As a lifelong fan of both the San Francisco Giants and the Fantastic Four, I'm no stranger to disappointment writ large. My earliest introductions to both came on the crest of unbelievable momentum, and since then it's been a rocky road, to say the least.
When I came to love the San Francisco Giants, they were heading into the NLCS against the Cardinals with Jeffery Leonard puttin' one flap down and raising the ire of the entire town of St. Louis. Two years later, my favorite baseball player of all time, Will Clark, was having the best season of his career and leading the Giants over the Cubs to the world's first, and only, Bay Bridge World Series against the Oakland A's.
Then there was an earthquake.
The Giants have had plenty of good seasons since then, and have even nearly won a World Series before flaming out in Buckner-esque fashion to truly cement their place as the perennial West Coast Red Sox. But I'm not here to talk baseball.
No, I'm here to talk comics.
There's something about being a Fantastic Four fan. If you love it, you're going to have to get ready for disappointment on pretty much a yearly basis. Do you love the way a particular artist draws The Thing? Fuckin' strap in, because they won't be around long. Are you really digging the way someone writes Susan Richards? That's great, because it just so happens that said writer is leaving the comic to write their own creator-owned series about a dude who sodomizes people for justice. It's his super power.
I came to the Fantastic Four at (what I later found out was) the tail-end of Walter Simonson's unbelievably awesome run on the book. I went back and picked up as many back-issues as I could find. (The age before the advent of the trade paperback, heh.) Turns out that Walter Simonson's lengthy run and John Byrne's multi-year stint on the book were awesome all-around. The arcs, the writing, the artwork, everything during those two runs was incredible. I took great pains trying to convince my friend that the covers didn't lie: this truly was The World's Greatest Comic Magazine!
What I didn't realize was that Walt and John were either two lengthy exceptions or the end of an era, or both. I tried not to notice that the periods between the two creators were filled with lackluster creative teams like Frenz ‘n’ Sinnott (a joke about George W. Bush) and featured such villains as a cybernetic Arab! But I latched onto Fantastic Four and never let go. Sadly, I didn't know what I was in for.
It turns out that writers and artists really love the Fantastic Four. They really do. They were the first superheroes created by arguably the greatest creative team in history, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The characters are among the best and most nuanced you'll find in all of comicdom, and their relationships with one another and with nearly every character in the Marvel Universe is full of decades of wink-nudge cameraderie. So writers and artists come into the FF like "AWESOME SPACE TRAVEL AND DOCTOR DOOM SHOOP BA WHOOP" and after a couple months basically go "aw nertz what now i guess reed uses math again this sucks whar them x-mans at" and leave to go make a pile of money by having Firestar blow Captain America or something.
It's a pattern that continues today. For every year of Waid and Wieringo that the FF fans get, we have to sit through fucking Dwayne MacDuffie and Black Panther putting a rear naked choke on the Silver Surfer. Sure, he's imbued by the Power Cosmic and can tear worlds asunder but PRESSURE POINTS
But the ultimate black hole of the Fantastic Four came immediately after Walt Simonson had Doctor Doom and Mister Fantastic performing a time duel, which you had to read independent of the rest of the linear comic by flipping back and forth according to time codes included in the Doom/Reed panels. Simonson left the book and Marvel's Editor-In-Chief at the time, Tom DeFalco, decided to try his hand at writing Marvel's First Family.
At the time, I enjoyed DeFalco's run, because when you're a teenager you are an idiot, but I liked Rob Liefeld, too. So.
But even I was going "what a horrible story" at several points. You have to give DeFalco credit for trying to create new villains for the FF, but at the same time, no you don't because fuck you Tom DeFalco. He gave the world such storylines as THE WILDBLOOD, a short, pink, four-fingered Lemmy who escaped from THE INNIVERSE and the nefarious clutches of OCCULUS. Yes, Occulus, a dude who has an orange diamond for an eye. THE FIEND. You can tell he is bad because his right-hand man's name was DANGOR. look out fantastic four i think you might be in dangor
you are in such dangor that his very name indicat