World's Greatest Comic: The Fantastic Four Appreciation 2023

[jwatson]

I don't care what anyone says. Johnny is 100% sleeping with Flame-O.

Though lowkey when i read it i thought it was a play on Johnny combusting when he flames on so he doesn't get to the N. it's like "Flame-ooooh" lol

[Doom'nGloom]

I liked the issue but I think it should have taken a bit more to solve the mystery. They just stumbled upon the monster.

[CaptCleghorn]

and Reed was attracted to her, probably as much for her looks as the fact they could in fact talk about other things.

This.

As hot as Sue Storm is, I am sure Reed would have lost interest had she not been intelligent enough to maintain a conversation he'd find interesting.

[CaptCleghorn]

The FF should always have been a team of scientists instead of one guy and his sidekicks.

Really, even in that first adventure, Reed doesn't know as much about radiation shielding as Ben Grimm, is too arrogant to listen to him, that incredible arrogance gets Ben mutated into a gross freak, and then Reed follows it up by calling himself Mister Fantatic, which is just mind-boggling in the face of his proving demonstrably less intelligent that Ben, at least on the subject of radiation shielding.

Really, the opening was RIGHT THERE to establish this as a team of situationally brilliant people instead of Reed and his sidekicks. But somehow that never got followed up on, and it has just been kind of quietly accepted that Reed is leaps and bounds more intelligent than his family. A huge mistake that should be rectified. And giving Sue a field in which she excels is a good start.

The FF were pretty much Rip Hunter's Time Masters, Dane Dorrance's Sea Devils, or Cave Carson's crew (although Johnny Blake wasn't Christie Madison's brother). In all three of those DC series, it was a scientist as the leader and his three subordinate partners. The FF have been compared to the Challengers of the Unknown and the Challs are more of a case of four equals. It's possible the FF was designed more like Rip and others as the Challengers had an actual event causing an origin where the other teams did not, but this is speculation on my part.

The models the team was based on were designed to be a leader and follower group. Plus it was the very early sixties and women characters were pretty much all under developed.

[Digifiend]

Yeah, genius, girlfriend, kid brother, and a jock best friend. Am I describing the FF, or the Time Masters?

[CaptCleghorn]

Yeah, genius, girlfriend, kid brother, and a jock best friend. Am I describing the FF, or the Time Masters?

Actually, those are the Sea Devils.

[Oberon]

At the very rare chats with a fellow comic fan or two, they usually preferring DC and finding much fault with Marvel too, btw, one goes on about FF being a rip of the Challs or whatever.

While some of that is true or certainly derived (and who didn't really?)
it is unarguable that the FF comic has more to do with the revolutionizing of what comics had been for 20 years.
Even, to some degree, riding on certain 'firsts' that no comic company had done.

Getting back to Sue and her characterization, I tend to seen that somewhere increasingly after the time Sue rejoined the team when Medusa had replaced her and forward, that her depiction keeps increasing her mental as well as other abilities. It could be the culture; by the end of the '70s women had gotten a lot closer to the glass ceiling. This was the initial time of the female heroes like Spider Woman, She Hulk and the first Ms. Marvel. So it is natural that Sue, Jan, Jean and some others all benefited by less stereotypical characters (damsel in distress, mostly).
But I don't remember when, somewhere in the $ 300s maybe? that Sue really started to seem more intelligently portrayed.
I think in some recenter years this goes back and forth, especially being virtually ignored like many here say.

But Sue has always been a bit more intelligent then the general female character and again it is either because of her own innate IQ and/or the exposure to such pure science as a member of the FF.

[JT221]

I am rereading the Byrne omnibuses right now. I'd forgotten just how enjoyable that era was.

[JackDaw]

But Sue has always been a bit more intelligent then the general female character and again it is either because of her own innate IQ and/or the exposure to such pure science as a member of the FF.

Always?

I think at very least it’s debatable if she was shown that (as more intelligent than norm) in early part of original Kirby/ Lee run.

[Crimz]

Always?

I think at very least it’s debatable if she was shown that (as more intelligent than norm) in early part of original Kirby/ Lee run.

I haven't read that run in a while, but I remember her making valid points and observations quite a few times only to be ignore because she's a woman. But I don't think Lee intended it to be viewed as her making valid points though.

[JackDaw]

I haven't read that run in a while, but I remember her making valid points and observations quite a few times only to be ignore because she's a woman. But I don't think Lee intended it to be viewed as her making valid points though.

I did ponder that myself (it was a genuine question).

Like you a fair time since I read the run…but can remember her doing a few things that were clever (eg. experimenting with various scents so dogs couldn’t detect her when invisible.)

I will re-read it sometime…so don’t be too amazed if I “report” on issue in a couple of years time.

[CaptCleghorn]

Sue was nowhere near the character she has become now back in the Lee/Kirby days. Can we really gather anything relevant from stories more than a half-century old? Anything then would have been coated (buried?) in societal sexism.

[CitizenXXX]

Ryan North

Last month Fantastic Four #700 came out, and this month FF #8 came out, and they are sequential thanks to comics numbering! They're both available at comic stores so I don't want to spoil anything, but they've been really well received, which has been great to see. I honestly did not expect the book to last a year given how different it was from previous FF runs, but I'm going to be sending in the script for FF #15 later on this week, so thank you to everyone who's been checking it out every month. It's because of you that I get to keep writing it!

The book has been really challenging to write - in a good way, in a fun way! - but still much more work than I was expecting. Part of that is because after five years, I had Squirrel Girl down to a science - but the biggest part of it is simply because of the format. I pitched the sort of comic I wanted to read - single-issue high-concept scifi stories with a focus on character - but the catch of being a writer is I have to write that now. So every month I'm coming up with a scifi story, and a twist, and it's featuring at least five different main characters, and a fight scene, and some sweet sweet anagnorisis if we're lucky - and fitting it all in 20 pages. Hard! But satisfying.

I read a lot of Vonnegut's letters in the preparation to adapt Slaughterhouse Five into a comic and he wrote a lot about the short story market then - a market that's almost entirely gone now. But he grew up in a time where there were competing magazines selling mass-market stories every month to a huge audience hungry for them, and they paid enough for them that you could make a living just doing that. There's still short stories, of course, but they're not such a big piece of culture anymore. Anyway I recently realized that somehow, that's what I've turned FANTASTIC FOUR into for me! Every month I'm writing a new scifi short story built around this cast of characters and getting it to print in a comics magazine. So I kinda imagine I'm living in the golden age of scifi and yes, trying to come up with a new big concept every month is hard, but people did it before and it's fun to step into their shoes. Of course, one of the stories coming up in a few months involves the Fantastic Four meeting dinosaurs, so I'm clearly not too far out of my usual wheelhouse.

Next month concludes the "people's memories are being rewritten" storyline started in #8 with a bang - and it's all narrated from Alicia's point of view. I've loved getting to know Alicia and making her a bigger part of the FF in this book, and it was great to see her in a story where she's the lead - despite not having any superpowers. I think every issue is special but I think this issue is really special!

Here's a sneak peek at some uncoloured Ivan Fiorelli's art, with Alicia narrating. One of my favourite big ideas from the early days of the Fantastic Four is that there's a company called Marvel Comics inside the Marvel universe, and they print these goofy comics starring the Fantastic Four, so the FF can read comics about themselves. I of course love a book-within-a-book, so I wasted no time in giving those comics a cameo!

Attachment 132617Attachment 132617

[CitizenXXX]

I believe Doctor Doom does not get tied up to lampposts by Reed's weird warm stretchy body nearly enough anymore, and I am doing what I can to fix that.

I like this!

IMG_20230613_174945.jpg

[Iron Maiden]

LOL....What is that from?