WHO REIGNS SUPREME? Fred Van Lente brings you a 65th ANNIVERSARY BATTLE ROYALE!
By FRED VAN LENTE
Welcome back, fight fans! In honor of the 65th anniversary of the Aug. 8, 1961, publication of Fantastic Four #1, 13th Dimensional Grand Poobah Dan Greenfield requested I pit two of the most storied runs of the book against each other: that of plotter/artist/co-creator Jack Kirby and that of writer/artist/Alpha Flight co-creator John Byrne, two runs I love deeply.
But which one is better? Using extremely scientific methods developed by the North American Comic Book Death Match Commission, of which I am the chair and sole member, I set about determining that FOR ALL TIME in this here article.
I should point out that in just a couple weeks, on August 20, the play my wife Crystal Skillman and I wrote about Jack, King Kirby, will be returning to the New York stage for a limited run, thanks to BrooklynOne and director Bill Coulter (tickets here). Our poster was created by the late, great Tommy Lombardozzi, one half of the Jacked Kirby podcast, who passed away far too soon and far too young in July. You are missed, brother.
As this is the record-setting third time Kirby’s FF has entered the Death Match octagon (you can awe at the other matches here and here), I had to change up the formula a bit: Since we’re celebrating the title’s debut on August 8 — 8/8 — I’ll match every eighth issue of these runs against each other once (Kirby lasted a couple years longer than Byrne, so he begins at #8). Cool? Cool.
Ring that bell!
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ROUND ONE
Fantastic Four #8: “Prisoners of the Puppet Master!”
Reed discovers a way to turn the Thing into Ben Grimm, just in time for him to meet Alicia Masters, his soon-to-be love interest, who prefers him rocky. (Sad trombone noise.) I love Kirby’s grotesque design of her awful stepfather, the Puppet Master, who looks like a demented marionette himself. This befits a sociopath who crafts mind-control puppets of people from radioactive clay so he can make them jump off bridges and start prison riots just (as far as I can tell) for funsies. P-Mas gets annoyed at the FF’s interrupting his psycho jollies and sets out to destroy them. In an inadvisable move, he makes a magic puppet of himself, which, when Alicia accidentally knocks it over, sends him out the window to his (very temporary) death.
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Fantastic Four #232: “Back to the Basics!”
The title of this issue serves as much as a statement of principle as a premise for the story, namely Diablo summoning four Elementals — the “basis” for all other substances in alchemy — to fight the vaguely elementally themed FF. “Back to the basics” used to be a much more common rallying cry when a new creative team took over a long-running book. Though since I couldn’t tell you how far previous teams deviated from “The Basics” set down by Jack and Stan Lee, here it comes across as a tad aggro?
(A fun trivia question: Who did Byrne take over from as the regular penciller of Fantastic Four? The answer… will surprise you. Unless you already know it, that is. If you don’t, scroll down to the end of the article to see.)
Either way, this is a cracking opening for Byrne’s run. Diablo’s Elementals don’t attack the obvious members of the Four — the Earth golem goes after the “air”-powered Invisible Woman, Fire attacks the “water”-based Mr. Fantastic (in that he, like, flows) while Water and Air battle Thing and Torch, respectively. When the FF switches enemies and defeats them, they call in Dr. Strange to help track Diablo down.
This is a tough one, because both of these stories are super-fun… but I’m gonna have to go with:
WINNER: BYRNE
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ROUND TWO
Fantastic Four #16: “The Micro World of Doctor Doom!”
As its publisher’s flagship title, FF was often dragooned into hyping up other Marvel characters, and here Ant-Man gets his turn as Dr. Doom shrinks leads our heroes into the Microverse, making its first appearance here. Previously, Vic got zapped by his own shrinking ray and promptly took over the pint-sized planet he found himself on, as is his wont. He plans to enslave the captured FF to the Lizard People of Tok (whom, if my continuity-addled eyes are not mistaken, look like cousins to Ditko’s Microversian despot Tim-Boo-Ba) until they escape with Hank Pym’s help.
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Fantastic Four #240: “Exodus”
Quicksilver breaks into the Baxter Building to get the FF’s help, only to have a big fight with them instead. Pietro’s adopted home of Attilan has been laid waste by Maximus and the Enclave. The combined powers of the Inhumans and the FF transfer the city to the Blue Area of the Moon, where Crystal gives birth to Quicksilver’s son.
The Micro World story is extremely goofy, but I will take goofy over talky continuity housekeeping like this any day.
WINNER: KIRBY
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(I am skipping ahead 16 issues because FF #248 is more Inhumans and #24 is Kirby basically plagiarizing himself with a retread of the Alien Brat story from Challengers of the Unknown #1, so I pre-declare that one a draw.)
ROUND THREE
Fantastic Four #32: “Death of a Hero!”
For those of you wondering what the deal with Sue and Johnny’s parents was, we get the answer here: Their surgeon dad failed to save their mom after a car crash, so he became a drunken gambler. When a guy he owed money to died in a fight with him, he went away for murder. In 2026, that would qualify him to be Surgeon General, but in 1964, Doc Storm told his kids to forget all about him so he could peacefully rot away in his cell.
Then the Super-Skrull teleports in and enlists him in a bizarre scheme wherein the shape-shifting alien takes Doc’s place, claims he gave himself super powers in the “prison laboratory,” then, calling himself the Invincible Man, beats the crap out of the FF. His son and daughter are unable to lift a finger against “Doc Storm,” until Reed figures out their foe’s true identity. (“I knew that no one could duplicate our powers in an ordinary prison lab,” says the world’s smartest man.) Our heroes get the Skrulls to prison-exchange SS with Dr. Storm, but the Empire straps a bomb to Dad, who heroically sacrifices himself to save his kids by smothering it with his body.
The best part of the story is the opening, where Reed tries once again to turn Thing human; he succeeds, only at the cost of wiping Ben Grimm’s memory, forcing him to scrap this attempt as well.
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Fantastic Four #254: “The Minds of Mantracora”
We’re in the midst of a neat multipart storyline in which Byrne has the FF exploring the worlds of the Negative Zone. Our heroes run afoul of a fellow alien in a Bronze Age-level society where he has passed himself off as the high priest. The ET needs to suck the brain energy out of sentients to power his space ship, and who’s got more brain energy than Reed Richards? Meanwhile, She-Hulk makes what I believe is her first appearance in this run, trying to free the Baxter Building from Annihilus’ grip, foreshadowing her arrival as a series regular.
WINNER: BYRNE
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ROUND FOUR
Fantastic Four #40: “The Battle of the Baxter Building”
Daredevil helps the powerless FF take their HQ back from Doc Doom. (Fascinatingly, Kirby does a much better job drawing DD than he ever did his kissing cousin, Spider-Man.) Matt Murdock manages to distract Doom long enough for the Four to elude the building’s defenses and get their hands on a gadget that restores their powers. When he becomes the Thing again, Ben Grimm blames Doom for the necessity of it and they have a brutal, drag-down fight. Then, he quits the team! This is the rare story that lives up to the first-page hype of “possibly the greatest action-drama you will read this year!”
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Fantastic Four #262: “The Trial of Reed Richards”
Byrne continues the long-standing Jack and Stan tradition of creators inserting themselves into this strip, as he is whisked away to the Shi’ar Empire to see Mr. Fantastic tried for saving the life of the planet-eater, Galactus. The Watcher, Odin, and the Big G himself all show up to testify. In his defense, Reed says that if God didn’t want Galactus to exist, He wouldn’t have created him in the first place, so he (Reed) couldn’t justify letting the planet-eater die. Eternity shows up and basically agrees, so everyone goes home.
WINNER: KIRBY
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ROUND FIVE
Fantastic Four #48: “The Coming of Galactus!”
This is an issue-long setup for the FF’s most beloved storyline, which has been made into a movie twice: We’ve got cosmic collages, the first appearance of the Silver Surfer, the Skrulls and Watcher freaking out, Maximus sealing off the Inhumans’ home from the world, and, in the end, the Big G makes his big arrival in what will soon be, very wisely, a redesigned costume, because the original is… not great.
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Fantastic Four #270: “Planet-Fall”
Byrne mixes soap opera angst (Johnny falling for Alicia in Ben’s post-Secret Wars absence, Sue agonizing over her miscarriage in arguably the best issue of this run [but, sorry, isn’t a factor of 8]) with the arrival of a new villain. Terminus is another big alien who ravages planets, though he is essentially a pirate looking for plunder, lacking Galactus’ tragic hunger. He’s defeated in bog-standard FF fashion: Reed invents a doohickey that neutralizes him.
WINNER: KIRBY
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ROUND SIX
Fantastic Four #56: “Klaw, the Murderous Master of Sound!”
Klaw, looking for Black Panther, attacks the Baxter Building, trapping Reed and Ben in the former’s lab, forcing Sue to take him on by herself in Johnny’s absence. He’s off with Wyatt Wingfoot and Lockjaw trying to free the trapped Inhumans. Things look grim until the Black Panther delivers a pair of vibranium knuckles to Reed so he can pound the crap out of Klaw himself.
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Fantastic Four #278: “True Lies”
The focus of this ish is Kristoff, the young man that the currently deceased Doctor Doom has chosen as his heir to Latveria. His loyal Doombots stick Kris in a wayback machine so he can relive Vic’s memories. If you’ve read Fantastic Four Annual #2 by Jack and Stan there’s not a whole lot here you don’t already know. Byrne does what Kirby says he always wanted, namely suggesting that Vic’s face is only slightly scared in his college-era experiment explosion, and it’s only his massive ego that makes him think he’s irredeemably deformed.
(If I could give Marvel Studios some free advice they absolutely will not take: The next time you reboot the FF film franchise, what you should do is start with a Doctor Doom solo movie, where we see him interacting with Reed and Ben in their college days, a la X-Men: First Class. For one thing, Doom is, arguably, a more popular character than the Four themselves, and this way you start their story at the beginning, letting you build to Mole Man, Galactus, and the rest, rather than trying to shoehorn everybody into a single film, something they wisely did not do when starting out with Iron Man and building toward The Avengers.)
After this literal brain dump, Kristoff, who has been artificially aged in the process, declares he sees the flaws in his predecessor’s plans, then blasts the Baxter Building into space just like Doom did in his second appearance. Instead of simply monologuing with glee, however, Kristoff blows the building to smithereens.
WINNER: BYRNE
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ROUND SEVEN
Fantastic Four #64: “The Sentry Sinister!”
Sue, Reed and Ben head to the South Pacific for a much needed vacation, where, curse the luck, explorers have managed to unearth an ancient Kree spaceport and the giant robot that guards it. When Sue’s force field lets their rocket penetrate the Sentry’s force field, the Sentry decides it needs to dissect them like frogs to figure out why. Lockjaw brings Johnny and Crystal as reinforcements, and together they have a terrific fight exceptionally executed by Kirby.
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Fantastic Four #286: “Like a Phoenix!”
It’s kind of strange to consider what a tectonic event Jean Grey’s death in Uncanny X-Men #137 was for fandom in 1980, since she spent a mere five years and change actually dead. Even by Comic Book Death standards, that’s not much!
Since Kristoff blew up the Baxter Building in Round Six, the FF have been hanging their hats at Avengers Mansion, so they’re around when Jean busts out of the capsule the Assemblers found her in at the bottom of Long Island Sound. Many, many word balloons, captions and flashbacks ensue to explain why Dark Phoenix, and not Jean herself, died fighting the Shi’ar Imperial Guard on the Blue Area of the Moon.
Byrne’s run as writer/penciller ends a few issues after this. It’s a bummer we have to conclude our Factor-of-Eight examination of his excellent run on turgid set-up for the X-Factor series that reunites the original X-Men.
WINNER: KIRBY
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By a score of 4-3…
OVERALL WINNER: KIRBY
The King remains undefeated!
(It was none other than Bill Sienkewicz whom Byrne took over from as penciller on Fantastic Four. He’s the guy you naturally think of when you think “Fantastic Four,” right? And he’s an artist who got his own DEATH MATCH examination for his run on Moon Knight… )
’Til next time, fight fans!
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MORE
— The Complete COMIC BOOK DEATH MATCH Index. Click here.
— JACK KIRBY’s FANTASTIC FOUR vs. JACK KIRBY’s THOR. Click here.
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Comics writer/playwright/bon vivant Fred Van Lente is a funny guy. Sign up for updates on his upcoming projects and check out the trailer for his comics-writing course at his web site, fredvanlente.com.
