In Fantastic Four #2 (Sept 1961), Marvel starts to gradually expand its mythos by introducing a shape-shifting alien race about to conquer Earth: The Skrulls! Four Skrulls establish a beach-head of tarnishing the FF’s reputation by masquerading as the superheroes and stealing jewelry or destroying property. The plan is to discredit the superheroes and then the invasion fleet orbiting the planet can descend.
Meanwhile, the four heroes are holed up in a hunting lodge, trying to keep Ben Grimm from going on a rampage.
It’s pretty obvious looking at the artwork here that Jack Kirby is still uncomfortable drawing the Thing. Most depictions show him the rear or with a concealed face. The tell-tale signs of exhausting in-fighting are more prominent than in the first issue.
Anyway, the army sneaks up on them in their cabin and they quickly surrender.
Which is pointless, because the next several pages are devoted to showing how the Fantastic Four are able to sneak out of the special army prisons and go on the run again. Whatever, Jack and Stan are learning how to tell book-length tales, give them a break!
The Fantastic Four finally catch up with the four Skrulls and pretty easily defeat them, not before Reed Richards finds another excuse to wrap up The Thing in his spaghetti arms. I guess “Easy, Thing, Easy” is the subtitle for this issue.
But what about that Skrull fleet orbiting Earth waiting for the Skrulls to finish de-faming our heroes? Reed Richards comes up with a plan to masquerade as Skrulls and rockets up to the flagship. He convinces the head Skrull that any invasion would be pointless and that Earth defenses are superior.
Successful, the group rockets back down to Earth and happens to pass through the same radiation belt that gave them their powers. This gives us our first cruel un-Thing moment: Ben reverts to his human-looking self and is over-joyed, until his rocky orange self returns.
After that little sad moment, the US Army pounces on the Fantastic Four. Thankfully Reed Richards is able to convince them it was shapeshifting aliens. One last battle with the remaining Skrulls who attempt to flee – and now what to do with those last three Skrulls on Earth? I must have lost count because there were four Skrulls on Earth, but now there are only three…
Anyway, Reed Richards decides to hypnotize these pathetic aliens into shape-shifting into cows permanently. I guess Reed was given powers of hypnotism by the cosmic rays too… I wonder how long that will hold?
And so we leave our four weird, crudely-drawn, non-costumed superheroes in their fledgling Marvel universe for awhile to see how these seeds take shape.