50 Years of The Fantastic Four!

Fantastic Four #10

Welcome to A Little Nonsense! What better way to kick off this new comics blog than by celebrating the birth of the Fantastic Four!

Fantastic Four #46

According to Mark Evanier, it was 50 years ago today that the first issue of the Fantastic Four hit newsstands and it’s hard to imagine comics being the same without it. It was also an issue that kicked off a historic 102-issue run from Jack Kirby and Stan Lee…a tenure that that no Marvel creative team would top until Brian Bendis and Mark Bagley did it on Ultimate Spider-Man. 

Fantastic Four #48

There’s something intangible about this book, like many other Kirby works, that make it something more and set it apart from any other superhero title coming out at the time. Sure, Jack definitely brought over a lot of elements from his incredible (and often underappreciated) Challengers of The Unknown work at DC, but the FF has a certain raw energy and excitement to it that few other titles had at the time. And it remained that way consistently for 102 issues. The concepts and characters were exciting and inventive and  the way that Kirby’s pencils brought them to life is seldom topped—when it is it’s usually by Kirby, himself. Like Ditko’s horror work and Wally Wood’s science fiction stories, Jack Kirby’s FF issues are something that every art and comics fan should experience and nothing that comics could live without.

Thanks, Jack.