The Fantastic Four... Guest starring Jack Kirby and Stan Lee

[Iron Maiden]

I have to thank Malus and his Marvel-ous work on the FF cover countdown thread as the inspiration for this thread.

So Face Front, True Believers it's time for....

For our first episode, let's take a trip on Doctor Doom's platform and pay a little visit to the ol' Marvel Bullpen circa 1963. Even back then, Marvel was breaking the rules and we see a sort of breaking of the fourth wall as Stan and Jack are visited by one of their own creations. For little did Stan and Jack know that when they faced the Dreaded Deadline Doom that they would face another Doom at the same time.... from Fantastic Four #10

Don't worry, Doom's plans were foiled when he stepped in front of his own shrinking ray, which he intended to use on the FF. Also notice that this story introduced us to the infamous mind swap trick that Doom pulls out from time to time. The next time he switched bodies with Daredevil in DD #37, Stan must have forgotten that he had this ability because he has Daredevil destroy the machine Doom has built to perform the transference.

Be sure to check out the cover for this issue in the FF cover countdown thread and stay tuned for another episode featuring a visit to the Hereafter...

 

[Kelly]

AWESOOOOOOME......I was wondering when you were going to post this up.........




Thanks, IM.......keep the knowledge flowing....

 

[Malus]

All right!
This is going to be fun.

 

[Casius--J]

Yeah i read this one about last year, was too funny!

 

[Lightning Strykez!]

Brilliant work so far! Bumping!

 

[Iron Maiden]

Thanks LS . ... I think it is also worth noting that Jack drew this issue and it shows him recoiling from Doom as he unmasks. Years later, he would say at conventions that Doom only suffered a small scratch along the side of his face and his pride would not allow even a small imperfection.

 

[stretchalicious]

Awesome Thanks!

 

[Retroman]

Nice!

 

[highguard]

^^ That small scar and story must have been conveyed to Tim Story cause that was the scene where he went crazy after finding the scratch.

 

[Iron Maiden]

The story behind the mystery of what Doom really looks like under the mask has a very convoluted history. As we saw, Kirby clearly conveys in #10 that his face is a horrific sight. Yet we do know that Kirby made that sketch at a convention many years later that showed only a small scar. Stan, for his part always went with the idea that the damage was very extensive. When John Byrne wrote the FF, he wrote a story called "True Lies" that tried to reconcile the two and it is now considered canon. Byrne's story asserts that immediately after the accident, there was just the scar along the side of his face. His perfectionism drives him to believe that it is an intolerable flaw and he has the mask placed on his face before it has cooled. It is the second injury that causes the permanent damage.

 

[Iron Maiden]

And now to resume the homage to Stan and Jack...

It's time to flash forward to the recent past and pick up on the harrowing afermath of the "Unthinkable" arc. At the end of FF#500 the FF finally defeated Doom after suffering from one of his most brutal assaults against them. In a final act of defiance, Doom used the last of his mystical powers to place a huge scar on Reed's face just as the Haazareth demons were dragging him down into Hell.

After coming to the realization that Doom would probably come back even from Hell to attack them once again, Reed decided to make a preemptive strike and took the team to Latveria in order to dismantle Doom's government and dispose of all his weapons and personal assets. Unknown to the rest of the team he also planned to exile himself along with Victor in an interdimensional prison. When the rest of the team tried to prevent him from making this sacrifice, they unwittingly freed Doom along with Reed. In the ensuing battle, Victor had taken over Ben's body using the mind swap technique we saw him acquire in FF#10. Victor, in a sort of suicide by cop, goaded Reed into killing Ben.

Reed is despondant and he and Sue drift apart. Johnny has pretty much left the team and is keeping busy by working as a mechanic when Reed comes up with a plan....

"Inspired" by his dream/nightmare, Reed then gets Sue and Johnny back to the Baxter building to tell them of his plan to use the same technology that Doom had created back in college to try and bring Ben back from the dead.

 

[Iron Maiden]

Next, a visit to the Hereafter...

 

[Malus]

Terrific stuff.
To me, the last great FF storyline.

 

[Joe Rockhead]

I REALLY enjoyed the Waid-Wieringo run on the book. Even got a Thing sketch from Wieringo at a con around that time.

 

[Iron Maiden]

I won an eBay auction from Karl Kesel of one of his inked pages from FF #500. It is the page where Doctor Strange is helping Reed learn magic just as Doom opens the door to the the library of arcana where he locked him in and finds out Reed is gone.

 

[Malus]

I won an eBay auction from Karl Kesel of one of his inked pages from FF #500. It is the page where Doctor Strange is helping Reed learn magic just as Doom opens the door to the the library of arcana where he locked him in and finds out Reed is gone.

In a way, "Authoritative Action" and "Hereafter" feel like a real ending to the FF series to me. "Unthinkable" (FF #296-500) showed us that Doom was now capable of anything - murdering his childhood sweetheart and donning a mystical leather armor made from the her skin all as part of a deal struck with a trio of demons - and then tossing little Franklin into Hell just to taunt and torture a desperate Reed & Sue. This was a Doom that would do anything to destroy Reed & his family. If Doom had ever been redeemable, that was over now. After he was left trapped in Hell at the end of FF #500 (after the parting shot of scarring Reed's face)
it was hard for me to imagine how we could ever get back to the Doom we'd gotten used to over the years. The Doom that maintained at least an illusion of nobility, even though he was really a sociopath.

Reed's obsession in the "Authoritative Action" arc (which actually ran a bit longer than "Unthinkable") with first taking over Latveria (against U.N. regulations and his own government's prohibition) and then constructing the "limbo bubble" where he intended to forever imprison both himself and Doom, so that Doom could never be a threat again - believing (rightly) that even Hell could not contain Victor Von Doom -- this was a Reed we had never seen as well, a changed man who was only shaken back to reality when his actions ended up costing the life of his closest friend (Ben).

Then we have the remarkable 3-part "Hereafter" which finds a broken Fantastic Four summoned by a newly obsessed Reed to basically storm the gates of Heaven to retrieve Ben Grimm's spirit (having detected the faintest life signs within Ben's corpse) - ironically using Doom's own device that had disfigured him years before. This was very much the final frontier for a family that for years had braved the far corners of the cosmos and countless dimensions and realms beyond understanding...but this was different. This bordered on blasphemy, as we could see in Sue's whispered reluctance to come along: "This...isn't right."

What they find at the end of their journey is as mind-blowing (in its own quiet manner) as anything they'd ever encountered before. And it's handled with a mix of emotion and humor that (for me) epitomizes the Fantastic Four. And that final scene, the "happy ending" (you'll see, everybody) - just wow. To a longtime fan like me, it was a very moving and appropriate end (albeit an open end) to the story of these beloved characters.

And after reading the end of "Hereafter," I realized that the concluding chapter (#511) was my 400th issue of Fantastic Four, having started reading the series with issue #112 in 1971. (A story that, ironically, ends in Ben's apparent death at the hands of the Hulk.)
Pretty cool, I thought.

Thanks again for sharing these highlights from one of the FF's boldest (and certainly most controversial) adventures.

 

[Joe Rockhead]

Pretty nice analysis there, Malus. Storywise, Waid really did pull out all the stops in that trifecta.

 

[Iron Maiden]

Well said, Fellow Fearless Front Facer... the only thing I can add to that is the concluding pages of "Hereafter". I would like to say that I like pretty much all of the Waid / Wieringo run... thank goodness the Bill Jemas firing of the pair was rescinded. I did nitpick a bit on Wieringo being a tad on the cartoony side but he is an excellent visual storyteller. My one gripe with Waid deals with my admittedly eccentric affection for Doom's character. There was a roundtable discussion in Back Issue magazine that involved many of the former FF writers. When the topic of villains Doom came up, Gerry Conway pretty much summed up how I felt. He said Doom was his favorite Marvel supervillain because he felt he was the most worthy of redemption. Gerry Conway wrote a wonderful little Doom story in Astonishing Tales #8 that Roger Stern used as the inspiration for the graphic novel "Triumph and Torment.

And now without further adieu, I will present the conclusion of our visit to the "Hereafter"...

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[gerbstat]

I have always loved this issue as the BEST of the tributes to Kirby. The plot is clearly "out there", and some may call it corny or cheesy, but somehow it just seems totally reverent and appropriate.

How'd you like one of God's original pencils?

 

[highguard]

...

IMG]http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y195/IronMaiden99/FF511pageC.jpg[/IMG]

IMG]http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y195/IronMaiden99/FF511pageD.jpg[/IMG]

IMG]http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y195/IronMaiden99/FF511pageE.jpg[/IMG]

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Some of the links are broken.

Maybe the missing [ at the beginning of the link.

 

[Kelly]

Well said, Fellow Fearless Front Facer... the only thing I can add to that is the concluding pages of "Hereafter". I would like to say that I like pretty much all of the Waid / Wieringo run... thank goodness the Bill Jemas firing of the pair was rescinded. I did nitpick a bit on Wieringo being a tad on the cartoony side but he is an excellent visual storyteller. My one gripe with Waid deals with my admittedly eccentric affection for Doom's character. There was a roundtable discussion in Back Issue magazine that involved many of the former FF writers. When the topic of villains Doom came up, Gerry Conway pretty much summed up how I felt. He said Doom was his favorite Marvel supervillain because he felt he was the most worthy of redemption. Gerry Conway wrote a wonderful little Doom story in Astonishing Tales #8 that Roger Stern used as the inspiration for the graphic novel "Triumph and Torment.

And now without further adieu, I will present the conclusion of our visit to the "Hereafter"...

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fixed....

 

[highguard]

^^ thank you very much mam.

 

[Kelly]

^^ thank you very much mam.

You do realize you could have fixed that yourself.......right??????


But you are welcome.....

 

[highguard]

^^ Duh, of course through the quote and edit procedure.

I tell you what would I do without you?

 

[Kelly]

^^ Duh, of course through the quote and edit procedure.

I tell you what would I do without you?

nothing......