Fantastic Four 3

The Menace of the Miracle Man
by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby

"Set the controls on automatic, Thing... We're home!" -Mr. Fantastic

The Fantastic Four are in attendance to a performer billing himself as the Miracle Man. Spotting the super group, Miracle Man goads them that his powers are greater than theirs. He then asks that the Thing to come on stage so he can prove it. Miracle Man brings two large tree trunks on stage to see which of them can chop through them fastest with their bare hands. With one swipe of his fingers, Miracle Man is the clear victor. The rest of the team hold Thing back from attacking the man. While the foursome heads home from the show, Miracle Man schemes to make the public fear him using a movie display at a nearby cinema.

The Fantastic Four have come a long way since being hunted by the military last time. They now have their own headquarters at the top of the Baxter Building in Manhattan with many rooms devoted to Reed's science research and various modes of transportation, including a helicopter and rocket. The public seems to give them a degree of respect, perhaps saving them all from the Skrulls shook the public's interest.

As the group arrives home in the tub-shaped Fantasticar, they all start to wind down. Johnny turns on the TV to find them broadcasting the premiere of the movie the display outside the cinema that attracted Miracle Man's attention is part of. Speaking of attention, Sue reveals to the group that she's been working on costumes for the lot of them. She dresses them all in their new blue uniforms, including a helmet for Thing to hide his ugly, rocky face in. Johnny draws their attention to the TV where he spots the Miracle Man at the world premiere. It's just then that the monster display seems to come to life. The creature starts attacking the police before it completely vanishes before their eyes. Johnny correctly guesses it was the Miracle Man and to confirm it the police commissioner receives a letter from the villain stating he will take over the world. The Fantastic Four search the city. Reed finds the big green movie monster first. He attempts to stop it by netting the creature with his stretched out body, but Miracle Man hurls a brick at his head rendering the leader unconscious. After regaining his senses, Reed is berated by the commissioner for failing. Next, Johnny finds the monster. He quickly turns on his flame and tries to draw it's attention away from the atomic tank it has picked up.

Sue and Thing quickly join in to help. But first Thing gets rid of his helmet and tears off the cumbersome uniform down to the trunks. As the two race over, the monster grasps Human Torch in its fist. Just as Johnny predicted, the statue blazes into a heap of wood and ash. Before he can celebrate, the Miracle Man hits Johnny with a chemical foam from below, dousing his flame. Thing confronts the Miracle Man, but he uses his powers to make the ground beneath Thing's feet swallow him up. As the two struggle in defeat, Sue turns invisible to follow the Miracle Man in an army truck he is using to steal the atomic tank.

With Sue gone the three guys quickly lose their temper. Thing is angry again about being ugly and takes it out on Johnny. Johnny quickly hightails it out of the headquarters. Reed and Thing are left contemplating Sue's whereabouts. In a junkyard on the outskirts of the city, the army truck (along with an invisible passenger) has reached its destination. Miracle Man unloads the atomic tank and starts hiding it among the junked cars. The Invisible Girl is suddenly spotted by the nose of a junkyard dog who quickly makes her presence known to the Miracle Man. He hypnotizes her into shooting off her "4" flare gun to summon the rest of her team. Thing and Reed see the 4 in the sky and helicopter over. Johnny, who is cooling off after his tussle with Thing at a nearby diner, is alerted to it as well and flies off.

Ben and Reed land and are confronted by the Miracle Man. He appears to be wielding a giant key, but before their eyes the key's form morphs into that of a machine gun. As Miracle Man begins to fire, Reed morphs himself into a rubber ball and bounces harmlessly out of the bullets' path long enough for Thing to use his body as a shield against them. Miracle Man takes off in the atomic tank just before the Human Torch lands to join the chase. The three men procure an antique racing car to pursue the villain. Still being too slow, Torch flies up to overshoot them and uses his flame to burn bright enough to blind their foe. Thing attempts to clobber Miracle Man, but Reed holds him back. Reed threatens to let Ben loose on him unless he releases Sue from her trance. The villain agrees, which leads Reed to figure out the Miracle Man's powers. He has none, he can only perform mass hypnotism which fooled everyone into thinking he has these awesome powers. Furthermore his hypnotism power has gone away now due to the Torch's flash blinding him. Thing takes an affront to this, that Johnny was the one who saved them all. Before they can continue this argument, Johnny proclaims he's had enough of this fighting with Thing and flies off distraught and alone.

Notes:

1st appearance of Fantastic Four based in the Baxter Building in New York

1st appearance of Fantastic Four's superhero costumes

1st appearance of Miracle Man

Human Torch quits the team

Tales to Astonish 27

The Man in the Ant Hill
by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby

"How will I ever get back to normal?!!" -Henry Pym

To show up his naysayer peers, a blonde scientist named Henry Pym has developed a serum for shrinking things. His hope if his experiment is a success is to use this formula to shrink things from shipping items at a reduced cost to shrinking an entire army for travel in just one plane. After months of planning and experimentation, Henry successfully shrinks a chair. For the final test, the scientist tests the serum on himself which works too well. Faster than he was expecting, the scientist rapidly shrinks.

In his excitement, Henry Pym realizes he left the antidote to his serum all the way up on a windowsill in his lab that he is now hopeless to reach. Running outside, Pym contemplates loudly on what he’s going to do when some ants spot him. The insects chase the small man down into their ant hill. Henry manages to evade them, when he slips and falls into a puddle of ant honey. Another ant spots Henry who is now stuck in the honey and it helps him out of his sticky situation. Before the two can exchange pleasantries, the other ants rush after the tiny scientist.

Henry Pym escapes. After sighting an unused matchstick, Pym grabs a pebble and tosses it to strike the match head. The fire from the match keeps the attacking ants at bay long enough for Henry to fashion a lasso and climb his way up higher in the ant chamber. Higher up he is greeted by another ant’s pincers which grip Pym around his body tightly. Pym uses his judo skills to over power the insect and fling it down towards the flames. Reaching the surface, Henry Pym is still pursued by the ants, but he notices the nice ant who helped him out of the honey. This ant allows Henry to climb onto its back so he can ride up to the windowsill of his lab where he bathes himself in the antidote formula. With himself back to normal size, the scientist decides to dispose of the rest of his formula so this will never happen again. At the next meeting with his scientist peers, Henry admits that his experiment was a failure and agrees to work on more practical projects in the future.

Notes:

1st appearance of Henry Pym, who will go one to have many adventures as the hero Ant-Man and many other guises.

Fantastic Four 2

The Fantastic Four Meet the Skrulls From Outer Space!

by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby

"Maybe I am a monster!" -Thing

We next find the Fantastic Four as they are being hunted by the military. A group of green skinned, shape-changing aliens called Skrulls have disguised themselves as the Fantastic Four and have committed crimes that discredit the superhero group. The Skrulls’ ultimate goal is to invade the world with the rest of their fleet and conquer it while their greatest heroes seem to be a threat to the public.

The real Fantastic Four are found hiding in a log cabin in some woods. The military take the group into custody, but with their powers they easily escape from their cells. Evading the army again, the Four make their way to one of their secret hideouts. Reading a newspaper, Johnny Storm gets an idea to lure the imitators out. He flies off to a nearby rocket site where a launch is underway. After sabotaging some equipment, the Skrulls disguised as Reed, Sue and Thing stop and bring him in assuming he is the one disguising himself as the Torch. Once inside the Skrulls’ hideout the aliens quickly realize their blunder as Johnny shoots his Fantastic Four flare out a window to summon the rest of the team.

The Human Torch keeps the Skrulls at bay long enough for the rest of the team to show up. The Fantastic Four successfully beat the imitating aliens and force them to send them up to the Skrull mothership in space via a small spaceship disguised as a water tower. Inside the mothership, the real Fantastic Four pretend to be the Skrulls. Reed speaks before a Skrull general to convince him that earth is far too dangerous to invade even with the Fantastic Four subdued. He then hands over evidence of this which are actually clippings from other Marvel monster mags. This is enough to sell to the general that earth is too dangerous. Before the Skrulls can flee with the Four, Reed persuades the Skrull general to let the four of them stay behind to remove any traces of their invasion. The general agrees and awards Reed a medal for being the bravest Skrull their race has ever known.

On the way back down to earth, the Fantastic Four pass through the cosmic ray storm yet again. The only person it effects his the Thing who changes back into his human form. Suddenly a spotlight drops on the group and they are quickly surrounded by law enforcement. They gather the Four together, but Reed has enough clout that he gets them to agree to follow him so they can explain what’s really been going on with the Skrulls and clear their names. They all race over to the Skrull hideout building, where the Skrulls have gotten free and start to attack everyone the moment they arrive. Ben, who has turned back into his rocky Thing form by this point, eagerly fights a Skrull who has changed into a snake-like monster and Torch subdues a spikey gray thing Skrull. The third turns into a bird to escape the scene, but Reed stretches his arms out a window to stop it.  This being enough evidence for the police, they drop all charges from the super group. The Fantastic Four take care of the Skrulls in a very peculiar way. Reed hypnotizes them to forget who they are and forces them to change to a form where they will remain at peace and unable to disturb the earth. The 3 Skrulls promise to remain the way Reed says and the Fantastic Four leave them to live out a peaceful existence as cows.

Notes:

Reading Guide:

Fantastic Four #1
Fantastic Four #2

Fantastic Four 1

The Fantastic Four

by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby

"Those words... "The Fantastic Four"! What can they mean?" -shopkeep

A flare is shot into the sky above a panicking crowd of people. It spells out The Fantastic Four, to summon the various members of the group. They are: Young, blonde, socialite, Susan Storm who can turn herself invisible, her teenage brother the enthusiastic motor-head Johnny Storm, who can burst into flames and fly at will, a gruff, grumpy monstrosity with an orange rocky hide called the Thing and Reed Richards, the shooter of the flare, with the ability to stretch his body to any form he chooses, brilliant scientist and who is also the leader of the team. He has summoned them together to go on their first case, but first we get a bit of back story.

Reed, the brilliant scientist that he is, decided he and the US need to beat the commies to a manned space mission. He got those closest to him, his fiancee Susan, her brother, and his pilot friend Ben Grimm to agree to join him. Ben starts out apprehensive to the whole thing, due to his knowledge of the threat of cosmic rays surrounding the earth, but Sue manages to poke at his pride to get him to go along with them. So all four of them steal away into the night to a rocket that Reed Richards had built for the government. As soon as they depart the earth’s atmosphere, as Ben rightfully predicted, the whole missile is bombarded with cosmic rays. As all four of them panic, Ben’s hands start to feel to heavy to keep control of the spacecraft and the vessel falls back down to earth.

The four emerge from the wreckage relatively unscathed. Suddenly, Sue vanishes before their eyes, as soon as she reappears orange rocks start forming all over Ben’s exterior turning him into the Thing as he goes to clobber Reed who he feels superior to. With emotions running high Reed manages to subdue Ben’s new found strength by finding out he has stretching powers of his own and wraps his limbs around his friend. After they’ve calmed down, Johnny suddenly bursts into flame and flies around. Realizing they all have powers now, they decide to use these powers for the good of mankind, the four of them take on superhero names: Sue goes by the Invisible Girl, her brother Johnny goes by the Human Torch, Ben Grimm goes by the Thing due to a comment made by Sue and finally Reed decides he’ll call himself Mr. Fantastic. And so the Fantastic Four were formed.

Returning to the present, the Fantastic Four discover their mission. Power plants have been sinking all over the world, into the earth itself, each of them precipitated by what seems to be an earthquake. Reed charts these incidents to be centralized from the location of a mysterious place called Monster Isle. The four immediately head off to the island where they do indeed find it to be populated by monsters. Reed takes care of a three-headed winged beast in their way, but the confrontation triggers a cave in which swallows up both Reed and the Human Torch into it. The two of them survive by Reed stretching his body thin into a parachute which Johnny holds onto. After the two of them land deep in the underground, they are both rendered unconscious by the sheer brilliancy of a room full of shimmering diamonds. When they come to they find themselves in special blue suits that restrain their eyesight. The also find themselves the prisoner of an underground resident calling himself the Mole Man.

Back on the surface, Thing saves the Invisible Girl from some huge bi-pedal blue creature before the two of them continue their search for the missing teammates. Underground, the Mole Man reveals his troubled past to the other half. Long ago before he was the Mole Man, people trated him poorly because his looks. No one would date him, he couldn’t hold down a job, no one would treat him like a human being. So he decided if society will shun him he’ll do the same. He searched for the center of the world to find some solace where he could be alone, but he stumbled upon Monster Isle in his travels. Once there he navigated the cave system until he found what he was looking for, however his celebration of finding the place lead to an avalanche which caused a cave in and cost him his sight. He then figured out how to master the creatures underground and he’s survived all this time. Now he wants to destroy all of the earth’s power plants in a bid to take over the world and make it to his liking.

The Mole Man’s monologue is so long, the Thing and Sue manage to find his lair and the half of their team stuck there. They all get into a massive fight with the Mole Man and his creatures. Johnny flames on and uses his flame to create another cave in as all four of them flee to their waiting aircraft outside. The entire island appears to explode behind them as they speed away.

Notes

1st appearance of the Fantastic Four and Mole Man

Generally regarded as the introductory issue to the Marvel Universe. There were stories in the late 30's & 40's before this as well as Westerns, Romance & Fantasy comics that become incorporated into the Marvel Universe.

Introduction

I've been reading comics for the greater part of 20 years. One of my favorite stories that I always seem to come back to is a maxi-series by Jim Kruegar & Alex Ross called Earth X. I love how almost every action or consequence in it is drawn upon some piece of Marvel lore. It introduced me to some of my favorite characters such as the Sub-Mariner and Black Bolt. At the time I had no idea just how in-depth the characterization and events drew upon events and characters that already existed, reading through more back issues of other Marvel series I quickly realized that Marvel has been doing this all along. Sure at the time the Fantastic Four were created nobody except maybe Jack Kirby at the time had any inkling on what Celestials are or were, and even though the Hulk's origin was originally tied to the day/night cycle, they had no idea that years later Kyle Richmond's powers would also be tied to the night. The thing I find most fascinating about the Marvel Universe is that the writers and artists did decide to build upon these pre-existing thoughts and notions of others to bring more weight to their own stories and at the same time build this foundation of continuity. Now I'll admit Marvel's continuity is far from perfect and I will point this out as they occur(given I've noticed myself), but I'm not going to nitpick stories, that isn't what this blog is about. I want to celebrate comics in spite of some of the less than stellar thoughts(the blantant sexism & racism) and stories.

With that in mind, I am going to start at the beginning with Fantastic Four #1 and work my way through them with a few side stops along the way. I am going to be using the "Main Reading Order" found at http://cmro.travis-starnes.com/reading-order.php  The reason I'm using it is because I'd rather cover a full story all the way through since this blog will be concentrating on continuity and character development and if I followed them month by month we'd have things like Thor hanging out with the Avengers but then him also being away on Asgard in his own book at the same time.