The start of one of my favorite runs of a Marvel Comics series.
Creative Staff:
Story: John Byrne
Art: John Byrne
Colors: Glynis Wein, Bob Sharen
Letterer: Jim Novak, Jean Simek
What They Say:
It was the world’s greatest comic magazine. Again. Not since the days of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the trailblazers of the very mythology known as the Marvel Universe, had someone so perfectly captured the intense mood, cosmic style and classic sense of adventure of Marvel’s first family of heroes – the Fantastic Four. Writer. Penciler. Inker. Visionary. John Byrne took these characters, whose powers resulted from each of them being bathed in cosmic rays during a flight into space, and launched them into realms where few creators before this had dared to go… Byrne reminded us all there was a family at the heart of this team of adventurers.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Way back in the days before digital and before the direct market, for the most part, I had a wonderful time with friends or by myself biking downtown to the various newsstands and drug stores that carried comics and baseball cards. Everyone got different things and different amounts so the discovery was always part of the fun. With comics, I had limited money like most of my friends and that meant we’d share books. It took a few years but one of my friends was a huge fan of the Fantastic Four and eventually got me hooked on them through the John Byrne run. I had little interest in them prior to that and I had gotten into it toward the end of his run on it, but having been a fan of Byrne’s through X-Men at the time, it was easy to revisit. And years later I had a delightful time filling in the gaps when there were actual comic book shops in the area that I could go to and buy back issues.
With the first volume containing issues 232 through 240 on ComiXology Unlimited, it was a great chance to go back and reread. The fear is always there when going back to this period or earlier as to how well it’ll read by modern standards and there are certainly issues. You get the heavy narration, the explanation of basic and obvious things, and the recounting of recent events is fairly regular for what amounts to a run of single-issue stories for the most part. But there is a nostalgia for this in its easy accessibility as you could come onto the book at any point and get a largely self-contained story, know the basics, understand the concepts, and enjoy it while looking forward to more as various plot points start to get established. While not everything works here, this is the kind of book and selection of issues that reminded me of how I formed my foundations in Marvel as a whole.
Byrne has a handle on the characters and their archetype early on so they’re familiar creatures under his care, though definitely straining against some of what has defined them for so long. The biggest problem character really is Sue as she had a number of stepping-up moments over the years where she was established as a solid character but so many found it easier to revert her to the simple token female character. We get some aspects of that here but that’s not Byrne’s intensions. It comes as she’s starting to gain more confidence about herself and realizing just how varied her power can be and using it to come up with creative solutions and uses to the problems they face. While invisibility is her core power, the way she can manipulate it on a physical level really helped to expand things here. Over the eight issues you can see her starting down the path that, to me and the nostalgia of the time, helped to put Sue in a much stronger position within the group beyond just the mom of it and within Marvel overall.
That said, there are some rough issues here. The opening installment focused on Diablo and that was just an awkward choice as the character at the time was very one-dimensional. But it’s a fun book to connect with others that support the series, with Frankie getting some nice time and the slow build relationship between Ben Grimm and Alicia Masters. Ben’s frustrating over the run because he comes across as such a sad sack in love even while dating the beautiful Alicia who loves him for him, not what he looks like. Byrne feels like he has an angle to play with it and does in the long run but it’s hard to feel too sympathetic toward Ben for a bit. That he goes through more physical changes over the course of it doesn’t help his mental well-being and that has to be taken into account as well. Both Alicia and Frankie bring good things to the series, with Frankie gaining powers along the way comparable to Johnny but being even more reckless than he was at the start, while Alicia brings some real heart to it all.
One of the early stories that’s a lot of fun is #234, “The Man with the Power!,” which focuses on Skip Colins. He ended up with the power to have anything he wants to happen but is unaware of this even as everything around him starts going his way but in an incredibly mundane way. He’s frustrated by his life in this way but the way things work out just enough is fascinating to watch. He ends up in New York City thanks to these kinds of events and turns in a good tourist run and ends up becoming involved with the Fantastic Four by association as the city is under attack and his way of wishing things would be all right ends up fixing it. I loved that it was Ego out in space staring down at the world and that the big wish to restore everything to being alright depletes Skip’s powers, but the whole thing just adds that kind of moment where it’s all so totally out of the heroes hands in the big picture that it works to keep them a bit humble in a way.
Another one that I enjoyed a lot was #236 where Doom has captured the team and hooked them up to a Crazy Device. Unknown to the team, they’ve had their minds transported down to miniature versions of themselves in a constructed city known as Liddleville where they never lived their past lives. They’re showing up in their dreams but nobody speaks about it as they go through their normal lives. There are a lot of other people here as constructs that Doom used to manipulate the team with and it’s a delight in watching them figure out what’s going on and connect with each other by revealing the strange dreams. For Ben, it’s doubly interesting to watch since he gets to spend time in his old body pre-transformation, which does have its psychologic impact along the way. It’s a solid standalone tale that seeds things to come but also provides for a really fun little thing for Doom to do, which is just simply outlandish.
In Summary:
With some crazy aliens in the mix with the Spinerette and her people and other smaller talers, the opening installment of this really is all about showing that Byrne has an ease with these characters and is kicking the tires with them. He does some nice moments of growth that are complicated, such as with Frankie and Sue, but he also tweaks things so that there’s some good humor, notably the introduction of Aunt Petunia as an actual character that completely messes with everyone. With Byrne, you know what you’re getting in terms of artwork and for me that’s always been a big plus. The familiar layouts and positioning of the characters may be frustrating at times but I like his take on the cast, particularly with Johnny but also Alicia and Sue. Reed is the one that it feels like it takes the longest for him to get comfortable in both writing and illustrating. But as a whole, this run from 1981 is exactly what you’d expect from the time and a whole lot of fun. It may not read well to modern audiences and that’s completely understandable, but I really enjoyed revisiting the start of one of the bigger growth periods for the team.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 12+
Released By: Marvel Comics via ComiXology Unlimited
Release Date: May 10th, 2018
MSRP: $14.99
