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Today, we look at your picks for #20-17 of the greatest Fantastic Four stories ever told!
As always, you voted, I counted the votes and now we count them down, four at a time. If I don’t add a date for the series, it means it is the original volume of whatever series I’m talking about.
20. Fantastic Four #191-200 “At Long Last, Defeat! At Long Last, Victory!”
This storyline saw the end of Len Wein’s time on the Fantastic Four and the start of Marv Wolfman’s run. It opened with the Fantastic Four breaking up and the book becoming a series of solo stories spotlighting the various members until they had to come together to face the threat of Doctor Doom once more.
Marv Wolfman also handled the iconic Amazing Spider-Man #200, so I suppose he is just really well suited to 200th issues, as he gives a tremendous one here, with Keith Pollard and Joe Sinnott taking over from George Perez on art duties and showing the “final” battle between Doctor Doom and Mister Fantastic, with Doom defeated by his own hubris, driven insane by his own tortured face…
The Fantastic Four succeed in tearing Latveria away from Doom (for now).
19. Fantastic Four Annual #3 “Bedlam at the Baxter Building!”
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby turned the comic book world upside down when they actually had Mister Fantastic and Invisible Girl get married in the third Fantastic Four Annual. The creators had spent a lot of time stressing how much the Fantastic Four was like a family and now, finally, the family was led by a married couple. Of course, things are not allowed to go smoothly, so the FF team-up with all of the heroes to fight pretty much all of the villains until Reed uses a powerful device form the Watcher (who can’t interfere, nudge nudge wink wink) and everything is back to normal in time for the wedding of the century…
The extra touch of Lee and Kirby being turned away from the wedding is really nice.
18. Fantastic Four #53-53 “The Black Panther!”
Originally, the Black Panther was going to debut in his own comic book series, but Marvel Owner and Publisher Martin Goodman ended up squelching those plans and so, instead, the Panther debuted as the capper of one of the most extraordinary string of comic book stories in the history of superhero comics. Imagine introducing the Inhumans, Silver Surfer, Galactus and then “This Man, This Monster” and then follow it up with the introduction of the first black superhero at Marvel Comics!
That’s just what Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Joe Sinnott did in this two-parter, which opens with the king of Wakanda, T’Challa, inviting the Fantastic Four to his kingdom, where he proceeded to beat them up for most of the issue, before revealing the truth of his attack..
The next issue saw the FF help Black Panther defeat Klaw, as we learned the origin of the Black Panther.
17. Secret Wars #1-9
“Secret Wars” was essentially the culmination of all of Jonathan Hickman’s previous storylines from both the Fantastic Four and, more directly, his Avengers run, that introduced the concept of Incursions, where a hole in the Multiverse led to an alternate version of Earth showing up and it became a question of “What do you do if another Earth shows up and it is a matter of either destroying the other Earth or letting it destroy our Earth?”
Captain America was brought into the Illuminati and he agreed to destroy the first Earth, but then he could not do it any further. The Illuminati then wiped his memory, so that they could continue to come up with solutions for the Incursions. They, too, though, decided not to destroy any other planets. Namor, though, found out about this and decided that that was foolish. He then formed the Cabal, with Maximus and Thanos, and they began destroying all of the other worlds that would come up in other Incursions, until there were only a dozen or so realities left standing.
Around this time, Captain America regained his memories and he declared the Illuminati to be enemies of the state. Finally, one last world showed up for the Incursion, the Ultimate Universe version of the Earth. This time, the Ultimate Universe saved their world and the two worlds collided. This led to the creation of a gigantic Battleworld, where the various realities were all merged together. They were all held together by Doctor Doom, who had gained the power of omnipotence from the Molecule Man, and Doom saved as many people as he could by turning the destroying realities into one big one.
Most people on the original Earth were killed, but a handful of heroes made it to an arc, of sorts, where they stayed in suspended animation for 8 years. The Cabal were also put into suspended animation. They came back out after 8 years, at which point Doom had been “god” for all that time.
The surviving heroes then had to work with the surviving members of the Cabal to take down Doom, using whatever items that they could use, like Namor and Black Panther finding out some weapons to fight Doom.
In the end, though, it came down to Reed Richards versus Doctor Doom, as it always does, but in this instance, Doom finally admits that Reed is a better man for the job than he is, and Reed Richards helped to re-form the Marvel Universe, just like how he helped form it in the first place in 1961.
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