejoined and it looks like everything’s back to normal, but…his old girlfriend Alicia is still romantically attached to his teammate Johnny, he’s still a “monster,” he still blames Reed, and Reed never really hashes out the whole guilt-trip thing with him. And when we get to the issues that follow, and the new creative teams that take over the book, we see that Ben’s emotional journey continues along a darker path.

[NOTE: examination of John Byrne’s past work is meant solely in a critical and historical context, and is not meant as a condoning of any specific statements he has made or creative choices he has taken.]

So we’re still going to be talking about Fantastic Four #296, the triple-or-so-sized anniversary issue of the title. Last time I didn’t get much farther than the cover, and this time…well, the aheader I am, the behinder I get, because I was Googling around and discovered some heretofore unknown to me information. And it’s information I should have realized was out there.

As previously discussed, John Byrne’s departure from the series was very sudden and apparently unexpected, as it appears a combination of office politics and burnout (so to speak) on creating the stories themselves is what caused him to self-remove from those chores. However, it didn’t dawn on me that maybe he let slip some of his intended plans for future stories here and there, like in the Amazing Heroes Preview Special an’ such.

And in fact, he did briefly chat ahout said comics there, but he talked about the same things in greater length in Marvel Age #37.

As I said, I happened to be Googling around and caught someone referencing this very issue of Marvel Age, noting that Byrne revealed his own plans for the upcoming anniversary issue. Thus, did I seek out this sacred tome (i.e. asked a pal for a copy) and dug into the long-hidden secrets of this lost comic.

Or maybe not so lost. We’ll see.

A production note: my source on these pages was relatively low resolution, so I doubled the size, just in case you were wondering why everything’s so fuzzy and pixelated. By which I mean these scans, not me.

This is all from an article entitled “Marvel 25th Anniversary,” written by Kurt Busiek, which surprised me just a tad. Within, creators are asked what they’ve got planned for their books for The Big Occasion, and that includes a certain Mr. Byrne, who has plans for #296, big plans indeed, oh yes.

Now it doesn’t specify in the article whether the “guest list” means surprise character cameos in the story, or guest artists helping to fill out this monster of a book. Regardless, let’s see what the story will entail.

No, Byrne didn’t just invent Ultimate Comics. Basically what he’s saying (as he explains more in the bit I trimmed off) is that the 20th anniversary book was more a standalone adventure, concerned primarily with itself, while this 25th anniversary book would contain more “fannish” callbacks and references. Like, for example, an autographed photo of the Infant Terrible on an endtable, you know, like that.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Byrne’s story is called “Return to Monster Island,” in which we go back to the Mole Man’s hangout from that very first Fantastic Four adventure in 1961. And what’s interesting about that is what does in fact happen in the published, Byrne-free #296, plotted by the then editor-in-chief of Marvel, Big Jim Shooter, with the scripting credited to the FF’s co-creator Stan Lee.

The noted retelling of the origin also happens in the published #296, but it appears as a reminiscence of the Thing’s. Also, the visit to Central City does not appear.

Now this sounds interesting, and probably would have made for a fascinating visual, with seawater just pouring into a giant open wound in the Earth. But again, not in the published comic, as when the FF reaches Monster Island, it is still intact.

That would have been a wild twist on that ancient detail, which…you know, why not? It’s not like all those giant diamonds played too heavily in any future plot points, beyond maybe emphasizing their literally-blinding brilliance. This gives them some measure of purpose, and their transformative powers sets up what is the likely resolution to a certain in-story problem:

First, yes, in the printed #296 the Thing had also come to Monster Island to hang out with other monsters, but at this point he just looked like the normal orange rocky monster he always was. (Only decked out in a jumpsuit and googles just like his new best pal, the Mole Man.)

In Byrne’s version, it seems pretty clear that the solution to the Thing’s new drastic, presumably physical, changes, would be exposure to that diamond goo. It would turn him to his “true self,” which wold mean (in the uninteresting resolution) regaining his human form as Ben Grimm, or (in the more compelling, psychological twist) becoming his true form as the real Thing, the blue-eyed idol of millions. That would certainly say a lot about what the Thing thought of himself, and, done right, couild have been a swell reveal.

In the published follow-up issues, the She-Hulk situation isn’t really addressed right away, as we’re more focused on the Thing’s mental state and his depression over The State of Stuff. It does come to a head with She-Hulk and the Thing having bit of a tussle in #299, but clearly circumstances at this point have departed from Byrne’s plans.

…or have we, as the published #300 does in fact have a marriage, between Johnny Storm and the Thing’s former girlfriend, Alicia Masters (or is it? More on that later!). Byrne’s comment on “whether those will come to pass” leaves it perhaps open to some kind of avoiding the marriage in his version of #300, but that’s hard to say. (That comment also refers to his tease of maybe finishing the long-uncompleted “Last Galactus Story,” which…well, it’s not too late!)

It’s kind of a no-brainer that going back to the setting of the very first Fantastic Four adventure could be the basis of a Special Anniversary Issue. As such, it makes sense that Shooter would stick with that basic outline for the story. (Plus, “Return to Monster Island” is blurbed at the end of #295.) It makes a very FF-kind of sense that the Thing, feeling alienated and alone, would go to Monster Island to be with other “monsters” like him. I’m sure Byrne had run all his plans for the issue, and once Byrne left, the idea was “well, let’s just kinda stick with what he was planning.” He probably should have had some kind of notation on the main page, at the very least as “inspiration.”

Maybe Jack Kirby, too, but at least get gets a mention in the afterword Stan supposedly wrote in the back of the comic. Ah well.

It was strange to see this alternate take on what the anniversary issue could have been, even if it wasn’t, at least on the most basic level, all that different from what we actually got. And what we actually got…will be discussed in the next installment! Finally!
 
 

Special thanks for the production assistance from Bully, the Little Fantastic Bull!

Listen, this is one humdinger of a cover. Drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith, it effectively depicts the state of the Thing as it had been at this time…alienated and alone, divided from the rest of the Fantastic Four.

You would think the moodiness of the piece might be slightly diminished by Marvel’s 25th anniversary framing border, which appeared on all the Marvel comics around this time, showing a parade of celebratory heroes. If anything, it enhances the Thing’s isolation, his somber demeanor separating him from the party that literally surrounds him. Yes, the Thing is also in the border:

…which maybe undermines my point a little, but that is the Heroic Part-of-the-Team Thing, not the put-upon, feeling-his-inhumanity Thing.

In short, what I’m saying is this is a good cover, one that even leans into the forced company-wide cover layout to give it additional meaning. Was that Windsor-Smith’s intent? Probably not, but that’s how it works.

Anyway, this is an extra-sized issue, 64 pages or thereabouts, marking not only the 25th anniversary of the modern Marvel superhero universe, but the 25th anniversary of the comic what kicked it all off. It’s hard to believe now that there was ever a time the FF was around only for 25 years. I mean, I’ve been in the comic book business for nearly 38 years now, and I’m just trying to imagine the FF starting 13 years ago and hitting its 25th anniversary now.

And frankly, it’s difficult to think of the series as having been around only 25 years, at that point, given just how much has gone on with its pages over that timeframe, and how many interpretations of the team. And, yes, how many repeated plot points (a problem the series still hasn’t shed, as we approach its 65th anniversary this year).

When this issue came out in 1986, I’d been reading the comic since about 1983, and had bought the back issues of the John Byrne run back to its beginning in 1981’s #232. The wrap-up of Byrne’s final storyline, which he departed partway throough, had actually been a relatively smooth transition, with sympathetic creators following in his footsteps and applying familiar story beats and styles of artwork. And, yes, working at least partially from Byrne’s plot points.

That all means we hadn’t yet seen a Fantastic Four issue free of Byrne’s influence post his departure. This issue, #296, would be the first in six years. But is it really free of that influence? The issue is literally about the Thing’s emotional and literal separation from the team that had been his family, a situation that Byrne himself instigated (assisted by creative teams over on The Thing solo series) and didn’t resolve before he left.

(On top of that, there’s the whole “Johnny Storm dating Alicia Masters” business that Byrne introduced, which also played into the Thing’s current situation. And I realize I said in a previous installment that I was going to address this particular twist on the title’s formula in a “future installment.” Don’t worry, it’s still coming, but it’s going to be a little bit down the line, when a certain something happens.)

All this means that this giant anniversary issue (released so close to the 300th issue, which is probably why that one is regular-sized) seemed as if it would be our first taste of where the FF would go. Ultimately (spoiler for the next installment of these posts) it isn’t really, beyond a reinstatement of the membership’s status quo, given its one-off nature and the gimmick of a Stan Lee script (over Jim Shooter’s plot). Plus, given some information that I just discovered, it may not be as free of Byrne’s influence as I thought! But more on that next time.

I imagine I was probably ready to drop the book once that final Byrne story wrapped up in #295. But, boy, I’d been a sucker for Oversized Anniversary Issues almost from the start of my comics collecting, and the timing of that 25th anniversary issue kept me on the title for at least one more issue. Which itself kept me reading until that #300, and then beyond…at least for a bit.

I’ll dip into the actual contents of the issue with the next part of these posts. That cover, though…that cover is the stuff. It wasn’t just that this was a big special issue that got me to pick it up, it was that great, evocative drawing of my favorite FF character, which said so much with so little effort. But don’t you worry…there’s a whole lot of effort expended within, to not nearly the same effect.

And so it came to pass, in the mid-1980s, that John Byrne wrapped up his five year run on Fantastic Four, as reported here in the March 1986 issue of The Comics Journal:

(Please forgive the pixelation, as I increased the size from the source image from here.)

It’s all very…politic, with Byrne’s “on everything” seemingly bearin a lot of weight, especially in light of some later interviews. The Comics Journal mentions instances of editorial interference on some of Byrne’s books in then-recent months, such as pages of Fantastic Four #286 being redrawn, and an issue of his Incredible Hulk run being pulled from publication*.

A link found on this page shows up this 2005 Comic Book Resources interview, now accessible at archive.org, where Byrne says

“JB: A lot of factors, most internal office politics, contributed to my finding myself in a position, creatively, where doing the best work I could was simply not good enough. Not for the FF, anyway. I fear I am one of those artists who is heavily impacted by the environment in which he works. The work suffers if I am not happy, and in those final years of Shooter’s reign, I was most definitely not happy!”

This 1999 interview on Sequential Tart (linked at the same Fandom page) adds the detail that he’d likely reached the end of wanting to work on the title:

“JB: Six years on the same book, basically. That works out as a long time, even when you love the characters as much as I love the FF. It simply started to get old, and, around the same time, things in the office got dicey, and I used that as an excuse to leave.”

In the Comics Journal article, he notes that he’s still open to working for Marvel, even though the only work he had going at that moment was the covers to the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition covers (which he leaves after #11 from October 1986). But, at that point he had his Superman reboot gig over at DC Comics (which he also leaves after about a year, but that’s another story).

I was reading the ‘zines at the time, as well as the Marvel books Byrne was working on, so I knew about the abrupt departures and editorial shenanigans that may or may not have brought Byrne to his decision.

And it was abrupt, as Byrne started a multi-part story in what would end up being his last full issue, #293, which I talked about last time. A huge bubble covers a city, and the FF enter to find that time passes much more quickly inside than outside, resulting in centuries having passed. Also in the issue, Kristof (the young boy programmed with Doctor Doom’s memories) is briefly shown, setting up threads for a possible future plotline.

But with #294, Byrne was no longer writing or drawing, and credited only with the plot as Roger Stern took over scripting, with Jerry Ordway and Al Gordon on art chores. With #295, the conclusion to the story, Byrne’s contribution is reduced to a “special thanks” in the credit box.

To be honest, as creative team transitions go, this was an easy one to make. Roger Stern is of course an absolute pro, and can write entertaining superhero comics with the best of them. And the art team of Ordway and Gordon is a pleasure to look at:

Whether it was due to the influence of Byrne’s plot or not, these two issues following up on the opening chapter for this story very much retained the look ‘n’ feel we’d been accustomed to during Byrne’s run on the book. Maybe the art was a little more smoothly refined compared to Byrne’s own self-inked work (which, don’t get me wrong, appealed greatly to me), but certainly of a piece compared to the art in Byrne’s later issues that was inked by others (including Ordway and Gordon, in fact, adding to artistic continuity). The overall tone of the story felt familiar to what we’d been reading for the previous half-decade, so the pain of losing one creator was mollified by the excellence of the replacements.

And so, I thought, that was that. Things were going to be fine. We were still getting our regular dose of John Byrne over on the Superman books, and this swell replacement team of Stern, Ordway and Gordon were going to be knockouts on the FF.

It didn’t quite work out that way, alas. Stern would stay on the book for a bit, though with a different, if fascinating, art team, and the title would slowly move away from the Byrne era of The Superstar Creator Doing His Thing and more toward something a little more…traditional, maybe? While still dealing with the repercussions of what had gone before.

It was an interesting time for the team, and while I had primarily stayed on the book for Byrne’s work, I found myself wondering how Marvel was going to follow that act. Thus, I stuck around for quite a while after his departure to see what they’d try next. And while Stern and that Mysterious Art Team (that you can totally Google, I don’t know why I’m being coy about it) would give us some readable entertainment, we had a giant anniversary issue in #296 to get through first.

And, hoo boy, it’s certainly somethin’.
 
 
 

* That story eventually gets published in Marvel Fanfare.

So I spent a lot of time talking about John Byrne’s 1980s run on the Fantastic Four, probably focusing too much on the specifics without saying, in the big picture, that it was classically-done superheroing. Imaginative, usually well-drawn, stories that, with the occasional exception, paid off and rewarded the reader for their investment of half-a-buck or so.

One time (warning: name-drop ahead) Scott McCloud asked me what was the current title on the stands that perfectly encapsulated the standard of A Superhero Comic. What was “One Exact Unit of Superhero Funnybooking,” one could say. At the time, in the late ’90s, I told him “Avengers by Kurt Busiek and George Pérez,” and not just because Scott and Kurt are old friends. It was genuinely the Platonic idea of a superhero comic…well-written, well-drawn, rewarding to read. Had Scott asked me a decade and a half earlier, I would have said John Byrne’s Fantastic Four.

But all things come to an end, and Byrne’s run, having begun in 1981, finally reaches its end in 1986’s #293:

First of all, it doesn’t feel like Byrne’s run was only five years long, given its reputation. It is a significant milestone in the series as a whole, essentially “resetting” the series that had, to some extent, gone a bit off the rails in the years following Lee and Kirby departures from the book. Byrne’s “Back to Basics” approach gave the title a new baseline from which to work, a several-year run that was almost entirely jumping-on points for new readers.

And it’s not like five years is anything to sneeze at. Every issue, plus the annuals, written and drawn by Byrne (with #266 mostly penciled by Kerry Gammill, though Byrne inked it all and did pencil three pages of it), even while he was working on other projects. This did affect the art somewhat, ’til Byrne wisely brought inkers on board to assist in the back half of his tenure.

Second, #293 has only the second cover on one of Byrne’s FF issues to not have been drawn by him (the other being Eliot Brown’s Doctor Doom mask cover). I’m pretty sure I knew already that Byrne was going to be departing, but it was a strange thing actually to see that David Ross/Joe Rubinstein image on the physical copy of the comic in my hands. Even looking at it to this very day makes me recall that sense that there’s a monumental change afoot.

I was in my mid-teens then, but this may have been the time I had personally experienced such a transition on a comic I was following. I was used to multiple teams of artists and writers on comics, of course, but I think Byrne was my initial exposure to The Superstar Creator, the Big Name doing Significant Work on a signature title. Such an immense talent, I thought, would be a hard act to follow. In fact, how could one follow Byrne on a title that he so very much made his own?

It’s a feeling I would have again, when Alan Moore left Swamp Thing, when Peter David left Incredible Hulk. Absolutely classic runs where the creators left their imposing marks, and also giving readers the feeling “who could possibly even follow that?” In the case of Swamp Thing, we got Rick Veitch as the next writer/artist of the series, who turned out to be just the guy to pick up where Moore left off, giving us his own wild run that, while unfortunately truncated at the time, is ginally getting its due.

In the case of Incredible Hulk, it took…a little while longer for the comic to find its footing, though it became very clear that David’s long run did away with the viability of the simple “Hulk smash!” formula that he disdained. The more successful follow-ups delved more deeply into the variable personalities of the Hulk character, such as the immensely popular Immortal Hulk series from a few years back.

Fantastic Four was more a case of the latter than the former, where Byrne’s run cast a long shadow, and the creators that followed found they had big shoes to fill. Eventually, we’d get some significant new directions, but the path from here to there did hit some rough spots along the way. For next time, I’ll delve a little more deeply into this specific story that ends the Byrne run, and where the book goes from there. A lot of changes are ahead, as folks come aboard and try to deal with the pieces that were left behind by this sudden departure of so outsized an influence.

I’m just about ready to move on from John Byrne’s 1981-1986 run on the Fantastic Four, but I wanted to touch upon this particular storyline because, among other things, it sets up a character that will return again and again in future creative teams’ efforts on the title.

I remember picking up issue #271 and being quite taken with the throwback cover to the 1950s/early ’60s Marvel monster comics, before Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and friends dived back into the superhero genre:

I’m not sure where I’d been exposed to that era of Marvel monster books initially…perhaps some of the reprints that popped up as filler material in some of the Giant-Sizes I’d collected, or a friend whose uncle had a handful of original copies of these books (before being all destroyed in a rainstorm, having left his box of them outside. But I was certainly familiar with them, and found them amusing and charming enough that I would eventually draw out my own spoof splash page of such a story (“FONDUU, THE CHEESE DISH THAT WALKED LIKE A MAN!”).

Byrne’s pastiche of the Marvel monster period (this time involving a pre-superpowered Reed and Sue as the intrepid humans against the alien menace) takes up the majority of this issue. It certainly succeeds in evoking the essence of that era, even if it suffers a little in retrospect as the bad guy is coincidentally defeated in pretty much the exact same way the bad guy is defeated in Avengers #250, released shortly afterward.

But of interest is the plot element that turns up in the “present day” section of the book…the fact that Reed is suffering memory loss, introduced in this dramatically effective panel:

He continues to say that other memories of his younger years are lost, and attributes this to their recent adventures in the Negative Zone, where Reed’s brain was drained and blah blah I’m not going to get into it, but some alien critter messed with his head and left it Swiss-cheesed.

So it’s decided for some reason that escapes me even though I just reread these three issues right before reading this to go back to Reed’s father’s mansion in California…and I just reread that section of the story and I’m still not clear why they did. Anyway, we learn that Reed’s father, a scientist, had disappeared about ten years ago (“three years” before the team got their powers, leaning into Byrne’s “seven year” span that he assumes the FF had been active).

Eventually Reed discovered that his father had created a time machine that shunted him into an alternate timeline, and in #272:

…the FF use Pops’ machine to follow him into the parallel universe. Look, okay, there are cowboys on flying horses on the cover, and we get some neat bits with a sci-fi tinged Old West in this other timeline, but the big story is that Reed’s father is apparently the hated Warlord, who rules over this world:

And that brings us to Part Three, #273:

…where you can see on the cover there that Reed and his dad finally meet face to face, which is a neat moment, but boy, this issue is undermined by the fact that Byrne decided to not only write and draw this issue, as he had been on the FF for the previous few years, but letter it as well, and, um:

…the man’s no Gaspar Saladino. I think when I first read this issue, even then I was all “what’s up with the lettering” when I noticed that there was no lettering credit on the issue. Eventually I figured out Byrne did it his own self, which kinda blew my mind just a little. I mean, artists lettering their own work was not a new idea to me, as comic strip artists did it all the time, natuarlly. But in Marvel and DC Comic Books, it was always a separate job that you got someone specifically to do.

I should have realized it wasn’t unprecedented, but I don’t think I realized Jim Aparo often lettered his own work, and it was around this time that Todd Klein was lettering his own scripts on Omega Men. Of course in many independent books, this was often the case…the Hernandez Brothers lettered their own work, Dave Sim did some wild lettering in Cerebus, but that seemed different from the usual assembly-line nature of the Big Two.

Regardless, it did seem like A Step Too Far when Byrne picked up the lettering gig for this issue. He was already perceived as being stretched too thin writing and drawing the multiple books he worked on per month, and adding the not-insignificant task of lettering an entire issue felt like one burden too many. Especially when the result was aggressively Not Good. It looked awkward, the lettering was inconsistent, lines of text looked crooked, and even the word balloons themselves were pretty janky. Lettering can’t be distracting when reading a comic book, and this job was nothing but distracting.

Despite all that, the story continues, with Reed pleading his case to the Warlord (only it turned out (SPOILER) to be Reed’s stepmom, who was acting as the Warlord without Pops’ knowledge).

Note that we are here in the third and final part of this story, and Reed is still emphasizing his loss of memory. Which is interesting because ultimately, when the story is resolved and Reed and his dad have their peaceful reunion…the whole “lost memory” subplot is completely forgotten. The problem that launched this storyline remains unresolved. Far as I know, to this very day Reed still lacks all those memories, because at no point over these three issues does he ever get them back.

I remember noticing this at the etime, and wondering what exactly happened to let that plot element go astray. They didn’t forget it was such, and it was brought up in the concluding issue. Just when everything was said and done, the instigating action to drive the characters into this other world exists only as that: an instigating action. It is not a problem to be solved, but a…is Macguffin the right word here? I feel like that’s not exactly it but my English is failing me here.

But it’s ultimately pointless and I think that made me really wonder how such a gaffe could be made in a professionally published comic book. Yes, I knew about Marvel’s “No-Prizes” sent out for folks spotting (and explaining away!) continuity mistakes, but this seemed like a much bigger problem than that. A problem of a creator getting Too Big for an editor to successfully edit? I didn’t know then, and I’m certainly not sure now.

The lasting legacy of the introduction of Reed’s father in this storyline (beyond the “surprise twist ending” of the story connecting him to the time-traveling villain(s) Rama-Tut/Kang) is that Reed’s dad will return in Avengers: Doomsday in future FF storylines, with alternating personalities. While a seemingly benevolent and kind man at the end of Byrne’s issues, he returns in the Tom DeFalco/Paul Ryan issues as a untrustworthy and manipulative figure, then returns again as a somewhat more positive character. But, as I like to say when talking about future FF events, I’ll say more when I get there.

The other note I wanted to add is something I noticed on my most recent rereading…the attempts at pinning down Reed’s exact age. In this panel from #271, Johnny Storm congratulates Reed on hitting “The Big One” for this year’s birthday:

I interpret that as either 40s (most likely) or 50s (still plausible, given Reed’s slightly older status compared to the other 20/30-something superheros at Marvel.

Then Reed says this in #273:

…which still leaves things open a little bit. Reed’s dad vanished about a decade prior, but it’s very possible Reed hadn’t seen him for many years prior to said disappearance. However, if you look closely at the lettering in the second word balloon, the word “twenties” was obviously lettered in after the fact. Apparently someone didn’t want to accidentally “age up” the character by even implying Reed was in his 30s, or older, “10 years ago.”

This run of issues grabbed my attention way back when in good ways (Byrne’s generally fun art and storytelling) and bad (oy, that lettering, and the unresolved plot) that, had I had a blog back then, I almost certainly would have commented upon. It was an experience to get a story with a strong beginning and a clunker ending, leaving me wondering what fell down to allow this to happen. It was just another piece in the puzzle reminding me this comics were made by Human Beings, and sometimes we Human Beings drop the ball, even with the best of intentions.

Next time: the big transition from Byrne to Post-Byrne!