Eventually, my subscription copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #208 turned up in my mailbox, inevitably a week or two after copies had appeared on the spinner rack, frustrating me. This is about the point where the series started to come off the rails a little bit, in part due to the fact that a space epic that writer Marv Wolfman had intended to run in both FF and NOVA had to all be folded into the one surviving title after NOVA was cancelled. It’s also clear that there were some genuine scheduling problems throughout this next period, with the capable Sal Buscema providing breakdowns for this issue which were then finished by so many different people that the credit on the story is for D(iverse) Hands. Given the situation, it doesn’t really look that bad, but any issue of FANTASTIC FOUR that didn’t have finishes by Joe Sinnott never looks entirely right, so closely was his style equated with the title.
Last issue, having been sentenced to death via exposure to a Skrull aging ray, Reed, sue and Ben had escaped the Skrull throneworld by commandeering a Skrull spaceship and heading off towards Xandar. Unfortunately, the ship crossed paths with a craft piloted by the New Champions, the ad hoc group of superhumans Nova had put together to assist Xandar in their war with the invading Skrulls. Mistaking the FF’s craft for another attacking Skrull warship, the Champions fire on it and obliterate it. Fortunately, before the end, Sue is able to protect herself and the others with one of her patented invisible force-fields, and upon seeing the trio floating in space and realizing who they are, Nova jaunts out to retrieve the force-field bubble and its famous contents, bringing it back about the Champions; Nova craft.
On board, there’s a momentary dust-up as the Thing recognizes one of the passengers as the Sphinx, a villain the FF encountered in an earlier Annual. But the Sphinx is effortlessly able to hold off Ben’s attack–he’s not interested in fighting with the Earth heroes, he’s focused on seeking out the enormous power source he’s come all this way in search of. Detecting that the Xandarian Living Computers are nearby, the Sphinx teleports himself away to them–and cyborg villain Doctor Sun hitches a ride along the way. The FF try to stop him, but their bodies are wracked with pain as they try to use their powers normally. The Skrull aging ray is already beginning to have an effect, and the trio is getting older rapidly.
Back on Earth, having come to the end of his solo adventure with Spider-Man last issue, the Human Torch has decided once more that college is a drag, and so he heads off to the Baxter Building to use the teleport device that Reed had left primed for him in case he wanted to come after them to Xandar. His arrival is well-timed, as the rest of his teammates plus the New Champions show up just behind him. So there’s a quick reunion, and now all of the players are together in one place. The most immediate problem facing them is the whereabouts of the Sphinx, who is seeking out the power of the Living Computers in order end his own eternal existence. Doesn’t seem like a big problem to me, but Reed seems to think it is, and thus everybody swings into action.
But by the time the assembled heroes are able to locate their quarry and traverse the distance deep into the heart of the planet, the Sphinx has already located and taken what he wanted. In absorbing the energies of the Living Computers, the Sphinx has been transformed into a godlike giant bursting with power. What’s more, having attained this glorious state, the Sphinx no longer seeks to put an end to his own existence. Rather, he’s delighted at the Power Cosmic that is now his to command, and he toys with it, scattering his foes like tenpins.
The remainder of the issue is pretty much a free-for-all, as the assembled Earth heroes unleash all of their powers and abilities in an attempt to bring the Sphinx to heel, and fail utterly. Even the mightiest among them can’t put a scratch on the Sphinx now that he’s attained godhood. But if nothing else, this melee works as a distraction to keep the Sphinx from thinking too much about what is next move should be. A good deal of this fight focuses on the New Champions characters; Nova, Powerhouse, Diamondhead, Crime-Buster and the Comet, and you get the sense that some of this is material that would have more naturally played out in the never-released NOVA #26. But the gist of the sequence is that nobody can stop the Sphinx, or even hurt him in any way at all.
Having put paid to his attackers, the Sphinx now realizes what he should next do with his cosmic powers. He intends to return to Earth, which he now regards as his former prison, and destroy it. So stating, he heads off into space with our heroes unable to pursue him. With two problems facing the assembled heroes, the decision is made that the FF will go after the Sphinx while the New Champions stay to defend Xandar. This is pretty much the last we’ll see of these characters until their story gets wrapped in a number of years later in the pages of ROM. Reed’s also got the beginnings of a plan, though it’s an absolutely terrible plan on the face of it. They need somebody more powerful than the Sphinx to stop him, and it so happens they they know somebody like that. Unfortunately, it isn’t an entity that they can quantify as a friend. But with the need being so great, the FF resolve to seek out Galactus and convince him to intercede on behalf of the Earth. Seems like a longshot to me, but we’ll see what happens next time.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
I remember buying this issue and being a little unhappy with the artwork. Honestly, Sal Buscema was always hit or miss with me, and the “Diverse Hands” tidbit is new information for me, so many years later. Love it.
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Trying to guess who inked what was always fun. Of the pages shown….Page 26 looks like it was inked by Frank Springer to me. The others are tougher to call and look like a mix of perhaps Milgrom, Esposito and Giacoia. It looks like effort was made to look as much like Sinnott as possible. It almost looks like page 16 was started by Sinnott and completed by someone else… maybe Springer.
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Pages 11 and 16 are 100% Sinnott to me.
Nobody else can ink the Thing that way.
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I remember liking this storyline well enough. If nothing else, it had been a while since we’d had a proper space epic in FF. I didn’t know or care much about the Nova characters, but it did tickle me to see Dr. Sun sliding over from Tomb of Dracula (a series that generally felt pretty remote from the greater Marvel Universe).
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I think I never really have cared for the Fantastic Four. Thomas, Conway, Wein, and Wolfman’s stints leave me cold thinking about them. Byrne helped me stop being a completist and I only read F4 for the creators more than the characters. My biggest memories of this arc was hating the Sphinx’s fate, thinking Sun’s robot body was pretty damn dumb, and how big a waste it was to kill a character’s son right in front of him and then pretty much just just ive about one panel or so to his grief.
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I think Comets son would have been explored in Nova. However who knows with Wolfman? In Crisis he would introduce a vintage character for a panel or 2 then kill them off. It elicited less emotion than if one witnesses a very small tree being chopped down.
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If the son you are talking about is Crimebuster, he was killed off in Rom#24 ( November 1981 ) as a result of Diamondhead’s betrayal.
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Oops!
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That’s right! He survived the Sphinx’s blast.
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Doctor Sun’s body was Carmine Infantino’s work. Nova was the first place I saw this character.
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I was pretty young when this story was coming out, and I definitely wasn’t aware of the nixed crossover with the Nova crew. I wasn’t much interested in Nova & those characters, but ended up enjoying the Sphinx/Galactus stuff – two heavyweight villains and all. I also was very interested in the aging ray storyline that was about to play out, as I wasn’t savvy enough to realize that everything would eventually reset or resolve. Given all of these pieces in play, the story felt pretty important to me at the time.
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Perez art could have made this a story to really talk about.
It’s clever to be clever but how much fun is it to watch your characters fight hopeless battles?
This would happen too frequently in an overall sense with team books where the villain was simply too powerful.
Wasn’t this handled appropriately in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? 🙂
Are the readers some sort of sadists who enjoy their favorite characters getting clobbered in lopsided losing battles?
That’s the comic I want to read where Galactus and the Red Skull get together and bemoan continually being drawn into battle with the same foes. Then Kingpin et al appear and discuss how appearing in Daredevil led to enhanced reputations and how they wouldn’t get caught dead fighting Fantastic Four or Captain America.
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It’s
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It’s funny, because as a kid I used to love these one-sided fights. Looking back, it seems like it was something of a late 70s trope for Marvel team books to feature battles with unstoppable opponents. Over in Avengers, they spent about a year getting the crap kicked out of them by the likes of Ultron, Nefaria and Korvac. The X-Men had an epic defeat against Magneto. Even the Invaders featured the Liberty Legion getting stomped by WWII Shellhead precursor Iron Cross. 7-year-old me ate this stuff up. Mainly because the fights were usually so well choreographed, it was fun to pour over the various beats of heroes getting taken down one by one. Of course, usually the heroes rallied by the next issue, which made any earlier agony of defeat a little easier to bear. I remember this FF issue very well, one of my fondest spinner rack acquisitions. Right from the cover, I was hooked.
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The Sphinx didn’t need to attain godhood to kick their butts: In Fantastic Four Annual#12 ( February 1978 ) he kick the butts of the Fantastic Four and blasted them into space above the Earth. Then he kicked the butts of the Inhumans ( Quicksilver too ) only to be defeated by Blackbolt ( both his punches ( despite the fact at this point the Thing was now stronger than Blackbolt and Ben’s punches had little effect on the Sphinx ) and Electron Blasts hurt the Sphinx ). Was Blackbolt’s Electron Powers the Sphinx’s Kryptonite or Red Sun Energy or Magic ( Superman’s 3 weaknesses used against him )?
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