Well, I talked about it for a long time, but we are finally here: the birth of the true Marvel Universe with The Fantastic Four #1 (Aug 1961). Stan Lee and Jack Kirby bring us a full book-length story here that introduces their first true super-heroes of the Silver Age named, of course, The Fantastic Four. Let the Marvel Age of comics begin!
How are Jack & Stan going to fill up an entire comic book with one adventure after so many one-shot 4- or 8-page monster stories for the last several years? Well the clues are in the first issue. They spend literally eight pages showing their characters going about their daily business (shopping, tinkering with cars) and then answering a mysterious emergency summons when a flaming ‘4’ appears in the sky. This of course allows them to show off their powers in kooky ways, like Sue Storm (The Invisible Girl) freaking out a taxi driver, or Ben Grimm (The Thing) needlessly inflicting property damage and trauma on New York City.
Or Johnny Storm (The Human Torch), needlessly destroying national guard jets.
Or Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) saving that reckless Johnny who ran out of oxygen… careful, Icarus!
Then a few more pages to recount the origin of these four weirdos: space pilots caught in a cosmic ray storm. Clearly there is some influence from the Challengers of the Unknown here. The flashback heavily features the only real innovation in this magazine thus far: these characters have insecurities and actually bicker and fight! Though, in truth, other teams did this earlier than the FF.
Anyway, fourteen pages into the story, we finally learn why they’ve been assembled in an emergency fashion: Reed Richards has discovered that atomic power plants all around the world are being swallowed by the Earth. The group takes their private jet to “Monster Isle” and meet the mastermind behind this: The Mole Man.
Some big monster fights, a super-villain monologue, an escape, and the Mole Man seemingly destroys Monster Isle as our heroes leave. That rounds out the last handful of pages.
It’s not really a masterpiece. The art is crude, the characters personalities are a little tiring already in this first issue, no flashy uniforms, no kirby krackle, no highly-detailed scientific backgrounds or magnificent panoramas… but it’s a pretty big beginning nonetheless because of everything that comes after it.
Maybe we’ll never know exactly why Marvel Comics decided to try their hand at serialized superhero characters all of a sudden. My guess is that there is truth to the jealousy around the success of the Justice League of America, but you can clearly trace the JLA as a consequence of DC revitalizing older characters and deepening its mythos and world-building across all of its characters. And you can clearly see the effects of that in DC’s devoted fan-base as witnessed by the energy in all those letters columns. Anyway it’s pretty exciting to see Stan and Jack start this effort of world-building from scratch!