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Today, we look at your picks for #16-13 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.
16. Fantastic Four #5 “Prisoners of Doctor Doom!”
It’s kind of cool to note that the introduction of the greatest villain in the history of the Fantastic Four happened to debut in an issue where Joe Sinnott did fill-in inks. So the debut of Doom was done by the classic Fantastic Four creative team of Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Joe Sinnott.
It is amazing how many over-the-top ideas were thrown into this one issue, with the introduction of not just the great villain, Doctor Doom, but also Doom’s time machine!
You have to love those early FF stories that just went all over the place. There’s this whole tangent with the Thing as a pirate! Amazing.
15. Fantastic Four #509-511 “Hereafter”
In one of the earlier stories on this list, “Authoritative Action,” Reed Richards came up with a plan to trap Doctor Doom in, effect, hell, with him forever, willing to sacrifice himself if it meant that his enemy would be trapped, as well. Of course, the plan backfired (in part because Reed’s family would not accept him making this unilateral sacrifice) and ultimately Doom was free to possess other members of the Fantastic Four and the end result was the Thing being killed.
Reed just could not deal with it, so we discover that Reed has rigged up some sort of contraption that is keeping Thing very unnaturally alive. Reed then comes up with the idea of basically breaking into heaven to bring Thing back to life. The others follow him on this journey and discover, ultimately, that the problem isn’t that Thing can’t move to the next step, but that Reed is KEEPING him from taking that next step with his machine back on Earth.
The Thing, though, knows how difficult his passing is on his teammates and he makes the noble sacrifice of literally passing up heaven to rejoin his friends back on Earth. Before they return to Earth, the FF actually get a chance to meet with “God,” which Mark Waid, Mike Wieringo and Karl Kesel have cleverly designed as Jack Kirby…
It was a really nice touch to also have Kirby “erase” the awful scar that Reed had suffered during the earlier, “Unthinkable,” storyline. Very touching stuff.
14. Fantastic Four #84-87 “Within This Tortured Land”
Towards the tail end of their historic run on the Fantastic Four, Jack Kirby was turning to outside media to influence his story ideas more and more. One of the best examples of this influence was this four-part epic that was inspired by the cult classic TV series, The Prisoner. The Fantastic Four are sent into Latveria by Nick Fury to stop Doctor Doom from completing a powerful robot army. Once there, though, the Fantastic Four are trapped in Latveria without their powers (via hypnosis) and so the heroes (who are without the Invisible Girl, since she is still recovering from giving birth to her first child at the time) are stuck living in a village right out of the Prisoner.
This was an important story arc, as it showed everyone what Latveria was really like under Doom. When the FF gets their powers back, they lead a revolt against Doom, with his oppressed subjects, and we see that Doom is a not some sort of noble tyrant, dude is just a tyrant plain and simple…
Of course, the village wasn’t REALLY destroyed, courtesy of one of the best deus ex machinas of the Kirby/Lee era, as a fresh-off-maternity leave Sue Richards showed up to save the day with a timely force field.
13. Fantastic Four #44-48 “The Inhumans Saga”
Like Black Panther, the Inhumans were originally going to debut in their own comic book series, and a result of them instead being folded into the pages of the Fantastic Four, Jack Kirby had come up with such developed back stories for everyone that the introduction of the Inhumans was filled with an astonishing amount of plot development for brand new characters. Medusa had fought the Fantastic Four as a villain, but then we learned that she had amnesia. This is just in time for her cousin, Gorgon, to show up to bring her home to the secret abode of the Inhumans. Her long lost love, Black Bolt, had temporarily given up his throne to his brother, the mad Maximus, while Medusa was missing, but with her back, Black Bolt was ready to take his throne back…
How amazing is that sequence where Maximus debates what to do, going from instant anger to “nah, I’ll get him later instead.” Jack Kirby was a genius. This storyline also introduced the Romeo and Juliet-esque relationship of Crystal and Human Torch, with the star-crossed lovers stuck between his world with the humans and hers with the, well, you know. This marked the debut of the classic Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Joe Sinnott creative team. Sinnott would ink Kirby for the rest of Kirby’s time on the Fantastic Four.
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