FANTASTIC FOUR

Nick straps himself into a rocketship to celebrate Lee and Kirby’s genius comic.

Like the light from some distant American supernova, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four took years to reach me. I discovered these original ’60s strips in the pages of The Complete Fantastic Four, a shortlived weekly published by Marvel’s British outpost in the late 1970s. They were wedged at the back, playing support act to reprints of more recent FF adventures. Cruder than the sleek, contemporary fare at the front they were steeped in quirkiness, wit and charm. I adored them. Even reduced to black-and-white they burst with colour.

Lee and Kirby’s work was far from the dazzle of a dying star, of course. Fantastic Four #1 was the big bang of the entire Marvel Universe, the primal explosion that flung decades of imaginative shrapnel our way. Everything began with that first cover, the superpowered quartet battling a green, street-smashing leviathan while a weird, almost childlike logo crowned the action, its anxious jumble of lower-case letters so different to the bold, muscular typography that announced Batman or Superman.

“I wanted to think of them as real, living, breathing people,” Lee recalled. And that was as radical, as revolutionary, as Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns, decades later. Sure, Lee captures the FF in strokes as broad as Kirby’s outsized art, but these mismatched archetypes sizzle on the page: Reed and Sue, the Kennedy era power couple; Johnny, the hotshot teen; Ben, the brick colossus, half cigar-chewing comedian, half human tragedy. They were flawed and fractious and real. A family. Love bound them as much as the strange science that had mutated their bodies.

Lee brought an East Coast wiseguy attitude, adding a cocksure sense of irony to his hype-drenched epics (he rarely gets credit for how damn funny his stories are). Kirby was an equal genius, his blocky art characterfully grotesque and endlessly kinetic. Impossible, incomprehensible technology would be rendered in meticulous detail while unearthly energies seethed in his signature Kirby Krackle. But the mundane always collided with the cosmic – one issue finds the FF evicted from the Baxter Building because they can’t meet their rent. That never happened to Bruce Wayne.

Nick warned you about the cosmic rays, but you wouldn’t listen.