High Five! Comics

For writing extensively about the Silver Age, it’s a wonder I’ve had yet to touch upon anything Marvel, specifically any of the bajillion collaborations between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. These two are responsible for the X-Men, Thor, Hercules, Hulk, Iron Man, and Nick Fury. I mean, come on, if that ain’t prolific, nothing is. And, while most of their books seemed to be somewhat more serious than DC’s books from the same era, Lee and Kirby seemed to write another of their creations, the Fantastic Four, as a bit more fantastical (hence the name, I guess). Let’s take a look at January 1963’s The Fantastic Four #10.

The issue starts out with Mr. Fantastic using his patented vibra-light process in his radioactive x-ray camera to try and help Sue control her invisibility. By the way, it’s worth noting that, while Star Trek may have perfected it, the Fantastic Four more or less invented bullshit technobabble (which this issue is full of). Anyways, he manages to take a picture of her while she’s invisible which I guess is good news or something. Before they can explain how that even begins to make sense, Johnny Storm spots the emergency signal flare out the window! To the Fantasti-Car!

Except it turns out that Reed’s nuclear lock is stuck and they can’t get into the garage. We are then treated to a full page of Reed stretching his arm under the door, trying to feel around for the Fantasti-Car. He fails, but Johnny discovers that he can “concentrate his flame so much that it burns without heat” (um, what?) and pops open the lock. For some inexplicable reason, Reed then decides that it’d be faster to walk anyways, rendering that entire sequence completely pointless. After Sue almost gets killed crossing the street and Reed almost gets his clothes ripped off by insane fans, they show up at Alicia Masters’ doorstep to discover that the Thing just wanted to show them Alica’s sculptures of various supervillains.

Meanwhile, across town, Doctor Doom shows up at the office of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Feel free to take a few seconds and let that last sentence really sink in. Turns out that Earth-616’s Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are BFFs with all the heroes. Anyways, Doom demands that Stan call up Mr. Fantastic and somehow get him to the office. Reed suits up and heads on over, where Doctor Doom hits him with some sleeping gas and teleports away with an unconscious Reed.

Later, Reed awakens in Doom’s secret lab, completely unrestrained. He just stands there while Doom talks about how he survived being shot into space on a meteor by being picked up by some weird aliens called Ovoids who taught him how to swap bodies with somebody. After he finishes his story, Doom reveals that while Reed was just kinda hanging out and listening, he’d used telepathy to switch their bodies. Doom-in-Reed then proceeds to beat the shit out of Reed-in-Doom before the rest of the Fantastic Four shows up and finishes the job. After they talk about whether or not they should bury him alive in the desert (holy fuck, that’s an option?), they decide to lock him in a plexi-glass prison in his own lab. Ben is super concerned that Reed-in-Doom will run out of air, but Doom-in-Reed convinces him that there’s tons of air in there and he’ll be fine. After they leave he then pretty much says, “Just kidding, there’s only an hour of air. See ya!”

Back at the Baxter Building, the team is shocked when they open Reed’s lab and a ton of tiny-sized animals run out. Ben notices that that day’s headline reads “Zoo Animals Missing.” Gasp! The gang rushes in to confront Doom-in-Reed but he contests that he was doing it for them, merely testing out his new reduction ray to help increase the group’s powers! This is immediately followed by the greatest example of sequential art (laced with more technobabble) I have ever seen.

Roughly the same size as this vagina.

Doom-in-Reed explains that the reason dinosaurs went extinct is that while their bodies grew larger and larger, their brains did not (bullshit). But what if they got smaller? With their brains being so large compared to their tiny bodies, those dinosaurs would be scientific geniuses and rule the world (bullshit)! Doom-in-Reed hypothesizes that if he uses his Shrinky Dink laser beam on the group, their powers will retain their intensity, yet grow when they are un-shrunk (such bullshit!). He tells them that Johnny could fly faster than a jet, Sue could turn parts of herself invisible at will, and Ben will be able to turn human again. Rather than question the logic behind any of that crap, the gang starts arguing over who’s going to get shot by the laser gun first. Doom-in-Reed tells them to come back in a few hours and, as soon as they’re gone, starts giving exposition to the empty room. Basically, he’s just gonna shrink the Fantastic Four out of existence. Surprise, surprise.

Back at Doctor Doom’s secret lab, Reed-in-Doom escapes his plexi-glass prison by blowing up the rest of his oxygen tanks. He immediately runs over to Alica’s house to get her help convincing the others that he is actually Reed. Before he can get a word in, an invisible Sue beats him over the head with a vase, knocking him out. Ben and Johnny run in and get ready to beat the shit out of an unconscious Reed-in-Doom  but Ben realizes that, for some reason, he can’t bring himself to punch him. Confused, they take him back to the Baxter Building.

Doom-in-Reed (seriously, all they have to do is look at his new evil Peter Lorre eyebrows) ties up Reed-in-Doom and tells the rest of the Fantastic Four that the ray is read to shrink them. They eagerly stand in front of it, but a desperate Reed-in-Doom runs around screaming that everybody is dumb for not listening to him. Johnny decides to test this out by using a heat mirage to make it look like there’s a stick of dynamite in the room. While Doom-in-Reed freaks out and climbs up a pipe to escape, Reed-in-Doom tries to remove the fuse. Doom and Reed suddenly switch bodies back to normal and a fight ensues. Sort of. Doctor Doom just throws himself in front of the reduction ray and starts screaming for somebody to turn it off. They don’t, he shrinks into nothingness, the end.

So, yeah. While Lee and Kirby’s other books like X-Men and Hulk were way more dramatic, Fantastic Four is anything but (pretty much til the Silver Surfer shows up). I mean, hell, this issue alone had aliens, cameos from the creators, and technobabble out the ass. Oh. And dinosaurs in spacesuits. Shit, did I forget to mention the dinosaurs are in spacesuits?

BEST. PANEL. EVER.