Fantastic Four 102 | Percival Henry: The Fantastic Four and more

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Fantastic Four, Fantastic Four 102, jack Kirby, Magneto, Namor, Stan Lee

Fantastic Four 102
“The Strength of the Sub-Mariner!”
Published June 1970
Story: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Script: Lee
Pencils: Kirby
Inks: Joe Sinnott
Letters: Artie Simek
Cover: John Romita and John Verpoorten

Note: This is a milestone issue of the Fantastic Four, the last issue penciled by Jack Kirby. It’s also a fitting place for me to take a break from blogging duties. After nearly two-and-half-years of writing (almost) weekly posts about the world’s greatest comic magazine, I’m a bit burned out and going to take a short hiatus. I’ll still write occasional entries like So Random!, but I’ll leave the FF alone for a while. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone, but when I return, I will be looking forward to diving back into the post-Kirby era.

Synopsis

As per usual, the issue opens with Thing and the Human Torch—plus Crystal—hanging out in the Baxter Building. This time, Ben has a cold and is being a baby about it. The action then shifts beneath the ocean, where the Sub-Mariner, investigating a disturbance, discovers Magneto unconscious on a tropical island. He takes him back to Atlantis to recuperate, and there Magneto tries to convince Namor to join him in his fight against humans.

Meanwhile, back in New York, metal objects start to fly out of control, including the machinery in Mr. Fantastic’s lab. Reed uses a “magna-tracer” to track magnetic waves to Atlantis, and as a warning, sends a “sonic probe” which creates tremors under the sea. When the magnetic attacks against New York don’t stop, Ben sends a torpedo to Atlantis, against the protests of Reed, and the provocation leads Namor to declare war on the surface world, with Magneto behind him.

What’s going on here?

This, of course, is Jack Kirby’s last issue of the Fantastic Four and one of his final stories for Marvel before he decamped for rival DC. He didn’t even stick around to draw the cover, which was handled by John Romta.

Kirby’s frustrations with Stan Lee and Marvel had been brewing for years, and ranged from creative—such as seeing his character, the Silver Surfer, taken from him and given to John Buscema to draw—to financial. According to author Sean Howe, Marvel was by then licensing its characters to an entrepreneur who sold posters and other merchandise using Kirby’s images, but Kirby wasn’t compensated. Nor did he receive his share of a settlement in a dispute about the ownership of Captain America. After previously rejecting overtures from DC’s Carmine Infantino to jump ship, in March of 1970 a fed up Kirby finally signed a three-year contract with DC.

There’s no easy way to sum up the significance of the Lee / Kirby run on the Fantastic Four and I’m not sure I’ll be able to do so adequately here. There have been longer sustained runs (Dave Sims wrote and drew 300 issues of Cerebus!) and shorter runs with more recent acclaim (Neil Gaiman’s 75-issue Sandman run is often at the top of fans polls). But when combining quality, creativity, longevity and influence, I don’t think there’s really any comparison.

The Lee/ Kirby FF run seeded the Marvel universe, and the concepts and characters they created became the foundations on which a multi-billion-dollar entertainment empire has been built. Even a short list of characters introduced or reintroduced in their run is breathtaking: The Skrulls, Dr. Doom, Latveria, Namor, Atlantis, Rama Tut aka Kang, the Watcher, the Negative Zone, Annihilus, Galactus, the Silver Surfer, the Inhumans, the Black Panther, Wakanda, Agatha Harkness, Ronan the Accuser, the Kree, the Molecule Man, Him aka Adam Warlock and the Microverse. All of them have been recycled dozens, if not hundreds, of times across thousands of comics, TV shows and movies.

When I was a kid I had a Fantastic Four poster by John Byrne, in which the FF are surrounded by dozens of other characters. All I knew at the times that they were cool characters; what I didn’t realize is that they all had debuted in the Lee / Kirby run.

Back to issue 102

After about eight or 10 uninspired issues, Stan and Jack at least go out on a high note. Fantastic Four 102 isn’t a classic, but it it’s a reminder of how good the book could be when the elements combined into something greater than the whole. We have the Ben and Johnny hijinks, the noble-yet-misguided Namor, a dastardly villain in Magneto, and some amped-up stakes as Atlantis is on the brink of war with the surface world. Jack also leaves us with some great images, his best in a while.

Magneto’s presence is an interesting choice. It’s the first time he’s appeared in the FF’s own book, and according to a footnote, it follows his appearance in X-Men 63, a classic Roy Thomas / Neal Adams comic that features Ka-zar and the Savage Land mutates. In that issues, he’s last seen in a burning compound in Antartica that is collapsing above him. How he winds up on an island and in a differently colored costume is not explained.

Jack’s Magneto isn’t a mad genius like Adams’s, or the hero he later becomes in later X-Men comics. Here, he’s a conniving sneak in a helmet that barely fits him.