Crystal!

Medusa!

Power Man!

She-Hulk!!

Ms. Marvel!

(who later became She-Thing!)

Ant-Man!!

Black Panther And Storm!

Spider-Man!

Ms, Thing!!

Thus endeth the roll call...

It's kinda dark here...anybody got a light?!?

Whoa!! That's bright!!

Yup, for Marvel 1985 week, I saved the best (or at least my favorite) for last--the Fantastic Four!!

Our creators:

This was, of course, the latter part of John Byrne's epic run as writer/artist (and usually inker, though of course Jerry Ordway inked this particular issue).

I'll come right out and say it--I'm an unabashed Byrne fan. You take a look at his bibliography, and it's pretty inarguable that the man was a giant of his era. Yeah, his art isn't always the most technically brilliant (especially some of his earlier stuff, and under inkers who did him no favors)--but he was clear, and readable, a great portrayer of action and of the fantastic in a normal world. As a writer, Byrne was rarely "innovative" or cerebral, but he understood his characters, and was a creative plotter, rarely settling for regurgitating the status quo.

It's funny, though--I was out of comics for a few years starting in 1997, and when I came back, all of a sudden John Byrne seemed like a persona non grata. He was never a part of the conversation, and much of what he did seemed to be derided in reviews I read.

I never figured out what happened. I know his Genesis event miniseries was pretty heavily disliked (I haven't read it). During the time I was away, his work seemed to increasingly concentrate on "untold tales" series, or epic imaginary series--perhaps he allowed himself to fiddle around in the backwaters of Marvel and DC, became too divorced from mainstream continuity, and took himself out of the fannish eye. And maybe his propensity for feuds and kerfluffle finally took its toll.

Whatever the reasons, in the past few years Byrne has seemingly been set aside, restricted to low-profile projects that generate little buzz and less sales. Which is a shame, because in my opinion, the man is titan of the industry, and (probably) still has a lot to offer.

Even Fantastic Four #276, which wasn't one of his better issues, still has a lot to offer. For example:


In love? That's hardly new, Johnny. What's the big deal?

Yeah, that's right, Johnny's making time with Alicia. Got a problem with that?

That was one hallmark of Byrne...he was willing to shake things up a bit. The Thing stayed behind on the Beyonder's hodgepodge planet after Secret Wars, and was replaced in the FF by She-Hulk. Johnny and Alicia fell in love. Reed and Sue...well, just a second on that.

Anyway, that was thing a lot of people forget about Byrne's run...Johnny grew up a little bit, was showing more maturity. And, of course, he faced the terror of...

SKRULL COOTIES!!! (Of course, Byrne didn't know that in a mere 6 years years, some bright souls would decide that Alicia had been replaced with a Skrull at this point...sigh...).

Speaking of She-Hulk...

You know another thing about Byrne? An awful lot of contemporary artists could stand to learn a lesson from him--you don't need to make a woman look like some perv's version of a sex kitten to make her attractive. I know that in some quarters Byrne has been accused of writing (and drawing) poor female characters, but you could never tell that from his Jennifer Walters, or his Susan Richards.

And Johnny's not the only one getting some tonight...

OK, now to the bulk of the story. In one of Byrne's less stellar storylines (in my opinion, at least), Reed and Sue decided to move to the suburbs, to try and give Franklin a more normal life.

Good luck with that, right? But disguised as Reed & Sue Benjamin, they put on disguises, bought a house, and moved out to the hinterlands of Belle Porte, Connecticut, throwing house parties for the neighbors!!


Cool bit--note that all of their guests are comic strip characters...a No-Prize to anyone who can identify them all (editor's note--there will be no prizes given, so don't bother).

Well, Sue can disguise herself just fine with a wig. But Reed? He has to use one of the more neglected aspects of his powers:

So, everything is happy in suburbia, right? As if. You see, the Richards Benjamins have a snoopy, Gladys Kravitz style neighbor named Alma Chalmers. And she actually believes that Reed & Sue are witches, or demons, or something:

In fact, she's even gone so far as to summon famous exorcist and Andy Warhol lookalike Elspeth Cromwell:

Now remember, earlier in Marvel 1985 Week we saw that, in 1985, some U.S. senators didn't even believe that Doctor Strange or his powers even existed. At the same time, apparently, ordinary citizens did, and "world renowned" (Reed's words!) exorcists were able to make a good living. Go figure.

Anyway, after the party, as Reed is cleaning up:


And Sue is upstairs, brushing her teeth:

(See...you CAN draw a female in her undies without having to register as a sex offender. Are you taking notes, Ed Benes?!?)

Reed and Sue hear the sound of tubular bells...


And, while Reed isn't to hep too the magic, he learns pretty quickly that you don't mess with someone using dark magics against you:

Sue, too, finds thing aren't as easy as they are against the Mole Man...

...although there are some similarities to fighting the Mole Man:

Reed's rescue goes awry, as cosmic-ray empowered stretchy limbs meet demon magic:


OUCH!!

Sue manages to free herself...

So Cromwell summons the big guns:

Unfortunately for everyone, during the fracas, someone gets hurt:

Because spilling the blood of an innocent is never a good way to keep control of your borrowed Satanic powers!!


And the mastermind behind this chaos?!?


Hey, Joe Quesada, look--Mephisto is a bad guy!! Evil!! Dealing with him is a BAD thing. He's not somebody you summon to help you--he's an evil dickweed!! Sigh...

Well, that big an intrusion of evil into our plane of existence won't go unnoticed (again, are you listening, Quesada??), and Doctor Strange springs into action.

That's the end. Really!! Continued next issue!! (SPOILER ALERT: Franklin Richards kicks Satan's ass, with some indirect help from ROM. Seriously!!)

And there's Byrne's Fantastic Four. Even amongst his lesser stories, he was always taking the group to new places, poking and prodding and stretching in different directions. Even with stories that weren't his A-game, they were never boring, and almost always still fun.

And you can be darned sure he would never have had Johnny marry a Skrull, or have Reed support the Registration Act...

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

Hey, where the heck is Ben Grimm, anyway?

Oh, yeah...Ben had his own series, after Marvel-Two-In-One (one of the worst titles ever, by the way...who was in charge of naming that mag?!?) evaporated. For two years it was written by Byrne and penciled by Ron Wilson.

And for about a year, Benjy had been wandering around the Beyonder's hand-crafted planet. He stayed behind in part because, on this planet, he had the ability to shift between Thing and human form at will.

Because the world was a patchwork, created by the Beyonder from chunks of other worlds, Ben wandering took him to all sorts of weird places, from sword & sorcery to high tech to just plain odd. Think of it sort of as Green Lantern Mosaic, except nowhere nearly as good. Still fun, though. (Hey, DC--we gonna put that out in trade anytime soon? Huh?)

This was Byrne's penultimate issue...next issue Ben would come back to Earth (although he wouldn't rejoin the FF, in part because he was upset about Johnny making time with his dame), and Mike Carlin would take over the scripting duties. The mag's continuity still tied in fairly closely with the FF's, though. And about 2 nanoseconds after Byrne left, Ben was back on the team, and She-Hulk was unceremoniously shuffled off to the Avengers.

I've said it before, I'll say it again...people bitch a lot about comics in the 1990's (and often with good justification). But most of the trends they find distasteful started in the 1980's.

Which brings us to:

I mean, look at that cover! Look at Spidey's impossibly shaped feet, look at Mary Jane's impossibly long coat, look at all the incredible detail that distracts from the overall flow and design sense of the cover--the very miss-the-forest-for-the-trees art approach that swallowed and engulfed the 90s.

And whom can we thank for this?

Ah, Todd McFarlane, the man who famously left Marvel because he didn't want to draw characters that he didn't own--only to basically give up drawing to end up with a lucrative career making statues of characters he doesn't own. Irony indeed.

Back to our story...as you can see by the splash page and the cover, it's Christmas time, and Peter and Mary Jane have been evicted.

A note for all you younger readers: once upon a time, Peter Parker was married!! I know, crazy, huh? How could Spider-Man ever be popular...with a wife?!? How could you ever do a story about power and responsibility, about having to live with Aunt May, about stopping crime--if Peter Parker were married?!?

OK, OMD ranting done. What's going on here?

Well, there was this insane billionaire stalking Mary Jane, and he tried to kidnap her...and when that failed and he ended up incarcerated, he apparently found a way to contravene New York landlord/tenant laws and evict the Parkers, with zero notice (and on Christmas Eve, and on a Saturday, to boot!), from their condo in the building which he owned. Whatever shall they do?

Aunt May offers to taker them in, but no soap--Peter's being a prideful butthead.

Meanwhile, I've got to pick on David Michelinie a bit here, because what follows here is perhaps the stupidest thing he's ever written:

Really, David? Howell Thurston III? A dumb Gilligan's Island joke in 1989?!? (A good one I could have accepted...). Sheesh. Anyway, this scene is to set up the silly "overworked accountant decides to get his own by robbing the boss on Christmas Eve" storyline that provides the only real action in the book.

Well, not the only action, as Spider-Man does spring into action against a mugger:

You know, McFarlane did draw a good Spider-Man...so why don't I like any of the other characters he draws? Is the overly-cartoony style somehow more appropriate for Spidey's costume and physicality? Or am I just nuts?

Oh, and we can't forget--if it's McFarlane, there's going to be web porn:

Anyway, Parker hits the old friend/Xmas party circuit, looking for a place he and Mary Jane can crash. But the old Parker luck kicks in, and everybody is full up or has too many of their own problems for neurotic Parker to impose upon...except Flash Thompson:

Whatta stand-up guy (well, not anymore)(sorry). Now Pete feels so guilty he's gotta go visit Uncle Ben's grave:

Damn, I love unnecessary splash pages that feel compelled to show every single leaf and every single wind line because the artist had no idea of how to actually draw a static scene without tarting it up...

Meanwhile, our page-consuming robbery subplot is getting ready to collide with our hero's angst...but first the villains have to take a special hostage:

And the great coincidence machine is running full blast, because the bad guys decide to take a shortcut through that very same cemetery (because there's no other way these storylines could possibly intersect).

So it's time for our THIRD lecture this issue on power and responsibility yada yada...

Hey, look--more web porn:

Now this is a Spidey I'd be scared of:

But surprisingly enough (if you haven't been paying attention, or haven't wondered why Santa was taken hostage), Webhead is NOT the one who kayos the final bad guy!



After more uneasy juxtaposition between cartoony and menacing, Peter discovers that he's not the only one visiting Uncle Ben that night.



Yay!! Peter's going to have sex with his wife in his childhood bed within earshot of the woman who raised him!! How creepy/exciting!!

And next issue:

DAMN!! Missed it by this much!! Oh, well...

And I'm still not gonna forgive Michelinie for that Howell Thurston III bit.

One interesting aspect of the Marvel books of April 1989, as no fewer than 7 of the ad pages were dedicated to video games and accessories.

I wouldn't have thought so much advertising would have been going on back then...but the games companies were fighting fiercely for their shares of the NES pie. How fiercely?

Yup, in 1989 they were trying to convince us that Pac-Man was still rad.

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

At this point Spidey had 2 other mags, Spectacular and Web Of. He was pretty popular, and Marvel was intent on making good use of that. First, this label was sprayed on the cover of all his mags:

Give 'em bonus points for the ability to mock the sprawl of their own mutant mags. But they also liked to guest-star Spidey all over the place, namely:

You see, kids, before the She-Hulk was the product of "biological material" from the Hulk and an alternate future Thundra...(more seriously, I loved Byrne's She-Hulk. Where the hell is the Essential Sensational She-Hulk?!?) And look, kids, you can do cheesecake without fish-nets or ass close-ups...

Oh, yeah, and She-Hulk had her head cut off this issue...