Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

result, the artists often determined the page-by-page pacing and plot details. When the penciled pages were returned to Lee, he would write the dialogue, sometimes covering up inconsistencies, and sometimes changing the intent of the artist. Over time, this would evolve into an effective conduit for creative synergy; in these early days, it could result in something like confused rambling.
    On the opening page of Fantastic Four #1, a gray-templed man in a suit fires a flare gun, which gains the attention of most of the generically rendered Central City, but three people in particular: society girl Susan Storm, who turns invisible and sneaks out of afternoon tea; an unnamed figure who discards his trench coat, sunglasses, and fedora and rushes out of a Big and Tall Store, revealing himself to be an orange, clay-like behemoth; and teenaged Johnny Storm, Sue’s brother, who abandons his hot rod at a service station when he bursts into flames and flies away. They gather in the man’s apartment, and the action flashes back, jarringly . . .
    The next panel shows the four gathered at an earlier date. Reed Richards, the gray-templed man, is arguing with a tough-talking bruiser named Benjamin Grimm about the prospect of piloting a ship into space. “Ben, we’ve got to take that chance,” insists Susan Storm, Richards’s fiancée, “unless we want the commies to beat us to it!” And so the four of them drive to the local rocket launchpad, and, “before the guard can stop them,” take off for the stars. Unfortunately, they’re bombarded by cosmic rays, and they make an emergency return to earth. At the rural crash-landing site, the heroes discover their new, radiated physiologies. What’s striking about this sequence is the feeling of horror, the absence of joy in becoming super-powered. “You’re (gasp) fading away!” someone yells at Sue Storm as her body slowly disappears. “He’s turned into a-a—some sort of a thing!” Sue shrieks of Ben, as he grows into an ochreous, bricky mass, angrily attacks Reed, and jealously vows to win Sue. And then she notices her morphing beloved, his body elongating wildly and rubberily. “Reed . . . not you, too!! Not you, too!” Ben is restrained just as Johnny’s body ignites with flame and he flies into the air.
    Once they adjust to the transparency and the orange rockiness and the stretching and the immolation, their future is clear. “You don’t have to make a speech, big shot!” Ben says to Reed. “We understand. We’ve gotta use that power to help mankind, right?” Thus are born the Invisible Girl, the Thing, Mister Fantastic, and a new version of the Human Torch.
    A shift back to the moment of that flare-gun summons provides an anticlimactic twelve-page adventure, involving atomic power plants that have sunken into the earth, thanks to the Mole Man and his army of “underground gargoyles” on Monster Isle. (One of these creatures is recognizable from the issue’s cover, but the city streets and bystanders are nowhere to be seen.) The energy of the artwork is undeniably special, but the roaring and snarling three-headed monsters are no longer where Lee’s or Kirby’s interests lie. We’re granted one last look at the creatures that might have been named Mongu or Sporr or Zzutak, before a rock slide seals them off forever and the Fantastic Four, and Marvel Comics, fly into the future.
    T he issue reached newsstands on August 8, 1961, the same week that East Germany began work on the Berlin Wall. The space-race themes couldn’t have been better timed: between the conception and publication of the comic, the Soviets had made cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first man in space (although there were no reports of dangerous cosmic rays). Although sales figures wouldn’t come in for months, there was an immediate surge in reader mail—not the usual complaints about missing staples, but an engaged audience taken with the complicated characters. “We are trying (perhaps