“The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine” Fantastic Four No. 29

24 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by percivalhenry in The World's Greatest Comic Magazine

Tags

1964, Fantastic Four, Fantastic Four 29, jack Kirby, Red Ghost, Stan Lee

Fantastic Four 29
“It Started on Yancy Street”
Published: May 1964
Story: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Script: Lee
Pencils: Kirby
Inks: Chic Stone
Letters: Sam Rosen
Cover: Kirby and Stone

Synopsis

The Fantastic Four, visiting Yancy Street to investigate a rise in crime, are assaulted by the hidden Yancy Street Gang. The team escapes, pursued by a drone. Once back at the Baxter Building, Ben and Alicia come close to breaking up before reuniting. The team then turns to its fan mail, when Ben opens a package from the Yancy Street Gang, which explodes after he opens it. The package contains a note daring the team to return to Yancy Street.

But back on Yancy Street, the team is attacked not by the gang but by three apes with super powers, who are eventually revealed to the Red Ghosts’s super apes. The Red Ghost, last seen in FF 13, who vowed revenge, used a ruse to lure the FF to Yancy Street. After a battle, the apes take the Human Torch hostage—for once, it’s not the Invisible Girl—and the Red Ghost orders the FF onto a spaceship and they return to the moon.

He jettisons the team on the moon (surely there was a simpler way of killing them) but the Invisible Girl creates a force filed around the team containing enough air to save them until they reached the Blue Area and the home of the Watcher. Mr. Fantastic uses the Watcher’s technology to draw the Red Ghost’s ship back to the moon, where the team defeats him but his apes escape. The FF are then returned to Yancy Street by the Watcher.

What’s going on here

Fantastic Four 29 is a fun combination of old and new elements. There’s a lot that’s familiar: the Yancy Street schtick, the drama between Ben and Alicia, the hanging around the Baxter Building, the opening of fan mail. But there’s some new stuff as well. The issue opens in media res (fancy-talk for in the middle of things) rather than the slow build up to the action that’s customary. There’s the continued expansion of Sue’s powers, which prove indispensable in this issue. And there’s this amazing photo collage by Jack, the first (but certainly not last) that he will deploy in the Fantastic Four:

I was unable to find the source of the photo used by Kirby. It’s likely it was taken in 1959 by Luna 3, a Soviet satellite, since the first images of the moon from a US spacecraft didn’t appear until July of 1964, several months after the issue appeared.

It’s what’s inside that counts

FF 29 is one of the earliest issues I actually own, and so I was able to read it as Stan and Jack intended. That means I got to see awesome ads like this: