Today, we look at your picks for #3-1 of the greatest Fantastic Four stories ever told!
As always, you voted, I counted the votes and now we count them down, four at a time. If I don’t add a date for the series, it means it is the original volume of whatever series I’m talking about.
3. Fantastic Four #57-60 “The Peril and the Power!”
Throughout Marvel history, one of the most interesting storylines has been when supervillains gain ultimate power and that’s just what happened in Fantastic Four #57 (by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Joe Sinnott), when Doctor Doom tricked the Silver Surfer into Doom capturing him and absorbing the Power Cosmic…
In an amazing bit in the next issue, Doom is powerful now that he doesn’t even bother to kill the Fantastic Four!
But don’t worry, Doom has his comeuppance coming and its a brilliant twist of fate, as he has become so confident that he does not realize that he now has the Silver Surfer’s strengths, but also his weaknesses. Kirby and Sinnott have rarely been better than they were on this storyline (which also worked the Inhumans in there for good measure).
2. Fantastic Four #51 “This Man, This Monster”
In “This Man, This Monster,” Stan Lee and Jack Kirby delivered a brilliant character piece about selflessness and heroism.
In recent years, Grant Morrison wrote a great Batman story about how the trauma of Batman’s life would be too much for anyone BUT Batman to handle, and similarly, Dan Slott wrote a Spider-Man story about how Spider-Man’s sense of responsibility is so powerful that when a supervillain was exposed to it when he took over Spider-Man’s body, he couldn’t help but be moved to be a hero, as well.
Those concepts are very similar to this Kirby and Lee story from almost sixty years ago! The story is about a jealous (unnamed) scientist who hates Reed Richards because he feels that Reed does all of his exploration and scientific discoveries because he is a glory hound (which might seem that way to an outsider – the guy DID name himself “Mr. Fantastic,” after all). He then decides to eliminate Reed by by switching places with the Thing through some power-switcher thing.
So he shows up as Thing, but he is shocked by the goodness of the Fantastic Four, especially Reed’s selflessness, so, in a moment when he could easily kill Reed (and no one would ever know it was murder)…
This is an excellent representation of the humanity of Lee/Kirby’s Fantastic Four (and the art, naturally, is excellent). Of course, we have the bittersweet part of the now-human Ben Grimm turning back to the Thing when the “villain” sacrifices himself.
What a powerful issue.
1. Fantastic Four #48-50 “The Coming of Galactus”
The top storyline works as the epitome of the epic cosmic adventures Stan Lee and Jack Kirby sent the Fantastic Four on often, with wild technology and astonishing stakes (the fate of the entire planet) but at the same time, real human elements, like Reed Richards’ reaction to having to try to save the Earth from doomsday (he doesn’t deal super well with the enormous pressure, grows a beard and even snaps at Sue). However, the most “human” part of the story turned out to not involve a human at all, as the alien being known as the Silver Surfer, the being who was the herald and literally drew the world-eating Galactus to Earth, ended up falling to Earth and learning a valuable lesson in humanity from a familiar face…
And one of the most interesting aspects (and also part of what made the Kirby/Lee FF so great, with Joe Sinnott inking Kirby on this storyline) of the story is how #48 contains the ending of the previous arc and #50 has a story AFTER the Galactus story wraps up (and sets up a story for #51!). At the time, Kirby and Lee were coming up with so many ideas that something as cool as the Galactus trilogy, where basically “God” showed up to destroy the Earth, was not even the SOLE story for the three parts of the trilogy!!!
The 50th issue has some stretches of the imagination, but it also has two extremely iconic moments – Reed Richards threatening Galactus with the Ultimate Nullifier…
and Galactus stripping his former herald, the Silver Surfer, of his abilities to roam the galaxy, as punishment for helping to fight for the people of Earth…
And note that these moments were handled as just one of many panels!!
You could argue that this comic had it all – great story, great art, cosmic problems, earthly problems, action – it was the complete package, and it still stands out today, fifty-plus years later!
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