By their sixth issue (Sept. 1962),
the groundbreaking superhero team the Fantastic Four faced the foes they’d inevitably
been fated to meet — a super villain
team. Stan Lee even extended the parallelism to alliteration — a “Diabolical
Duo.”
It took six issues because the FF
had to meet some villains before they
could team up. As an 8-year-old, I’d already read — devoured, really — the
third and fifth issues of the title, so I was delighted with Dr. Doom’s
immediate return.
The Sub-Mariner I’d never heard
of. But even to a child, it was clear that Namor was more hero than villain (I
didn’t know the term “antihero” yet).
A kind of seagoing Superman, he boasted an impressive array of superpowers
of which flight and super strength were only the most obvious.
As Mike of Comic Book Curios
recalled, “The story reaches a climax when the team is forced to put on astronaut
suits and attack Doom’s ship in the middle of space. Everything seems hopeless,
until Namor decides to help out. He jumps into a conveniently placed tank of
water, gathers up enough energy to shoot out of the building, bounces off of a
conveniently approaching meteor storm, and then throws himself onto the hull of
Doom’s ship. Namor reveals that he has the powers of all underwater creatures
combined, and chooses to use the power of an electric eel to shock Doom through
the walls. Finally, Doctor Doom flees, jumping aboard one of those passing
meteors - NEVER TO BE SEEN AGAIN! (We all know better than that though!)”
“In fact, the theme of the issue
seems to be how these larger-than-life characters are viewed by others,” Don
Alsafi wrote. “On the one hand, you have a troubled Namor — just now beginning
to see the error of his ways — cajoled into further villainy by Doom, who sees
him as nothing more than an easily manipulable pawn. And the issue opens on a
crowd in awe of the Torch flying overhead, and a courier at the Baxter Building
flustered at a chance meeting with the Invisible Girl. And then Stan and Jack
further invite us to think of the Fantastic Four as real people, as we see an
expanded cutaway of their headquarters, first seen in #3 ... and the FF
answering their fan mail! In fact, when Reed gets a letter from a hospitalized
boy, he stretches out the window and across several city blocks to pay him a
visit. More than a few letter-writers after that must surely have been thinking
of that very same scene!”
Jack Kirby’s art really was
fantastic, with those three-panel progressions he used to convey dramatic and
emotional power and those breathtaking splash pages. I can’t count the number
of times I savored that issue.
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