“If you weren’t a female, I’d demolish ya!! But the only thing I can do to a nut like you is give ya the spankin of your life!!”
Ugh, I’m so bad at writing these reviews. I finished the book a while back but have just been too busy to write up a review. I’ve been keeping up on reading though and am nearly done Doctor Strange Volume 1 so hopefully I’ll be posting a review for it sooner rather than later!
I’d also like to take a minute to say Rest in Peace Stan. He passed away recently and if you don’t know he was basically the father of Marvel comics as we know it. He will truly be missed.
Well here we go. I feel like a lot of my writing starts with that. So I’ll work on a different opener, but for now you’re stuck with it. The Fantastic Four! This is one of the Marvel teams and characters I know the least about, or knew the least about going into this first omnibus. If there was ever a cartoon (I believe there was but too lazy to look it up at this second) I never watched it! I’ve seen bits and pieces of the two movies but never sat down and watched them start to finish but if they end up in the MCU you can bet I’ll watch those movies.
This Omnibus collects Fantastic Four #1-30 and Annual #1. If you don’t already know, the fantastic four consists of Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic), Johnny Storm (The Human Torch), Sue Storm (The Invisible Girl) and Ben Grimm (Thing). The four of them went into space in an effort to win the space race and ended up getting blasted with some cosmic rays that granted them their abilities.
The book itself was a bit slow and probably the toughest omnibus I’ve read so far but still highly enjoyable and glad I was able to read it!
I think the biggest reason I slowly got through this book and took me longer than others is the lack of ongoing story lines. Most issues are completely standalone stories that have no cliffhanger or something that makes you crave that next issue. Marvel was still figuring out their formula at this point so its to be expected. I’ve also heard others say the silver age stuff can be a bit wordy which can make issues take longer to read. The issues as individuals are quite good though, don’t get me wrong. But for me personally I’m looking to invest in some long term story lines. Which is why I decided to pick up a lot of these characters from their origin stories and not just jump onto the most popular arcs that become movies etc.
This omnibus introduces us to some of the fantastic four’s greatest foes like the Mole Man, Namor the Sub Mariner, the Puppet Master and of course Dr Doom. I personally always thought Namor was more of a good guy but the amount of issues he shows up as the antagonist in this book would leave me to believe otherwise. However I’m still behind about 50 years on Marvel lore so anything can happen!
Namor is constantly trying to win over the love of Sue Storm and surprisingly enough to me anyways she seems torn between Namor and Reed Richards. Throughout the omnibus she witness’ enough from both of them that her love for Reed is quite clear by the end however it was an interesting dynamic I had never known about before reading these books.
I almost completely forgot to mention the other couple present in the fantastic four. Thing and Alicia, the blind daughter of the puppet master. They have a funny dynamic of constantly not feeling good enough for the one another. Thing with his grotesque rock man like features and Alicia with her blindness. SPOILER WARNING but I think in the current FF run these two actually just got married. So its cool to see how it all began almost 60 years ago!
This book also had some great guest appearances from some marvel favorites such as Spider-Man, The Avengers, The X-Men, and some epic showdowns between the Hulk and Thing.
This panel, where Thing tells Jean Grey of the X-Men that he is going to give her the spankin’ of her life absolutely astonished me in 2018. It is truly a sign of a how much the times have changed since the 60’s. I don’t think anything that they let kids read would have anything close to an adult male spanking an adult female. It just wouldn’t be accepted in todays society.
One other character that shows up in this omnibus that I wanted to talk about is the Watcher. When the Fantastic Four go to explore the moon and end up on a collision course with a Russian scientist, they end up having an encounter with the Watcher. The Watcher is a cosmic entity who is never allowed to interfere with the dealings of the creatures of the universe but will observe. He ends up breaking that rule though and helping the Fantastic Four by taking Molecule Man with him to an alternate dimension so earth can be safe.
All in all its an exciting series of stories that is only beginning to scratch the surface on what will become the Marvel Universe and I couldn’t be more excited to read through them!
Thanks for reading my review! Nuff said 😉