The FF settles in for a quiet night of TV at home, unaware of Miracle Man’s impending perfidy, but The Invisible Girl has a surprise for her de facto family. Still, we’re in for more surprises than the car as the team returns home, giving us the first glimpses of their Baxter Building headquarters… For my money, the old “flying bathtub” is cool in its simplicity, the kind of thing a scientist might make if he were in no way interested in image or rococo, exactly Reed’s bag. Reed, ever the futurist, realizes that ol’ Miracly represents the wave of the future for his world (boy, does he!), and is pensive the entire ride home in their brand new Fantasticar. He openly mocks the Fantastic Four until Ben Grimm can brook now more of his hubris, and takes to the stage to retort in his own inimitable way: Swift and blinding violence. We begin with our FF attending a strange little stage performance…Ĭalling out his famous attendees, the Miracle Man (not THAT Miracleman) shows off his mighty powers to bend time and space to his will, to grow and shrink and defy the fundamental forces of nature. Leiber, aka Stan Lee, teamed up with his frequent collaborator Jack Kirby, Issue #1 sold well, and issue #2 introduced the Skrulls, who still menace the Marvel Universe to this day, but it’s #3 where things really get jiving. That part is apocryphal, but we do know that Goodman went to his editor-in-chief/wife’s cousin Stanley Lieber and told him to get on the stick with a superhero team title. The story says that Martin Goodman, owner/publisher of Marvel Comics, was playing golf with either a member of DC’s editorial staff or someone with the distribution company, when he heard how successful the sales numbers were on DC’s new ‘Justice League’ series. No, not the bit with the cosmic rays… the OTHER origin.
Previously in Fantastic Four: The origins of the Fantastic Four have been told many times, so many that the story has mutated and gained an urban legend life of its own. No, not Fantastic Four #1, that’s just the origin, I’m talking about the REAL beginning… Your Major Spoilers (Retro) Review of Fantastic Four #3 awaits! Seems like a good time to check out the issue that made the team what it is today. With the upcoming (hopefully temporary) end of Fantastic Four drawing near, we may be entering a strange new Fantastic Four-free world for the first time in decades.