Fantastic Four #29

Featuring: Fantastic Four
Release: May 12, 1964
Cover: August 1964
12 cents
Written with a dash of greatness by: Stan Lee
Drawn with a hint of glory by: Jack Kirby
Inked with a touch of drama by: Chic Stone
Lettered with a bottle of India ink by: S. Rosen
22 pages

This is pretty easily my favorite cover so far. Years before I’d ever read the issue, I’d been enthralled by the cover. It seems to promise so much potential. What started on Yancy Street? Important enough to attract the attention of the Watcher.

Beyond my fascination with the ominous mood the cover suggests, there really hasn’t been a cover at all like this yet in our reading. First of all, it’s definitely the first Fantastic Four cover without a hint of a villain. The closest other example is Fantastic Four #13, which only shows Red Ghost’s hand. The mood of the characters is entirely different from the norm. Usually they’re mid-battle or primed for battle, with only a couple exceptions, notably FF#13 again. Now, they seem nervous, uncertain, hesitant. Moods that have never made it onto a cover. Reed is holding Sue’s hand. Ben looks uneasy. Johnny is nervously looking around.

Behind them all, the visage of the Watcher lurking ominously with glimpses of the cosmos behind him.

And yet. And yet. While almost everything about the visuals of the cover suggest this serious tone, we must also look to the street sign. Yancy Street. That creates an association which is far from serious. Since we first learned of the Yancy Street Gang back in issue 6, they have been comic relief, existing to knock Thing down a peg, to keep him humble. There is then some irony on the cover. Perhaps the super-serious tone is not meant to be taken quite so seriously.

Will the story live up to the incredible cover? As with most great works of this era, parts of it do and parts of it do not. In particular, the revelation of just what was happening on Yancy Street proves somewhat disappointing.

The first page seems almost a continuation of the cover, the Fantastic Four walking down Yancy Street, uncertain quite what they are looking for. Yet, the ominous tone of the cover is mixed with a certain wackiness as Thing steps in gum and somebody hurls lettuce at Mr. Fantastic. They are indeed on Yancy Street.

The first 5 pages of this comic are a quirky mix of foreboding and humor and relationship drama. The Fantastic Four get attacked by unseen members of the Yancy Street Gang. Reed bewilderingly concludes that a super-villain must be behind the Gang.

While Reed looks through pictures of old super-villains, Johnny asks if Reed is looking at pictures of Jayne Mansfield. While I may not have the full context, this seems to be a pretty risque reference for 1964. It may have been meant innocently, as she was a popular model and film star. But the biggest recent headlines for her would have been that she made history as the first major actress to appear nude in a modern Hollywood film; the accompanying Playboy photoshoot got Hugh Hefner arrested for indecency.

Meanwhile, Thing and Alicia each seem ready to break up with the other, until they each realize they are only thinking about what’s best for each other. Ben thinks Alicia should find a man who isn’t a monster, and Alicia thinks Ben should find a girl who isn’t blind. They end with a renewed sense of commitment.

The Fantastic Four find an invitation to return to Yancy Street at midnight to get to the bottom of the strange happenings.

Has the story so far lived up to the cover? The story so far has been much more quirky than the cover suggests. It has the mystery, but lacks the gravitas.

We then get the answers to the mystery. And the answer disappoints me. The Fantastic Four had not been attacked by the Yancy Street Gang at all, but rather Red Ghost and his Super-Apes.

Before a large number of my friends throw stones at me, I want to clarify I have nothing against the Super-Apes. In fact, I rather like the Super-Apes. Nobody appreciates an orangutan with magnetic powers more than I. They just don’t quite have the pathos that the cover had led me to expect.

Bewilderingly, the Fantastic Four are very slow to recognize the Super-Apes. Only Reed figures out who they are in an Aha! moment. I know the Fantastic Four have encountered a lot of weird things in their time, and that what seems fantastic to me may just be Tuesday to them… but I really would have thought a shape-shifting baboon would have been sufficiently memorable.

Luckily, they have super-genius Reed to make the connection that they’ve fought a shape-changing gibbon before. Though likely only because he had read a file on them just minutes earlier.

The point of the dialogue here isn’t that the Fantastic Four are idiots, though that’s how it comes off to me. Stan is trying to work into the dialogue what readers need to know about the previous adventure. This might be his first attempt to do so in our reading. At first, there wasn’t that much continuity of any kind. As the stories have become more connected, Stan has been using narration and flashbacks to fill readers in on what they may have missed, often a page near the beginning that just summarizes the previous story. Because he wanted to keep Red Ghost’s identity a mystery, Stan did not include a recap page in this issue, and so tries to use the dialogue to “organically” fill the readers in on the relevant events of Fantastic Four #13.

The Fantastic Four are defeated and brought to the moon in a magnetic spacecraft piloted by an orangutan.

We then get the page. If there’s one page on which the entire course of this series pivots, it’s this one.

We’ve now read over 200 Marvel Age comics. A lot of them have been of pretty poor quality; disposable fare, produced quickly and cheaply under extreme deadline pressure. Formulaic plots designed to give fans what they expect to see: their favorite heroes triumphing over evil.

Yet, you listen to any number of critics and scholars talking about the history of comics, you will find Fantastic Four mentioned in the same breath as other great works of American comics, from Eisner’s The Spirit to Barks’ Uncle Scrooge and along such international icons as Hergé’s Tintin, Tezuka’s Astro Boy, and Asterix by Goscinny and Uderzo.

The first 28 issues do little to explain why this might be so. In comparison to many of the other titles we’ve been reading… the barely readable Human Torch, Thor, or Iron Man stories… Fantastic Four is quite good. Stan and Jack put a lot of heart into it and show affection for the characters; they both seem to have a particular affinity for Ben Grimm. And it’s a fertile landscape for Jack’s boundless imagination and his own ideas about science and technology and the future.

The first hint of greatness I saw was in Fantastic Four #13, which this issue revisits. The Fantastic Four took the first trip to Earth’s moon, racing against the Soviet Red Ghost. There they found the ruins of an ancient civilization that had put an artificial atmosphere in the Blue Area of the moon. They also found the Watcher, an enigmatic being from an advanced and ancient race, monitoring our planet and chronicling its affairs. It was a triumph of the imagination hinting at greatness to come. This issue, Red Ghost returns, and they all return to the moon to again meet the Watcher.

But this time, as they approach the moon, Jack Kirby gives us this…

What the heck is that? He didn’t draw that. It’s a collage of photographs. The surface of the moon, Earth behind, Red Ghost’s spaceship approaching. It features the same style of word balloon and caption box we are used to. This will become an increasingly common feature of Kirby comics, collages that blend photographs and artwork in increasingly unique and ambitious ways.

What is that page doing here? It’s bold and experimental in a comic that’s really supposed to be quickly churned out and disposable, catering to reader expectations. The readers did not expect this page. Kirby’s drawing like 4 comics a month at this moment. How do you draw over 80 pages, come up with the stories for them, and also find time to experiment with the medium itself in a single month.

It’s insane to think about. Did this man sleep? And if he did, were his dreams nothing but colorful characters and strange locales he would then bring to the page?

These photo collages will never quite turn out as Kirby envisioned them. The printing process used was not ready for his experiments and the final product will suffer for it. He was a few decades ahead of his time. With the advent of more refined printing processes, artists like Dave McKean would make hauntingly beautiful comic pages and covers through a combination of art and photographs. See for example this page from Arkham Asylum and the cover of Sandman #1, both from DC Comics, 1989.

Fantastic Four is going to get better in the months and years to come. It will earn its place among the pantheon of great comics. Kirby will grow increasingly ambitious and take greater creative control. The best truly is ahead of us for this series. Picking out the point where this series evolves from a particularly good superhero comic to one of the best comics of all time is a tricky task. This page is as good a guess as any.

Boy, do I wish the caption didn’t screw up the page with a grammatical error.

The above page was from the digital “cleaned up” version. Here is the original panel.

Here is the much worse reproduction in Marvel Collectors’ Item Classics #21, where I have taken most of the art for this post from.

Last we saw Red Ghost, he was still on the moon, battling his own Super-Apes. They seem to have resolved their conflict. In that same issue, we learned the Watcher was leaving the moon for good. We now see his house is still there. We have seen the Watcher many times since in his own series, but it is likely all those stories are set in the past. In at least one, he was on Earth’s moon, probably in the past. However, his home does not appear abandoned.

Within the Watcher’s home, Kirby’s imagination again pours forth. We see a mix of strange devices and concepts. An entire world and its star shrunken down for the Watcher to observe; Reed instantly changed into what humanity will eventually evolve into; just mind-blowing concepts; the comic devotes a single panel to each before moving on.

There’s brilliant science fiction here. A cover that leaves one breathless in anticipaton. There’s bold formalist experiments with the comics medium. And there are super-powered apes.

The comic ends in a way none of the comics we’ve read have yet ended, with the signatures of Stan and Jack. Perhaps they were particularly proud of this issue.

Rating: ★★★★☆, 71/100
Significance: ★★★★★

I read this story in Fantastic Four Epic Collection vol. 2: The Master Plan of Dr. Doom. The scans are mostly taken from a reprint in Marvel Collectors’ Item Classics #21.

You can also find this story in Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four vol. 3. Or on Kindle.

Characters:

• Human Torch/Johnny Storm
• Thing/Benjamin J. Grimm
• Invisible Girl/Sue Storm
• Mr. Fantastic/Reed Richards
• Alicia
• Red Ghost
• Watcher

Story notes:

• Unusually large lettering on Page 1.
• Reed refers to them as the “world’s most famous fighting foursome”.
• There has been a recent increase of crime on Yancy Street.
• Baxter Building is 35 stories.
• Rock Hudson reference.
• FF open fan mail.
• Thing’s package is a trap set off by a floating spy machine. Note from Yancy Street Gang invites the Fantastic Four back at the stroke of midnight.
• Thing destroys antique table.
• Super-Apes: Gorilla super strong and smart; Orangutan fires magnetic rays and controls magnetism, able to pilot a magnetically-powered spacecraft; Baboon can shape-shift.
• FF dumped onto moon; only Sue’s force field provides them air.
• FF find themselves in the home of the Watcher.
• The Watcher is in a far distant galaxy but has sent a spectro-image to greet them.
• Watcher can read thoughts.
• Watcher’s devices: one speeds up evolution to show Reed as he would be in 20,000 years; a globe contains a large planet the Watcher had shrunken for study.
• Being trapped within invisible force field makes Red Ghost solid.
• Red Ghost falls into matter transmitter; possibly transported to another galaxy.
• Super-Apes escape with ship.
• The Watcher may not interfere except to protect his own privacy. He sends the FF home.

#217 story in reading order
Next: Amazing Spider-Man #15
Previous: Strange Tales #123, Story B