Fantastic Voyage: Fantastic Four #5 (1962)

FANTASTIC FOUR #4 (1962)
Written by Stan Lee, drawn by Jack Kirby

Sorry for the incredible gap between Fantastic Voyage posts. I was shocked to discover that it had been about six months since I talked about Fantastic Four #4. Thanks to a new app I downloaded called Bookman Lite, I can now read PDFs on my iPhone. I just transferred over a few I had on my desktop from the awesome DVD I own that contains every FF and Silver Surfer comic from 1961 to 2005. The experience was actually pretty awesome. I’ve read plenty of comics in PDF form, but this was cool because they’re high res scans of issues that you can really zoom in on and look at, maybe even better than you could with a hard copy.

So, I got back into the game with a pretty landmark issue: the first appearance of Doctor Doom. I assumed he’d be behind some insanely complicated plot for taking over the world, but not so much. Instead he puts an electrified net around the FF headquarters, asks for (and is given) Sue, then takes the male FFers to his headquarters where he reveals his nefarious plan: the send them back in time to steal Blackbeard’s treasure chest. Huh? Really? So, that’s what they do, only Mr. Fantastic pulls some verbal trickery, noting that Doom only asked for the CHEST not the treasure itself. Oh that Reed, so sneaky.

Yes it’s got a good deal of Silver Age goofiness (Doom’s helicopter is alternately painted bright blue or pink with a shark face on it), but it’s also kind of fun seeing Mr. Fantastic, Thing and Human Torch using their powers while dressed up like pirates at the end. Also, as with the previous four issues, poor Ben Grimm has a hard time of things, first with Johnny comparing him to a comic book starring something called The Hulk (see the slideshow below) and then in the past when it turns out that he’s actually Blackbeard and he wants to stay there as a pirate only to get foiled by a storm (he even had his men restrain his teammates in ways that don’t actually make any sense).

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All in all, this was a really fun issue. I especially liked seeing the early building blocks that would go into making Dr. Doom one of the greatest villains around. The addition of the pirate setting was fun to see through the pencil of Jack Kirby, but I just keep thinking about how much better they would look if Kirby in his prime was drawing them. Ah well, we’ll get there!