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The Way It Was!
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This is a hugely important comic for me and this blog (though probably not for anybody else) as it's the 147th text the (long) list of 293 items which currently make up the corpus, and so marks the halfway point for my reading. Of course, this isn't an exact number - the 293 items includes everything I've collected, so there are some comics in that number that, it turns out, don't feature Doctor Doom at all, and also doesn't include the inevitable extra items that will doubtless turn up in the future. However, while the numbers may change either way I think that this is still a pretty good place to point to and say "We're halfway there!"
After two years of blogging it's a cause for some celebration to have got this far, but it's also a reminder that I'm going to have to increase the frequency of updated if I'm going to have any chance of handing in my PhD on time!
Another reason for it being important is that it also marks the start of the third "phase" of The Marvel Age, with the arrival of Jim Shooter as editor-in-chief. Part of the aforementioned PhD involves using a Culture Of Production approach to define "The Marvel Age" as a distinct period of Marvel comics, and superhero comics in general, started with the first issue of "The Fantastic Four" in 1961 and ending with the last month of comics with Jim Shooter as editor-in-chief in 1987. Within this there are three seperate phases - "Creation", with Stan Lee as editor-in-chief, "Chaos", beginning in 1972 and running through five seperate editors-in-chief until 1978 when Jim Shooter takes over and we enter "Consolidation". There's all sorts of arguments as to why this is A Thing and why it matters which I'll not bore you with here, but suffice to say we're about to enter into a very different version of Marvel Comics, both from the preceding few years of "chaos" and indeed from its origins in the 1960s.
Sadly, the actual comic that marks this changeover isn't very special at all. It's a re-telling of most of the history of The Fantastic Four so far, which includes a single panel retelling of Doom's first appearance in Fantastic Four #5 and then about half a page later on covering the time the Thing nearly killed him in Fantastic Four #40.
Doom also appears on the cover, drawn by his creator Jack Kirby, illustrating how important he's been to the history of the team even if he doesn't appear very much on the pages of this issue. The story, such that it is, happens just after The Fantastic Four have split up for good (again). The Thing goes through his diary, telling Alicia about all of the times this has happened in the past. She, very understandably, points out that this shows that The Fantastic Four will always get back together again (SPOILERS: they will), but The Thing dismisses the idea and suggests they go out and get something to eat.
And that's all there is to it - a very downbeat, intentionally low-key ending to what has been a fairly low-key story, even though it contains versions of some of the series' most well known adventures. It's a shame but not to worry - Doom will be back in the pages of The Fantastic Four very soon, in a genuinely exciting and epic story that kicks off some major changes for Doom in the coming few years, Next time, however, we're looking at a brand new series for this blog, as Doom makes a brief appearance in the distinctly weird pages of 'Master Of Kung Fu'!
link to information about this issue
posted 17/10/2019 by Mark Hibbett
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