Fantastic Four #141 (December, 1973)
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.