Fantastic Four #1

[Emerkeith Davyjack]

Okay , here's a thought .

  I jst recently bought , at my LCS , a Marvel Milestone Edition facsmile reprint of the entirety of FANTASTIC FOUR #1 - for a dollar .

  Let's try re-reading this story , with what we know now .

  It's been manymanymany times reprinted , so , unless anyone here is SO anti-Marvel that they-Well , I shudder to think !

  Anyway , let's find , if we can , some version of the story and comment about it again , from today's perspective and maybe imagining what it might'vbe seemd like in '61 .

  MSA , did you declare that - behind Spidey in AF #15??? - it was the most , or the second most , reprinted Marvel story , anyway ?

  Fittingly enuff:-) , I believe you stated that Superman's first story , though in the SUPERMAN #1 " director's cut " version , not the ACTION #1 " AM radio edit " , was the winn-ah ! there .

  FF #1's story is a book-length , 25-page , story - taking advantage of a first issue's then-not needing to have a Post Office-required text page , possible etcetera , to be a little longer , and I suppose that its' title is just that , " The Fantastic Four ! " , as Reed's non-equally-sized raygun flare letters spell out on the splash page ( I first read it in FANTASTIC FOUR SPECIAL #7 , from '69 , incidentally . )...

[Tim Boo Ba]

Challengers of the Unknown refers. Anyone read any stories with June Robbins in?

Henry R. Kujawa said:

Kirk:

"this appears in FF #12, immediately after they spend half of #11 trying to defend and build Sue up, despite her self-deprecating tone and attacks from the fans as well!  Sheesh, Stan... what are you trying to do here???"

Dandy:

"I'm no Stan."

Makes me wonder how the guy who wrote the STORY would have written the DIALOGUE (if he'd been given the chance).

Stan's no Jack, either.

[Henry R. Kujawa]

Hey, Tim.  To answer your question, YES, I've read Kirby's entire run of CHALLENGERS (thanks to the 2-volume Archives set).


As far as characters / personalities go, I'd say Kirby got BETTER in the 70's.  But then again, any "personality" he tried to bring to CHALLENGERS may have been restricted and "toned down" by editor Jack Schiff.  DC had a "house style" that didn't stop at the look of the art.  They wanted flat, bland, dull, colorless, INOFFENSIVE characters.  Jack Kirby probably gave them EXACTLY what they wanted! To compare this against Stan Lee's "badly-behaved adolescents" is probably not fair.  After all, Marvel's heroes have ALWAYS been badly-behaved, compare their to DCs back in the early-40's!


Anyone saying CHALLENGERS' characters had no personalities should try reading ANYTHING ELSE that DC put out in the late 50's by comparison.  I bet they fit right in.


It's been years since I've read CHALLENGERS (and I've only read them once, so far).  But my memory is, any time Kirby wrote women characters, he treated them with RESPECT.  Anytime Stan Lee wrote women characters, he DIDN'T.


As for stories written by Jack and RE-written by Stan, who knows?  Jack was very good at giving editors EXACTLY what they asked for.  Stan's problem was usually not knowing what he wanted until someone already gave it to him... then making changes to satisfy his ego and "prove" to people that he was (ahem) "contributing".


There's also the saga of John Romita's AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, where Stan has been described (by a few) as "making course-corrections".  Therefore, with that in mind, we never really got to see what "pure" Romita might have been... or "pure" Kirby either.


And with THAT in mind, it's clear WHY Jack Kirby, by the end of the 60's, wanted SO BADLY to be able to write & edit his own books without interference.  How else was what HE wanted to do ever gonna make it out to the public?


Given that before long, Martin Goodman was out, Chip Goodman was out, and Stan got promoted upstairs, had Perfect Film actually given Jack the contract he wanted, we might have seen Jack writing & editing his own work AT MARVEL.  And if that had happened, it seems to me, there would have been a good chance it would have SOLD better.  NOT because someone else wrote the dialogue, NOT because someone else was editor. JUST because it said "MARVEL" on the cover, so "MARVEL" fans would buy it, and support it.

[Dandy Forsdyke]

Actually the reasons Marvel comics sold is pretty much well documented and evident. Not only were the characters exciting and the stories well told but the Marvel regular readership felt part of a club. Stan was a great salesman and made you believe these were the best and most thrilling comic books on the newstand. It's no good just having a great product, you have to be told it's a great product. This is where the editorial and cover blurbs came in.

Jack Kirby created, plotted and paced all of his comics at Marvel. Of that there is little doubt. However it was through the captions and dialogue that explained it all to us, adding the humour, the pathos and the characterisation. That's a big part of what sold comic books to me age 12 when I discovered Marvel comics, and just when I thought I was growing too old for the Superman family, the Legion and Justice League. Stan Lee's Marvel comics added another five or six years to my comic book reading.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby made good comic books apart, but they  were never as great nor as successful as when they were together, and that is as close to truth as opinion can get. When Jack left Marvel Stan only wrote (or co-wrote if you insist) for another couple of years. Whilst, although the character of Darkseid endured over the decades, none of the books Jack created sufficiently satisfied the DC publishers to be continued, and none exist today as far as I know. Marvels sold even better after Jack Kirby left them. They exist today not only as comic books but a movie franchise and through millions of dollars of merchandise - and that's not down to someone just taking all the credit.
Stan was a bit sexist with his female characters if we judge him by today's standards, but they weren't treated any better elsewhere. Lois Lane may have sold better than Flash or Spider-Man in the early 60s but she was still a was a spoilt, manipulative shrew.

That will be my last post, folks.  'Bye.

[Luke Blanchard]

Best wishes, Dandy.

[Kirk G]

I agree with virtually everything  you posted above, Danny, except for the assertion that Marvels books sold even BETTER when Kirby left Marvel.   I had thought that the entire line was in a downward spiral as readership grew up and moved on...and so the editors and writers were looking for the "next big thing"...which they thought might be monsters...thinly disguised vampires, golums, warewolves by night, morbius, etc.

 

But until the Teen Titans and then X-men revivals, nothing was really working, as I understand it.

Otherwise, I think you're on target with your comments.

[Henry R. Kujawa]

There was also "girl books" (all cancelled within 5 issues);  "blaxploitation";  "martial arts"... apparently, science-fiction was the only thing they never really got into (until the late 70's, and then it was almost entirely "licensed" properties), because Martin Goodman had been saying for decades, "Science fiction doesn't sell!").

It was almost amusing that IRON FIST was cancelled and POWER MAN on the verge of being cancelled, when they got the crazy idea to combine them into POWER MAN / IRON FIST.

[Richard Willis]

How is this any different than DC combining The Atom and Hawkman into a single book?

Henry R. Kujawa said:

It was almost amusing that IRON FIST was cancelled and POWER MAN on the verge of being cancelled, when they got the crazy idea to combine them into POWER MAN / IRON FIST.

[Kirk G]

Yeah, that was a really bizarre move.  I could never figure out why they did it...but the buddy book concept, with Byrne and Claremont at the helm, seemed to work. Who knew? (Of course, tying it into the X-men storyline also helped out!)

Henry R. Kujawa said:

There was also "girl books" (all cancelled within 5 issues);  "blaxploitation";  "martial arts"... apparently, science-fiction was the only thing they never really got into (until the late 70's, and then it was almost entirely "licensed" properties), because Martin Goodman had been saying for decades, "Science fiction doesn't sell!").

It was almost amusing that IRON FIST was cancelled and POWER MAN on the verge of being cancelled, when they got the crazy idea to combine them into POWER MAN / IRON FIST.

[Kirk G]

DID they really do that at DC?  Were they just combined into the same book (printed as a split book or back-up feature?  Or were they in the same story together?

Richard Willis said:

How is this any different than DC combining The Atom and Hawkman into a single book?

Henry R. Kujawa said:

It was almost amusing that IRON FIST was cancelled and POWER MAN on the verge of being cancelled, when they got the crazy idea to combine them into POWER MAN / IRON FIST.

[Luke Blanchard]

The title did both split issues and team-up issues.

[Tim Boo Ba]

I agree that Stan was a great salesman, et cetera, but would point out that you need to have a great product in the first place to have anything at all to market.

If only Stan had confined himself to the editorial and cover blurbs.

Dandy Forsdyke said:

Stan was a great salesman and made you believe these were the best and most thrilling comic books on the newstand. It's no good just having a great product, you have to be told it's a great product. This is where the editorial and cover blurbs came in.

[Tim Boo Ba]

Goodbye, Dandy.
Dandy Forsdyke said:

Jack Kirby created, plotted and paced all of his comics at Marvel. Of that there is little doubt.

That will be my last post, folks.  'Bye.