Fantastic Four Annual 14
“Cat’s-Paw!”
Published October 1979
Story: Marc Wolfman and Geore Perez
Pencils: Perez
Inks: Pablo Marcos
Letters: Jim Novak
Colors: Carl Gafford
Editor: Wolfman
Cover: Joe Sinnott

Synopsis

After a brief battle with Sandman, the Fantastic Four return to the Baxter Building to find Agatha Harkness, who convinces the team plus Franklin to accompany her to New Salem for her annual visit. Meanwhile, a group of Salem witches is plotting to restore Nicholas Scratch — defeated by his mother, Harkness, and the FF in issue 186 —and then reveal themselves to be Salem’s Seven. They battle and subdue the FF, but Franklin escapes and is found by Harkness. Back in New York, Salem’s Seven harnesses the powers of the unconscious FF in order to summon Scratch, creating a powerful force field around the Baxter Building that resists the military and the Avengers. With Franklin, Harkness withstands Scratch’s assaults and once in the Baxter Building, Franklin’s latent powers restore the hostile, mind-controlled FF back to normal. Harkness then defeats Salem’s Seven and prevents Scratch from returning to Earth.

What’s going on here?

This is a big, fun, rollercoaster of an annual that only barely makes sense and is held together by George Perez’s amazing layouts and pencils. He is ably assisted by Pablo Marcos on inks, who has a nice light touch. If Perez had not worked on this book I would likely have a much lower opinion of it but thankfully we’ll never know. More on this great art in a bit.

Like a lot of annuals, this story feels a bit padded, particularly the opening sequence with Sandman, which serves no real purpose. It’s filled out at the end with a series of pinups. The story hinges entirely on the FF’s impromptu decision to join Harkness, and she ultimately is the hero of the story. After they are captured, the FF are barely players in their own annual.

This annual brings back Salem’s Seven, a fun group of villains who are surprisingly underused. They only appear a handful of times after this issue, despite seemingly tailor-made for fighting other super teams. Couldn’t the X-Men have fought these guys?

Also of note, the cover is by Joe Sinnott working solo, which is rare. It’s unfortunately not a particularly exciting or interesting cover, and my guess is Perez either couldn’t deliver his cover on time or it was rejected by Jim Shooter, necessitating a quick fill-in job by Sinnott.

What I liked

This is the first comic I’m aware of where we really see Perez’s layout innovations take hold. He was a master of propelling the story with panel designs, and often can fit seven, eight or nine on a page without it feeling cramped (most artists don’t exceed six). We can see the beginnings of that here, where he uses the bottom panel on four consecutive pages (I can only show three here) to introduce the main plot of the story through the sinister villainy of Salem’s Seven. Another artist might gave simply broken away from the main action and used four contiguous panels, but by using one panel per page, Perez undergirds the FF’s triumph over the Sandman with a portent of menace.

Here’s another page where Perez creates simultaneous action through page design. The small light blue panels show the machinations of the villains at the same time Harkness invites the FF to the evening’s big event. It’s a technique unique to comics; the movie or TV equivalent would be a picture-in-picture with separate characters and dialogue, which would be awful (you do sometimes see this in sports, but it’s hard to watch).

Perez uses 10 panels on this page, and it allows him to give the readers a sense of New Salem’s weirdness while advancing the plot.

The high point of Perez’s panel wizardry was probably Crisis on Infinite Earths, six years later, where he had roughly a zillion characters to include and a lot of story to tell. Here, in issue seven, he uses an insane 16 panels to record the death of Supergirl.

Today, one wide-screen artist like Brian Hitch would probably use half of a comic for the same sequence.

There’s lots of other great Perez art FF Annual 14, too, like this crazy double page splash:

Although the design is pretty rudimentary, with its one-point perspective, it’s full of fun details, like Johnny making time with a New Salem native (later revealed to be a succubus) and Franklin and Sue (and what is Sue wearing on her head??)

While this issue (and blog post) is really about Perez, Marv Wolfman has his moments. This was a fun sequence that followed the team thwarting the Sandman’s bank robbery and getting a kitten-themed calendar for their troubles:

And to finish up, just a few more amazing pages from Perez (the one with Avengers is stunning):

What I didn’t like

This being a Wolfman comic, there were all sort of odd plot devices and inconsistencies that seems could have been avoided with a bit of thought or (cough) an editor (cough) who wasn’t the same person as the writer.

Here, Harkness invites the FF to join her on a trip across the country and they decide to drop everything and go. Apparently world-class scientists like Reed don’t have meetings or lectures or experiments that keep him tied down. Would it have ruined the story to have made this a trip they planned in advance?

Then, instead of flying one of their several vehicles, they fly commercial. Because who doesn’t like an easily avoidable trip to the airport? (Also, note Reed is smoking a pipe on the plane. It was the seventies).

Later, the Salem witch Gazelle announces she’s a “beast of prey.” Really? Her name is Gazelle and she’s a predator??

And this feels like an own-goal, but when the Defenders show up and Iron Man says they’re helpless against this mystical, magical forcefield, it kinda begs the question about a certain missing Defender. Wears a cape. Lives in the village. Sometimes called the Sorcerer Supreme. Maybe he could have helped.

Anything else?

The pinups in the end are by Keith Pollard and Marcos. It’s called a gallery of the FF’s most famous foes but most of these guys are pretty obscure (there were six in total). I like that they each get a custom designed logos.

Overall

A Perez triumph!