BHOC: FANTASTIC FOUR #209

Even at the time, we all knew in my circle of friends that the New Fantastic Four cartoon that was then airing on NBC on Saturday mornings wasn’t very good. This despite the involvement of the comic’s co-creator Jack Kirby as a designer and storyboard artist and dialogue written by Marvel figures such as Stan Lee and Roy Thomas. All of the stories were watered down versions of actual early FF tales, with the action minimized due to the strong restrictions placed upon children’s programming at that time. That didn’t stop me from recording a few episodes on audio cassette tape–I was a collector, after all, and a Marvel fan. But it wasn’t really very good. At this time, I hadn’t yet seen the earlier 1967 Fantastic Four cartoon, which was markedly better. So as this was the only way I could experience my new favorite heroes on television, I sucked it up and went along with it, squeezing out such enjoyment as I could. But there was one element of the show in particular that rankled each and every episode.

That element, of course, was HERBIE the Robot, a new character introduced into the cartoon series when it turned out that the television rights to the Human Torch were unavailable for animation (they had been licensed for a live action television production that never happened.) Consequently, a new character needed to be devised to take the Torch’s place and fulfill the promise of the premise. And this was 1978, in the immediate wake of STAR WARS, so the shape of that character was obvious to everybody involved: the Fantastic four were about to count among their number a cute R2D2-style robot. It was Jack Kirby who designed the new character–Jack named his creation Z-Z-1-2-3, but that didn’t have the necessary pizzazz for marketing. So he became HERBIE, short for Humanoid Experimental Robot with B-Type Integrated Electronics. No, I don’t know what B-Type Electronics are either, nor how you could take one look at HERBIE and describe him as humanoid. But he got to spar and argue with the Thing, which was his primary story function.

This being Marvel, it wasn’t enough to simply create HERBIE, he needed to be integrated into the comics as well. So in the next issue that I received as part of my subscription, writer/editor Marv Wolfman did just that. The pretext for Reed creating HERBIE is relatively thin–he’s a remote computer terminal that can provide the team with the calculations that they’ll need to navigate across the stars and locate Galactus, their only hope for waylaying the now cosmic-powered Sphinx, who is headed back to Earth to lay waste to it. Marv also includes the in-world explanation that Johnny Storm was out of town the day the contracts for the cartoon series had to be signed, explaining why he was replaced by the little robot. Three of the four members of the FF–everybody except the Human Torch, who arrived later, have been struck by a Skrull aging ray, which has increased their metabolisms, causing them to age at a rapid pace. They’ve only got about three days in which to accomplish their mission before they all perish of old age. So it’s goodbye to Xandar, Nova, the New Champions and that entire wing of this crossover story, as the FF borrow Nova’s starship and head off to locate the world-devourer.

But the truly big news in this issue of FANTASTIC FOUR was the arrival of new artist John Byrne. I was a big fan of John’s work at the time, and had in particular loved his one-off Thing vs Thing story in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #50, so i welcomed his arrival.

BHOC: MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #50

With powerhouse inker/finisher Joe Sinnott remaining in residence to continue to give the series its typical polished look, all of the elements were in place for a stellar run. It looks to my eye as though Byrne was only doing breakdowns on this FF run, since Sinnott was more than capable of providing a strong, almost overwhelming finish to them. And this run looks…all right. But it never quite rises above mediocrity. In later years, Byrne revealed that he had strong feelings about the FF–feelings that he’d be able to put into practice in a couple years when he’d go on to both write and illustrate the series. But this first time out, he wasn’t vibing with the stories, and his more fluid approach to the artwork had a lot of its character submerged by Sinnott’s finishes. None of it looked bad, but overall it’s a bit of an uninspired mix.

Anyway, getting back to this issue, it needed a story and some action as well as the set-up to cartoon synergy and dispatching the myriad of guest-stars, so very quickly in their space voyage, the Nova ship finds itself drawn into a Sargasso of Space, the final resting place of lost ships. The team determines that there are life forms on one of them, and despite the fact that they’re racing the clock in more ways than one, they decide to head over and investigate. There, they encounter a suitably buglike alien called Grogarr, who tells the humans that he had been transporting dangerous criminals across space when they were drawn to the Sargasso, and that his fellows must be prevented from escaping. Consequently, the FF head deeper into the ship in an attempt to recapture the now-demised Grogarr’s charges.

What follows is kind of a blah action sequence, far from one of Byrne’s finest. He was typically truly adept at coming up with interesting action beats, but here, with the FF facing a dozen flying bugs in armored carapaces, it feels like he’s a bit uninspired. Anyway, the FF get jumped by the aliens, and while they fight back, the alien leader Krogg attempts to zip over to the Nova ship and claim it for himself and his men–they need it in order to escape the Sargasso. The team, though, puts a quick kibosh on most of the aliens, with Reed enveloping them within his own expanded body and then Ben smacking Reed against the bulkheads again and again until the bugs are all stunned. With that, the Thing punches a hole in the skin of the ship and Reed attempts to stretch over to their own craft before Krogg can get away with it.

But when he gets there, Krogg is suspiciously dead, and the only one around who might have done the deed is HERBIE. But the robot insists that the termination of life functions isn’t permitted in his programming. This doesn’t prevent the Thing from side-eyeing him, though. Anyway, leaving the rest of the aliens in suspended animation with a rescue beacon set up to alert others of their kind to their whereabouts, the FF zip off in the Nova ship in pursuit of Galactus. To Be continued. It’s a meh issue, to be honest, and I felt that way about it at the time. Especially with the addition of Byrne to the creative team, this felt as though it should have been a home run. But the creators weren’t yet pulling in the same direction.