Hard times at the Baxter Building.  Bleak House.  Heartbreak Hotel.  Is life not ironic?  If nothing else?  As Annihilus remarked back in issue #140.  Love and work had come between the Fantastic Four, America’s greatest superheroes.  For almost a year — a year in real time, a year in Paul Hood’s whirlpool teens, but a few days, no more, in the motionless, imperceptible time of Marvel comics — Sue Richards, née Storm, the Invisible Girl, had been estranged from her husband, Reed Richards.  With Franklin, their mysteriously equipped son, she was in seclusion in the country.  She would return only when Reed learned to understand the obligations of family, those paramount bonds that lay beneath the surface of his work.  In her stead, the Medusa had joined the Fantastic Four.  Medusa: Tibetan-born Inhuman and cousin of Johnny Storm’s paramour, Crystal, the Elemental…

The mood in the Baxter Building was grim.  Besides the Richards’s marital problems, Crystal had recently chosen to marry Quicksilver instead of Johnny Storm.  Sue was worried about Franklin’s trances; Reed was worried about Sue; Johnny was worried about Crystal; Ben Grimm was worried about himself.

It was a good period for readers of the F.F….

— from Rick Moody’s 1994 novel The Ice Storm.

That’s not at all a bad synopsis of what had been going on in “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine” in the months prior to the release of the issue that’s our primary topic today.  Indeed, your humble blogger must confess he’s been tempted to simply go with the take that’s been provided here by Paul Hood — the fictional teenage comics fan who’s one of the principal characters of The Ice Storm — and jump right on in to, if not FF #141 itself, then at least the issue immediately previous to it.  In the end, however, I’ve come to feel that any discussion of the concluding chapters of this storyline — probably the most memorable of this whole era of Fantastic Four — will suffer for not having the key events leading up to them laid out in somewhat more detail.  After all, even if you read these comics back in the day as I did, I can hardly expect you to remember them as vividly after half a century as Paul Hood does after only a few months in his “whirlpool teens”.

And so, we’re going to begin not with FF #141, or even #140 — or even the last couple of issues we looked at in depth here on the blog, back in November of last year — but with FF #127 (Oct., 1972).  In doing so, we’ll be covering a bit of the same ground we did in that earlier post, but with a different emphasis this time.  Also, we’ll generally be paying fairly short shrift to the main or “A” plotlines of these issues, since our concern is not so much with the villain-of-the-month (at least, not until we get to the month of August, 1973), as with the interpersonal dramas involving the main cast — the series of mostly domestic events that will lead inexorably to the shocking family calamity with which the story ends.

Fantastic Four #127 was written by Roy Thomas, with art by the team of John Buscema and Joe Sinnott (who are also responsible for the rest of the artwork included in this post, save as noted).  In it, Thomas picked up on a hint of marital discord between Reed and Sue Richards, aka Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Girl, that his predecessor (not to mention the FF’s co-creator and original writer) Stan Lee had dropped all the way back in issue #107 (Feb., 1971) but never really followed up on.*  We join the narrative in medias res, as Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, waits impatiently for his sister and brother-in-law to show up so that they can descend into the bowels of the Earth to rescue the Thing from the Mole Man:

Naturally, the FF put aside their squabbling long enough to take care of business down below — an adventure which continues through #128 — but no sooner has the full team returned to the Baxter Building in New York (at the beginning of #129) than Johnny announces that he’s immediately leaving for the Great Refuge, so that he can be with his beloved Crystal.  Johnny’s departure is then quickly followed by another event which will cause the team to separate further, if only temporarily: an urgent call (placed via mystical vision) from Agatha Harkness, the governess of Reed and Sue’s young son, Franklin (and also a practicing witch)…

It’s possible that Roy Thomas had a plan to explore the mystery behind Miss Harkness’ sudden demand for the Richards to come get their kid; however clichéd her “I can say no more!” line might be, it’s still undeniably portentous.  But he never came back to it before leaving the book (with #133), and his successor, Gerry Conway, opted to introduce a brand new, evidently unrelated mystery involving the sorceress rather than follow up on this one.  So, at least as far as we readers are concerned, it might as well have been about nothing more than “a red-hot mah-jongg match”, as suggested by Ben Grimm.

Ben decides to go for a walk — an entirely ordinary and mundane sort of thing to do which nevertheless ends with him fighting, and being defeated by, the Frightful Four.  The story continues into #130 (with the same creative team still on board), where we get a glimpse of Reed’s seemingly all-important “work in the lab“, as well as a look into his thoughts…

As it turns out, the elevator contains none of the above (though Reed comes closest with his joke about Dr. Doom) — rather, it’s the home-invading Frightful Four, with a captive and unconscious Thing in tow.  Very soon thereafter, the Invisible Girl returns from Whisper Hill with Franklin, just in time to enter the fray.  At one point, it seems that the tide might turn in our ambushed heroes’ favor when the Thing finally returns to consciousness — an occurrence which young Franklin seems to have something to do with, somehow (though no one seems to notice)…

But not even the might of an awakened and freed Ben Grimm — not to mention the aid of former Frightful Four-er Medusa — seems to be enough to put the Wizard, Sandman, Trapster, and Thundra (Medusa’s replacement) decisively away.  Or, at least, it’s not happening quickly enough for Mister Fantastic…

In the end, the Frightful Four manage to make their getaway, leaving behind wreckage of more than one kind…

In the next two issues, Reed and Ben travel to the Great Refuge at the invitation of Medusa, where they’re reunited with Johnny and become involved with the revolt of the Inhumans’ genetically engineered slave race, the Alpha Primitives.  At the conclusion of that adventure (which we covered in detail in November), Johnny accepts that Crystal now loves another man — the speedy sometime-Avenger named Quicksilver — and resolves to return to New York with his teammates… as does Medusa, who offers to fill in for the Invisible Girl until she returns (as everyone seems to assume she will, sooner rather than later).

The following issue, #133, is a one-off, featuring a rematch between the Thing and Thundra; it’s also the last (at least for a while) to include an authorial contribution from Roy Thomas, who only plots it, while Gerry Conway handles the final script.  Then, with issue #134, Conway takes the steering wheel all on his own:

We never learn the nature of the specific “experiment” concerning Reed in this issue — perhaps it’s connected to what he was working on back in #129, perhaps not — though, either way, he’ll have reason soon enough to regret not following up on the disappearance of Agatha Harkness more promptly.

Meanwhile, Sue Richards has gone to stay with old friends of hers, Carol and Bob Landers, who live on a farm in Pennsylvania.  Both she and Franklin seem to have settled in well…

Um, that’s not the least bit ominous.  Nope.

The bulk of this issue, as well as the following one, involve a scheme against the Fantastic Four by an old foe, Gregory Gideon — who, aided by another sometime FF adversary, the android called Dragon Man, kidnaps Sue and Franklin.  Alerted by the Landers, Reed takes the Fantasti-Car and flies to their rescue, followed quickly thereafter by Ben, Medusa, and Johnny.  Soon, all of them are captured as well; but though the team ultimately free themselves and triumph over their captors, the tale’s conclusion doesn’t bring the joyous family reunion one might have hoped for (if not necessarily expected)…

Aw, nuts (as Ben might say).

With the next two issues, #136-137, Roy Thomas takes a break from his duties as Marvel’s editor-in-chief for long enough to plot a two-parter inspired by the popular culture of the 1950s; Gerry Conway again delivers the final script.  However, as the series’ ongoing subplots advance not a whit during either issue, we’re going to skip ahead to #138, where Conway returns as the book’s sole writer.

This issue features the return of the FF’s old friend and ally Wyatt Wingfoot, who comes to the Baxter Building to invite them all to attend his college graduation — and then, to do him the favor of accompanying him to his people’s reservation in Oklahoma, where he suspects trouble is brewing…

A little while later, Reed sees the others off…

Hmm, what’s this about “responsibility”?  Is there more to Reed’s recent experiments than just his normal drive towards scientific discovery?

At this point, the story turns to the “A” plot, involving the nefarious doings of the Miracle Man on Oklahoma’s Keewazi reservation; that adventure continues into #139, so we don’t get another chance to check in on Mister Fantastic — or the Invisible Girl, for that matter — until about halfway through that issue:

All right?  I don’t want to second-guess Sue, but I think maybe she’s trying a little too hard to convince herself here.

Issue #139 ends with the decisive defeat of the Miracle Man, followed by a two-panel tease for #140:

And that brings us at last to issue #140, in which not only the question of who’s on the other side of the door to the Negative Zone is answered (actually, the cover by Rich Buckler and Frank Giacoia pretty much gives that away before one even opens the book), but we also see the background subplots we’ve been following for approximately the last year’s worth of issues move firmly into the foreground.

Several decades after this issue’s publication, Gerry Conway was quoted thusly in an article about the FF in the 1970s that ran in Back Issue #74 (Aug., 2014):

Those two Annihilus issues [#140-141] were the only two issues of Fantastic Four that I actually scripted in advance…  They were kind of rare. I wrote them as full scripts and even did sort-of-like little thumbnail layouts for the first issue — just for the heck of it.

I’m mentioning this, not because I think that the change in Conway’s writing process is necessarily evident in these stories as published (as we’ll see presently, there are a number of problems to be found in both; however, there’s no way to know how, or even if, things would have gone differently had the author used his more customary method of plotting first, then producing the final script after the story was drawn) — but because his impulse to try an other-than-usual approach here (which he characterizes as having been “just for the heck of it”) may have been (if only subconsciously) born of a sense that the bringing the dual plotlines of the Richards’ separation and their child’s burgeoning superpowers (both of which were actually initiated prior to his tenure on the book) to their ultimately traumatic culmination called for him to handle the material with a different kind — if not necessarily a greater amount — of care.  It’s something to think about, anyway.

Meanwhile, back at the Baxter Building, Reed Richards has yet to notice the red warning light going off above the Negative Zone door, which kind of makes you wonder what the point of installing it was.  Granted, the man does seem to have his hands full at the moment…

Sue’s vacation is over indeed, for as she drives up the highway towards home, she finds that some outside force has taken control of her car.  As the vehicle lurches off the road and into a wooded area, all she can think to do is generate a force-bubble to shield herself and Franklin, and then wait to see what happens next…

Meanwhile, Reed and the others are on their way to the Landers farm, though they’re delayed by several hours when they’re dragged in for a guest appearance in another Marvel title (Sub-Mariner #67, for the record).  Finally, however, they’re approaching their destination, and Ben tells Reed he’s sorry about how Medusa clobbered him with a wrench earlier; Reed ruefully admits that he may have had it coming…

The team quickly tracks Sue’s car to where it lies abandoned in the woods…

Is Reed’s remark about “charred ground” a reference to the crater left at Whisper Hill back in FF #134?  If so, then I imagine he’s really kicking himself right now for blowing off Agatha Harkness’ disappearance at that time…

Annihilus appears to be well-prepared to take on the whole team.  His second blow leaves the Thing unconscious, and a blast from his Cosmic Control Rod downs the Torch.  Mr. Fantastic and Medusa attempt a gambit with a “wind bomb“; it has little effect on the lord of the Negative Zone, who promptly retaliates:

Oh, right… I almost forgot that Wyatt Wingfoot was still hanging around.  Alas, the poor guy’s coming to at this particular moment means that he gets to be an audience of one as Annihilus spends most of the rest of the issue recounting his origin story — a narrative which takes up over five pages, but doesn’t amount to much more than “I was a little insectoid who was the smartest creature on my native planet for some reason, and then I found a crashed spaceship and put on a helmet that made me even smarter.”  None of this new background information tells us anything we didn’t already know about our villain’s powers or his motivations, or casts any illumination upon his present scheme — and so, the entire sequence doesn’t seem to have any real reason to exist, other than that Annihilus has been around since 1968 and someone at Marvel may have felt it was time he got an origin story.  Well, that, and to fill up five pages or so near the end of the issue.

And so we come to Fantastic Four #141 — an issue which, behind its John Romita cover, features the last FF story to be drawn by John Buscema, at least for a while.  Buscema’s run had begun with FF #107, just four issues following the departure of the series’ co-creator, Jack Kirby — and while he hadn’t drawn every single issue since, his assured draftsmanship had set the visual standard for the book throughout the early 1970s.  Thankfully, inker Joe Sinnott would remain on board to help provide stylistic continuity for several years to come; even so, from this point forward, and for the next few decades, the artwork on Fantastic Four would almost always seem to be reaching to recapture past glories, rather than simply continuing them (something which, we should note, had been true in regards to the series’ writing for some time — at least since Kirby’s exit, and probably even for a year or so prior to that).

Annihilus’ blast temporarily removes Reed’s powers, taking him out of the fight.  Next, the Thing leaps to the attack, but is swatted away almost carelessly by the villain.  And then, when the Torch attempts to “go nova”…

For all Ben Grimm’s bravado, his strength is to no avail against Annihilus’ tentacles, which unceremoniously dump him and his companions into a holding cell, there to cool their heels until called for…

Five action-packed panels later, the FF finally wins one.  It’s about time, amirite?

But even as these events unfold, the Fantastic Four are on their way, using the power of the Human Torch to burn a tunnel through the solid rock of a ridge that leads right up to Annihilus’ base, in hopes of catching him by surprise…

Annihilus’ remarks about how he’d hoped he was rid of Johnny and the others don’t make much sense, in the context of everything he’s said and done up to this point.  If he didn’t need to have them around for the culmination of his fiendish scheme, why tell Wyatt Wingfoot (back at the end of #140) that Wyatt and the FF were “the very crux” of his plan?  Why not simply proceed with the captives he already had — Franklin, Sue, and Miss Harkness — since it seems that Franklin is the only one he actually needs for the energy-transferral procedure?  And if he wanted to bring his old foes to the Negative Zone just so he could gloat over their defeat, why has he suddenly changed his mind?

Considering how easily Annihilus mopped the floor with our heroes earlier — not just once, but twice — Ben’s bewilderment over the suddenness of his collapse seems quite apt.  One might infer that the rapidly transforming Franklin is draining power out of Annihilus and back into himself, but it’s not at all clear, and it really should be.  Perhaps Gerry Conway has simply run out of room for explaining such things, seeing as how he has only three pages left to work with this issue, and the real climax of his story is yet to come…

Agatha Harkness doesn’t appear in the group of folks just returned to the Baxter Building — are we to infer that she and Ebony (that’s her cat) stayed behind in the Negative Zone?  There doesn’t appear to be any reason for them to do so, and of course they no longer have a home at Whisper Hill to go back to, so where did they go?  (For the record, the next time Agatha shows up — at the wedding of Crystal and Quicksilver, commemorated in Avengers #127 and Fantastic Four #150 [both published in June, 1974] — there’s no mention of where she’s been in the interim.)

Back in September, 1973, I no more believed that this was “the end of the Fantastic Four!” than you do, reading these words fifty years (and hundreds of Fantastic Four stories) later.  But my certain knowledge that nothing that my sixteen-year-old self had just read about was irrevocable (and, indeed, the Thing and the Torch would be back with the team as early as issue #144, while Medusa never left at all, and Sue had of course already left, back at the end of #130) could only mitigate the impact of #141’s concluding events, not negate them.

Could Reed Richards have made any other choice than the one he does, sacrificing his own son to save the world?  Could the rest of his family have made any other choice than the one they do in response, turning their backs on him in their grief and anger?  These, I think, are the questions that make Gerry Conway’s story remain so memorable, five decades after its original appearance, and in spite of the various problems I’ve pointed out along the way.  That’s because these are questions that, in the end, don’t submit to an objectively “right” or “wrong” answer.  Whatever you think about the ending of FF #141 is, of necessity, just as valid as what I think, and the converse is also true.  Discussing our different responses may help us understand each other’s point of view better, and our own as well — but we can never completely resolve the underlying issues… and that’s fine.

For what it’s worth, my personal take is that no, Reed couldn’t do anything other than what he does in the situation presented in our story’s closing pages.  After all, we’re given no reason whatsoever to doubt his assessment that, if Franklin reaches critical mass, he may well “kill every living creature in the solar system“, nor his conviction that there are only moments left to prevent that outcome.  And it’s not like any other option is available; after the fact, no one comes forward to say, “But Reed, why didn’t you try…?”  The others simply assume that the incredibly brilliant Mister Fantastic should have been able to find another way, which seems patently unfair.  The family’s complete rejection of Reed in the immediate aftermath of his dramatic action may be understandable, and even inevitable — everyone is clearly in shock.  But for them to continue to hold him completely responsible for what has happened to Franklin would be less than fair (as Ben and Johnny do indeed come to realize, pretty early on).

But even if all of that is true, it by no means lets Reed off the hook.  Yes, the situation he finds himself in is impossible — but it’s also a situation of his own making, at least to a certain extent.  It’s clear that Reed has been concerned about Franklin becoming a danger to himself and others for quite some time, and that he’s been conducting experiments in search of a solution at least since issue #138, and perhaps even since #134.**  But he’s shared his concerns — and his efforts — with no one, evidently feeling that it’s his duty (and perhaps, less to his credit, his prerogative) to handle things all by himself, as “the man of the family”.  Since he hasn’t asked the others for their support before now, in the moment of acute crisis he’s unable to turn to them — and so he alone is left to pull the trigger, to take the sole responsibility for the act that destroys his family.  It’s the stuff of tragedy — or it would be, if we didn’t all know, in 1973 as well as in 2023, that it’s all going to get better, sooner or later… and the smart money would be on sooner.  (Although you could make the case that things will get worse for Reed before they get better, at least on the marital front, as issue #147 will see him served with divorce papers by Sue.)

In the same Back Issue article that I referenced earlier, Gerry Conway referred to Reed’s action in FF #141 as “the classical male thing of taking a unilateral male step”.  He also explained how he saw the Reed-Sue-Franklin storyline as a whole as reflective of what was going on in American society at that time:

I wanted to shake things up… and, to put this into historical context, too, the early ’70s was a period of tremendous upheaval in male/female relationships.  The divorce rate was skyrocketing, [and] women were really pushing to be taken seriously as equals in their relationships with men.  It was the cultural flowering of Women’s Liberation…  So that was part of the zeitgeist, and part of what we were all thinking about.

That connection with the zeitgeist, however much it was intentional rather than arrived at unconsciously, probably accounts at least in part for the particular resonance this story has held for some readers over the years.  It certainly seems to have informed the use made of it by author Rick Moody in the semi-autobiographical novel I quoted from earlier, The Ice Storm (full disclosure: I haven’t actually read the novel all the way through, though I have seen the movie).  In it, Paul Hood — the author’s stand-in — finds in the pages of his favorite comic book, Fantastic Four, both mysterious intimations of his own family life as well as an escape from it.  After thinking of various ways in which his own father is like both Ben Grimm and Reed Richards, while his mother is like both Sue Richards and Crystal, and he himself is sometimes like Ben and sometimes like Peter Parker,*** Paul concludes:

These models never worked exactly.  Still, the F.F., with all their mistakes and allegiances, their in-fighting and dependability, told some true tale about family.  When Paul started reading these books, the corny melodrama of New Canaan lost some of its sting.

That “corny melodrama”, involving casual adultery and alcohol abuse among the novel’s adults, and sexual experimentation and more general substance abuse among their kids, is, I have to say, quite remote from my own experiences of growing up in the Seventies.  The social and sexual tumults of the decade largely passed my Jackson, Mississippi Southern Baptist household by; and while I might wish that a few liberal ideas — feminism, for one — had caught root with my parents (whether in that decade, or any other), I can’t say I’m inclined to complain about growing up in a stable, loving home.  There are, I’m fairly sure, considerably worse fates.

But even if I couldn’t relate to the Fantastic Four’s familial dysfunction in the same way as could young Paul Hood (or, I’m assuming, young Rick Moody), that didn’t mean I couldn’t be just as invested in their ongoing domestic saga.  I figure that I must have been as keen as anyone else was, back in the fall of 1973, to find out what would become of Reed and Sue, not to mention poor little Franklin.  Plus, was Crystal really going to marry that jerk Quicksilver instead of Johnny?  Was Ben ever going to ask Alicia to marry him?  (Don’t answer that one.)  And just how long was Medusa planning to stick around for, anyway?  I look forward to sharing the stories that answered those questions — some of them, anyway — with you in later posts

*The scene below appears in the context of Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, having just flown off in despair over being separated from his girlfriend Crystal, who for health reasons has been forced to return to the Inhumans’ Great Refuge, far away in the Himalayas:

In the next couple of panels, Sue worries about how much everyone on the team has been irritable with one another recently, and muses, “Perhaps we’d all be better off if we had a separation for awhile!”  Just one panel after that, however, she concludes, “And yet — even the thought of being without Reed — is more than I can bear!”  And that’s that.  If Sue ever gets her apology, we don’t see it on panel; and as far as I’ve been able to determine, Stan Lee never really returns to this theme for the remainder of his run (which, following a brief interregnum, comes to its final end with issue #125).

**It’s actually possible to place the beginnings of Reed’s secret attempts to deal with the Franklin problem even earlier — as far back as issue #129, where, if you’ll remember, Reed begged off from accompanying Sue to Whisper Hill to pick up their son due to his needing to attend to “some work in the lab” — a decision that clearly heightened tensions between the couple, and helped lead to their separation at the end of #130.  Or, if you’re even more daring, you could peg it still further back — all the way back to issue #107, where Reed snapped at Sue for bothering him in his lab while he was “involved in something important“.  Not that I’m saying that either Stan Lee or Roy Thomas intended those scenes to be read that way, setting up plot points for Gerry Conway to pay off years later; on the other hand, there’s nothing to prevent one from interpreting them in such a fashion.  For this particular reader, at least, it adds even greater pathos and irony to the fall of Mister Fantastic to imagine that his misguided effort to address a serious problem concerning his child while neglecting to involve his partner, the child’s mother — a woman whom he at at least one point castigates for not being protective enough of their child — has been going on for a really long time.

***No, Spider-Man isn’t a member of the FF — at least, not in 1973.  Still, it’s amusingly ironic that Paul Hood identifies so closely with Peter Parker, seeing as how Tobey Maguire would end up playing both young men in the movies.