Call the Four

Last time, I was posting about Marvel super-villains and decided that, given the prominence of  Galactus and the Lord of Latveria, Victor Von Doom, the Fantastic Four and their enemies deserved a post of their own.

 I first encountered the FF, like many of the Marvel stable, in Odham's Power Comics in 1967, when I was four years old.  The first Marvel reprint had been the Hulk in Smash! in '66 - this was also the home of colour front-page reprints of the Batman newspaper strip. The FF appeared later in Wham! followed by Nick Fury and Spidey in Pow! in Sixty-Seven. When UK comics sales fell, they merged with other titles and it must be the merger of Pow and Wham  where I first recall a double-page spread introducing the Frightful Four. The Cloak was a witty and surreal British humour strip by Mike Higgs and there was adventure with the robotic Python.

 My absolutely favourite Power comic was Fantastic (featuring Thor, Iron Man and the X-Men) which later merged with Terrific (which had carried The Avengers, Dr. Strange, Sub-Mariner and Giant-Man).

Any excuse to post a pic of the Mimic, my favourite X-Man

Fantastic ran for 89 issues from Feb 67 to September 68, just after I started primary school (and the final season of Patrick Troughton's Doctor). It managed to produce a bumper 48-page summer special, however, one of the long-lost traditional treats of my childhood.

Spidey at the Blackpool Tower about to play Smiley Miley's Mileage Game

Sometime in the summer of 1969, I was visiting my granny in Stonehouse and my mum took me to the park, past the Black Bull pub, where her father had been a mechanic:

En route she bought me this softcover "album":

The "popular television series" wasn't being shown in Lanarkshire- although it was by 1970 in the Grampian area (where I am now!). I used to look at the TV Times listings at my aunt's farm and long to see it.

Nonetheless, this was my gateway; I was introduced to Black Panther, the Silver Surfer, the Inhumans and Galactus (in name alone). I can picture reading this, by the ivy-encrusted garden wall and the red, corrugated pigeon loft in our garden even now; what I'd forgotten until googling the scans was how off-model the colouring is!

Red uniforms and a violet Thing?

Much as I loved the original X-Men, the Mimic, the Banshee and Bernard the Beatnik, they couldn't hold a candle to Kirby Unleashed. That same summer, I got a copy of this:

World Distributors got the colours right this time and Crystal the Exquisite Elemental joined the FF. This hardback also reprinted The Master Plan of Dr. Doom and two other stories which I can't recall now, but one possibly featured the Mole Man. The licensed annual was a Christmas tradition in the UK but they often went on sale in the autumn. US annuals- which Marvel also confusingly called "specials"- appeared in the summer.
The late Sixties and early Seventies saw a slew of reprint material from the Big Two and reprints certainly filled in the FF's history for me:

 This issue was one of my favourites in that we saw those Incomparable Inhumans in action:

Given the erratic shipping during those years, I saw this pair first: the left-hand issue, read in Baxter's Coffee House in Strathaven and the right, in the playground at Chapelton primary when I got a boiled sweet lodged in my gullet; Miss Morrison had to hold me by my ankles to dislodge it!

I designed a world map in concrete to the right of those pallets, in 1974!

  It would be about this time that I became able to recognise Kirby's art by sight, at around six years old and I would follow his work devotedly for almost the next decade.Here's one of my favourite covers, bought from the cafe beneath the Ayr India restaurant at Seafield:

There was a last gasp for Power Comics annuals in 1970; the Pow annual featured the Spidey/Looter story and the death of Franklin Storm. I preferred the Fantastic annual because of the alluring reference to Factor Three in the X-Men/Frankenstein story. Turned out to be a big disappointment...

There was also a second FF album this year, this time in black and white, reprinting three parts of the Skrull ganagster planet story, including that issue from Ayr, above. Crystal was especially cute in her moll's beret.

Before departing for DC and the New Gods, Kirby's final issues of the FF were moody and gorgeous; the women were beautiful, the men handsome. They even helped save an Apollo mission and there was one last hurrah for the Inhumans before they started a spin-off in Amazing Adventures (I never mentioned the Inhumans Origins series in Thor last week and I should have. They are top-notch and very possibly the remnants of a planned series- they feel very like The Eternals from 1976)

When I picked up my next issue, in the autumn of 1970, I never even noticed Kirby had left the book and had been replaced by Jazzy Johnny Romita:

 Special guest star: Richard Nixon.

 As I said last time, I'd read quite a few of the Roy Thomas/ Buscema/Severin Subby issues so I thought of him as a (slightly pompous) hero. I didn't really know much about the history these guys had. I was more interested in Romita's Magneto, who was wearing a version of his Neal Adams/Creator "threads".
My next issue picked up on the aborted Janus the Mega-Man/Nega-Man story (an instance where Stan needed more time to dialogue so it was bumped down the line- it was reprinted as The Lost Adventure three years ago.)

This one came from Criag's newsagent in Strathaven; I particularly remember Alicia looked a bit like the Partridge Family's Susan Dey. The next two issues introduced me to Annhilus, the Living Death Who Walks. Sometime later, again due to the mysteries of shipping, I got this stunning giant:

After Reed was saved yet again from the Neg Zone (I really thought he might die! I was eight!), I read exactly three more issues between the spring of 1971 and the autumn of 1972. Marvels became very scarce- as I've said, easier to get on the landward side at Glasgow and Prestwick airports than anywhere else. They included the apartheid story that saw the Black Panther change his nom de guerre to Black Leopard, a rather silly attempt to disassociate T'Challa from the revolutionary party; the Gabriel story I posted in a previous blog; and this Wimmen's Libber. Notice the hip reference to the underground "comix":

It's a Steranko cover and it features my flat-out favourite Stan and Jack villians, the Evil F.F. Thundra the Femizon drifted in and out of the comic for the next four or so years. Her daughter Lyra is the new She-Hulk and would make a good fill-in member for the Fab Foursome.
 I was buying Kirby's tetralogy (Jimmy Olsen, New Gods, Forever People and Mr. Miracle) and the new movie-based titles Kamandi and the Demon, wherever possible; also the JLA and as many 100 page super-Spectaculars as I cold find. Marvel had initiated its Bronze age with Conan the Barbarian, Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf By Night and Warlock. The FF, with Reed and Sue's marriage hitting the rocks, didn't seem quite so engaging and given their scarcity and darker tone, Marvels were losing their appeal. Then this happened:

I had the opportunity, along with hundreds of other British kids, to go back to the birth of Marvel-before I was born- and follow the whole thing as a sprawling, fractured history. I cannot stress how devoted I was to this line: I devoured everything from Spider-Man Comics Weekly to the Avengers; The Titans to Captain Britain; Planet of the Apes to The Super Heroes. Then there was the opportunity to join FOOM and read this:

The checklist in this issue of the first 132 issues and 9 Annual/Specials enabled the British reader to antcipate what was coming up: just imagine "The Brutal Betrayal of Ben Grimm"; "Whosover Finds the Evil Eye"; or "When Opens the Cocoon"! Then, just seeing those sexy, forbidden images of Dracula Lives and Tales of the Zombie: how could thirty-year-old reprints of the Newsboy Legion or the Boy Commandos compete with that?
The odd issue of the FF still cropped up between '74 and '75- the last of this trio in East Kilbride Village, I recall, and signalling an end to the Medusa/ Red Torch Era.

An Inhumans cover always drew me in but I liked Madam Medusa better as a villain and I never felt she added much to the team. By the time I was at Strathaven Academy in 75-76, Marvels were in plentiful supply gain and at 5 or 6p, I could buy one a day. I knew this guy from the Marvel Super Heroes reprints of 68-69:

Roy Thomas had done the "Golden Age Hero Goes Bad" story with Red Raven and Toro previously. I always felt it was a shame that Marvel Man/Quasar never caught on in the 90s. He was probably a decade too late or too early. This really feels like a Disco Era story: Johnny Storm's new "flame" Frankie Raye debuts here but it takes another half-a-dozen years for her to get a storyline. I began to notice the highly-detailed pencils of George Perez but the fact that the King was Kontributing Kovers had escaped me.

I  read the Galactus Trilogy in this favourite format, my first Treasury edition:

I didn't care for the Luke Cage/Thing-suit story in issue 169 but I ws intrigued by the return of big blue Kirby robot Torgo and the polysyllabic Gorr the Gorilla. Every comic could benefit from a talking golden ape in chivalric armour:

Five years after their UK debut in black and white and murky shades of green, the FF got their own title in Jubilee Year, just as I was sensing pressure to put away such childish things (fat chance!):

In these hard-bitten times, every comic has an enticing free gift, every week

I got to experience the whole 73-76 Conway/Buckler/Thomas/Wein era through this book's run; while trying to follow the Frightful Four/Brute story through S2 and my mum's hospitalisation in Stonehouse in the late Spring of 77 (where I bought comics on every visit):

 Was Thomas really grooming Tigra for FF membership? Tigra?!

The next installment of this four-parter(?) should take us from the end of the Punk era to the Filofax years; from my first course at Uni to early acting attempts and the Glasgow Garden Festival...

There will be a Moffat Dr. Who blog- I just keep postponing it 'til I like it better.

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