Fantastic Four Annual 3
“Bedlam at the Baxter Building”
Published: July 1, 1965
Story: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Script: Lee
Pencils: Kirby
Inks: Vince Colletta
Letters: Arie Simek
Cover: Kirby and Mike Esposito

Note: Fantastic Four Annual includes one original story, which we will discuss here, and reprints three others, from FF 6 and FF 11.

Synopsis

The story opens with Dr. Doom reading about the planned wedding for Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl. Seeing an opportunity to take his revenge, he deploys his “high-frequency emotion charger” to spur other villains into attacking the Fantastic Four.

As the wedding guests arrive at the Baxter Building, an array of bad guys begin to attack, only to be beaten back by the FF’s guests, which include the X-Men, Dr. Strange, Daredevil, Spider-Man and the Avengers. Eventually the FF gets pulled into the fray, and the Watcher appears, whisking Reed off to his home on the Moon. In a very legalistic interpretation of non-interference, he says Reed can take any device he finds and use it on the villains. Reed selects a “sub-atomic time displacer” which sends the villains into the past with no memory of recent events.

The story concludes with Reed and Sue’s much-anticipated wedding.

What’s going on here?

As far as stories go, this plot is about as thin as they get. Doom arranges for the villains to attack, we get about 15 pages of fun battle scenes as virtually every hero and villain in the nascent Marvel universe shows up, the Watcher swoops in to fix things, and we end up with a wedding. But a thin story doesn’t mean a boring story, and this comic is a lot of fun, as Stan and Jack clearly enjoy reaching into their bag of characters and throwing them all into the stew.

The basic concept—all the good guys vs. all the bad guys—will be repeated over the years, maybe most notably in 1984’s Secret Wars, which was a 12 issue series based pretty much on that premise and little else.

FF Annual 3 is also notable for mixing and matching heroes and villains, creating new pairings of combatants. For example, the X-men vs. the Mole Man:

Or Dr. Strange vs. the Red Ghost and his Super Apes:

Or Captain America vs. Cobra, the Executioner and the Enchantress

Or Thor vs. the Super Skrull:

Or Daredevil vs. Hydra:

Or Iron-Man vs. the Awesome Android:

This kind of matching heroes against unfamiliar villains became the basis for another 1980s cross-over event, Acts of Vengeance, in which Marvel’s biggest bad guys arranged to fight each other’s traditional antagonists.

Wedding bells

The other notable event in FF Annual 3, of course, is Reed and Sue’s marriage. As far as I am aware, this is the first super-hero wedding in the modern Marvel era, and it sets the template for dozens of similar issues to come. They usually take place in an annual or anniversary issue, a wedding is planned, villains interfere, and the nuptials finally comes together at the end.

While there have been dozens of weddings with super heroes, two heroes marrying each other is less common, in part because there are so few female heroes (the male-male super hero wedding is way, way in the future, of course). Notable pairing include the Wasp and Yellowjacket, Green Arrow and Black Canary, the Vision and Scarlet Witch, and Luke Cage and Jessica Jones.

There are way too many super-hero weddings to list, but here’s a few that took place in the pages of the Fantastic Four:

The marriage of Crystal and Quicksilver in FF 150 (Crystal had been a de facto member of the FF for years):

The marriage of Johnny Storm and Alicia Masters, later revealed to be Lyja the Skrull, in FF 300:

In FF 27 (Vol. 3), in a bizarre storyline, Sue marries Dr. Doom, who was actually Reed’s consciousness in Doom’s body:

Lastly, Ben Grimm and the real Alicia finally married in FF 5 (vol. 6):

Let’s talk about us

Stan and Jack, absent from these pages for a while, reappear as uninvited wedding guests:

Also making a cameo was Patsy Walker and her friend Hedy, marking their first appearance in the Marvel universe. The star of teen romance comics dating from the 1940s, Patsy would later become the heroine Hellcat.

Who are these guys?

Stan and Jack dug deep to find some obscure villains. I believe the guy to the right of the Mandarin is the Unicorn, but I have no clue who is between him and the Beetle. Anyone out there know?

Call my lawyer

I hope Murdock & Nelson bill their usual rate for running errands like this.

Deus ex machina

Once again the Watcher makes a big deal out of his vow to not interfere while doing a lot of interfering.

Dig that Kirby Krackle

This issue features another Kirby Kollage

Next issue: The return of Medusa and introduction of the Inhumans!

(Edited to remove a reference to The wedding of Bouncing Boy and Duo damsel, which I somehow placed in the 60s, not the 70s)