12 February 2007

Only Begun To Fight!

This is the first in an irregular series of posts looking at issues of FANTASTIC FOUR, “The World’s Greatest Comics Magazine”. There are several reasons I picked this title:

- It’s sometimes been very good and sometimes very bad over the course of its 45 years.

- It’s a barometer for approaches to mainstream comics. For a couple of periods in the early to mid 60s it was at the cutting edge of US comics, but mostly it has reflected trends not set them.

- It’s – mostly – starred the same characters throughout, so it’s also a good weathervane for characterisation in comics.

I won’t be attempting any kind of chronological critique of the FF’s mag: I’ll generally just hop around the comic’s history, posting when I feel like it. That said, this post is about FANTASTIC FOUR #1. more »

Tom in FT /The Brown Wedge • 8 Comments

19 February 2007

A God Enraged!

Fantastic Four #225 – “The Blind God’s Tears”

Published: 1980

Creative Team: Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz

Summary: The team have found themselves in a strange crystal biosphere, somewhere in the Arctic Circle, where a race of Vikings worship Korgon, a fifteen-foot tall ‘God’. Korgon keeps the biosphere going with his radioactive crimson tears, but he has recently begun to die and wants the team to save him. Complications ensue but essentially, they do.

Analysis: A comic badly in need of coherence. The turn of the 80s were a somewhat directionless time for Marvel, with Jim Shooter still establishing his editorial reign, and the company riding out a lean time for the industry with toy and film tie-in comics and slightly desperate creations like the ‘Disco Dazzler’. more »

Tom in FT /The Brown Wedge • 10 Comments

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