BHOC: GIANT-SIZE FANTASTIC FOUR #5

I always preferred buying original books to reprints, in part because many of the reprints of the times were cut down to fit shorter page counts. But this didn’t really become a major issue for me for another year or so yet. At the time that I made this post-grade-school-graduation trip to Bush’s Hobbies, I was much more interested in making my limited budget stretch as far as it could. So I wound up buying this issue of GIANT-SIZE FANTASTIC FOUR #5, which reprinted FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #5. I seem to recall that Bush had the Annual as well, but that it cost more. At this moment, i was mainly interested in reading the story (and buying other books that day) so I went with the cheaper option.

First things first: despite the credits listed on this splash page, this reprinted Annual story wasn’t inked by the great Joe Sinnott. Joe was intended to be the inker, but then something came up and Frank Giacoia had to step in and substitute for him–and the credit wound up never getting changed. Giacoia was possibly Kirby’s most faithful inker in the 1960s, accurately capturing a lot of what Kirby put down in his pencils, rather than slicking it up or modifying it to make it more commercially pleasing. But that meant that this story’s visuals had a bit of a sharper edge to them. As a kid, I was all-in on Sinnott’s work, and so found Giacoia to be not as appealing, though today I can see the strong merits in what he does here.

The story in this issue also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and while I’ve never done a full deep forensic analysis on it, I have the strong feeling that editor Lee changed the trajectory of Kirby’s tale partway through, as he occasionally did in those days. It’s possible that there were pages Kirby produced for this story that were discarded along the way, and the entire thing really doesn’t hold together all that well. But where it succeeds is in the power and imagination of Kirby’s visuals and the slickness of Lee’s dialogue. It introduces new villain Psycho-Man (whom Kirby named Psychon in his border notes, but Lee changed.) He’s a denizen of a microscopic universe who has come to conquer our macro world, and he’s armed with a device that can create powerful negative emotions in people: primarily Fear, Doubt and Hate. He’s also served by a trio of underlings, Live Wire, Ivan and Shell-Shock, who are human criminals who have fallen under his sway.

The big development in this story as far as the Fantastic Four are concerned is the revelation that Sue Richards is pregnant with the couple’s first child. This also serves as a pretext to keep them out of the action once things can get going. And it’s no wonder, as Kirby also involves both the Black Panther and the entire cast of the Inhumans in this adventure. As was more often the case than we today like to admit, there’s also some almost unforgivably coincidental plotting at work here: the Fantastic Four become aware of Psycho-Man’s existence and his plan to blanket the Earth with a larger version of his emotion-manipulating device when a necessary component is misdelivered to the sculpting studio of the Thing’s girlfriend Alicia Masters. In other words, a total fluke. Psycho-Man and his guys go to retrieve the misdelivered tech, crippling the Thing emotionally in the process. It’s a defeat that Ben won’t take lying down.

In the meantime, after an obligatory brawl so that everybody can show off their powers and prowess, the Black Panther and the Inhumans have joined forces to investigate Psycho-Man’s stronghold, which it turns out is just off of Panther Island where the Inhumans have set up temporary digs. Using Crystal’s teleporting dog Lockjaw, Ben, Johnny and triton join them–as does Crystal, at least when Kirby drew this page. But apparently, Jack forgot about Crystal in the back part of the story (possibly because elements of it were changed) so Stan had her taken out here, as you can see from the above panel reproduction. The big arrow caption in the final panel on this page was designed to help conceal the fact that one of those marching-forward figures had been eliminated.

From this point, the story becomes wall-to-wall action, pausing only for Psycho-Man to tell the assembled heroes the truth about himself: that he hails from Sub-Atomica and that the body he’s presenting to them is being driven by a microscopically small being. On the last page, for really no good reason at all apart from the fact that there aren’t any further pages, Psycho-Man drops over lifeless, defeated. It’s such a misfire of an ending that this too makes me wonder what Kirby might have had in mind at the outset. So this story was fun enough, but between the harsh inking and the nonsensical story, I didn’t really enjoy it as much as I usually did the FF’s assorted adventures.

While the blurb on the cover promised the Molecule Man, somebody changed their mind at some point along the way, and so the back portion of this GIANT-SIZE issue instead reprinted FANTASTIC FOUR #15, the first appearance of the Mad Thinker. As this was another early FF story that I hadn’t yet read, I didn’t mind the substitution, though like the lead adventure, I found this one just a little bit lacking. It was inked by Dick Ayers in a relatively crude fashion–Ayers could be hit-or-miss over Kirby, and this splash page, in particular the big FF faces, is a bit of a miss. The story involves the Mad Thinker, a criminal genius who creates precision plans, calculating a way in which to get all four of the FF members to move into other jobs so that he can take over the Baxter Building and swipe Mr Fantastic’s incredible technology, including the android that he’s been working on.

The Thinker’s plans are always foiled by an X-Factor, and here this is postman Willie Lumpkin ringing a particular bell in the Baxter Building lobby that functions as an emergency cut-off switch for all of Reed’s equipment. Which strikes me as a dangerous thing to leave around where any random child or pedestrian might push it out of curiosity, but hey, it gets the team out of this jam, so clearly Reed is smarter than I am. So the issue fielded two less-than-spectacular stories and wound up being a bit of a disappointment to me. Still, that’s how it goes sometimes.