Cover Album: Fantastic Four #1 (Part I)

Fantastic Four #1 was published by Marvel Comics 50 years and a few months back.

Why is this Cover Album is going up now? The same reason why I belatedly marked Watchmen's 25th anniversary a month ago instead of in June: FF #1 hit newsstands in August 1961, but it had a cover date of November — and I've not yet fully supplemented the master list of comic-book landmarks that will be a cornerstone of my long-in-progress website The Comicologist with on-sale dates. I'm still observing milestones based on the more familiar, more circulated indicia/cover dates for now.

Marvel's celebrating the 50th anniversary this month, too, by the way.



Even though it entered the burgeoning comic-book market in 1939 — with Marvel Comics #1 — the company best known as Marvel traces its "Marvel Universe" to FF #1, released over two decades later. That first issue of Marvel Comics debuted The Human Torch, created by Carl Burgos, and The Sub-Mariner, created by Bill Everett; with Joe Simon & Jack Kirby's Captain America, who showed up at the start of 1941, they formed a trio of flagship characters for what was then called Timely Comics despite the name of its premier(e) title. And those '40s stories are part of Marvel Universe history, just somewhat less canonically (for various reasons) than the interrelated continuity that began with Fantastic Four #1 — whose success led, slowly at first, to a litany of other offbeat superheroes including The Hulk, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, and The X-Men.

A new version of The Human Torch was in fact one of the Fantastic Four, while The Sub-Mariner showed up in FF #4, but the series was a departure from... well, from almost everything, thanks to the creativity of the veteran Kirby and Marvel writer/editor Stan Lee. It was, the story goes, a blue-sky effort on Lee's part to put together the kind of comic book he really wanted to make after prodded by Timely/Atlas/Marvel publisher Martin Goodman to take yet another stab at reviving the largely moribund superhero genre at their company in the wake of rival DC's success with its fledgling Justice League. The Torch, here a teenager named Johnny Storm, was joined by his sister, Sue Storm, alias The Invisible Girl; her beau, stretchable scientific genius Reed Richards, a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic; and Reed's army buddy Ben Grimm, whose rocky orange hide earned him the inconsiderate appellation of The Thing.

In today's vernacular, Lee & Kirby mashed up traditional superheroics with the sci-fi and supernatural monster tales that along with romance, humor, and war titles had come to dominate the medium. At the start the FF didn't even have costumes, and they operated without secret identities from a public headquarters; both their atomic-age acquisition of strange abilities — they were bombarded by cosmic rays in an experimental spacecraft — and their frequent squabbling (due to individual angst as well as interpersonal conflict within the family unit) set the stage for the Marvel Universe to come.

You can read much more about the origins of The Fantastic Four elsewhere. If you care enough to be reading this, in fact, you're probably already pretty aware of the stories on the page and behind the scenes. The point of this little endeavor is to commemorate FF #1 with a gallery of homages to its cover, easily one of the most frequently aped covers in all of comicdom; heck, as I found out collecting some of the harder-to-find graphics that populate this series of posts, the cover's iconic status has made show-and-tell of its imitations a popular topic on the Internet, but I suppose another such effort can't hurt.

The sharp cover image of Fantastic Four #1 above was taken from the issue's entry at The Grand Comics Database, source for most of the covers here as usual. Other sources include Comic Vine (where you'll find a cover-flow homage gallery, sans commentary) and Mike's Amazing World of Marvel Comics; at the latter, in addition to the issue's own index you can actually check out the company that FF #1 kept upon its August 1961 premiere within Marvel or among various publishers from DC to Harvey to Charlton to Archie (which beat Marvel back into the superhero game, although it wasn't Marvel's first revival). I should also note that while the indefatigable Stan Goldberg, a mainstay of the Timely/Marvel bullpen before his career-defining work at Archie, has confirmed that he colored the cover to FF #1, nobody is certain — or, better to say, not enough people are certain in the same direction, and there's no documentation — of who exactly inked Kirby's pencils, although George Klein, Christopher Rule, and Dick Ayers have been the leading contenders.



It's comic-book legend — but quite possibly apocryphal — that Martin Goodman charged Stan Lee with developing a property along the lines of DC's Justice League of America after hearing of the title's success during a round of golf from an executive at DC or its sister company Independent News (which at the time distributed both DC and Marvel, among other periodicals). Of course, Fantastic Four was pretty far off the reservation, overlaying the aforementioned "Atlas"-era creature features that Lee had been producing with Kirby and others upon the premise of DC's Challengers of the Unknown (itself a 1956 Kirby creation); The Avengers, bringing together more colorful solo superheroes who cropped up at Marvel in the FF's wake, would be closer to the all-star JLA.

Some have even suggested that the cover to Fantastic Four #1 was modeled after the one that introduced the League in Mar. 1960's The Brave and the Bold #28, above left, penciled by Mike Sekowsky and inked by Murphy Anderson. You can certainly see an echo of Aquaman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and The Martian Manhunter battling Starro the Conqueror in Kirby's layout for FF #1 if you're looking for it, but there are also only so many ways to clearly depict four or five characters fighting a giant alien and/or subterranean menace. Roy Thomas — Lee's initial successor as writer of Fantastic Four and editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics — referenced the FF/JLA comparison when he had Ron Frenz draw the cover above right, inked by Kirby's longtime FF collaborator Joe Sinnott and colored by Tom Ziuko; it appeared on 2004's Alter Ego #33 from TwoMorrows Publishing (unhappy home to my own magazine Comicology, one short decade ago).



An early homage to the cover of FF #1 was that of Sept. 1972's Fantastic Four #126, above left, inked by Sinnott over the pencils of John Buscema and with modified dialogue in the vein of the original. Inside, "The Way It Began!" kicked off Thomas's brief first run as regular writer of the series by revisiting the events of #1 — including the team's confrontation of The Mole Man and his minions from Monster Isle. The covers and stories of both FF #1 and FF #126 were repurposed for book-and-record sets from Golden Records in 1966 and Power Records in 1974, respectively, the latter being quite possibly my first "issue" of Fantastic Four ever.

One of the most recent homages is the second-printing variant cover of May 2011's FF #1, above right, drawn by Ed McGuinness. And that "FF" is not a shorthand for "Fantastic Four". Johnny Storm, you see, apparently died earlier this year in Fantastic Four #587, with the series ending (not for the first time) one issue later and succeeded the month after that by the new initials-only FF; Spider-Man has replaced The Human Torch in the team's roster, and it now operates as The Future Foundation.

Marvel has been shipping some of its most popular series in greater-than-monthly frequency in recent years, which explains why FF #12 is scheduled to hit comic-book shops next Wednesday, but not quite why Fantastic Four proper will resume one week before that — tomorrow — with #600. I know that many series from Marvel and DC have relaunched with #1s (either due to a long hiatus or just for the hype) and later reverted to issue numbering reflective of their entire publication history (for both an appropriate sense of longevity and for the hype), but since the new FF is continuing as well it's awfully odd for Fantastic Four #600 to just spring forth from the ether. The 50th anniversary wasn't a big enough deal? Marvel could have promoted that and then twelve issues later had another excuse to get all celebratory on the sexicentennial.

Given that I got even more loquacious than usual in annotating FF #1's origins, I've decided to break this enterprise into a fitting four parts that will run as close to daily as Thanksgiving and ease of posting allow.

Next: Fantastic Four #1 gets Byrned!

Cover to Fantastic Four #1 © 1961 Marvel Comics. All other images © year of creation and characters TM or ® their respective owners. Images used for historical reference.