Anatomy of a Classic

The Comics Alliance takes an appreciative eye towards Fantastic Four No. 50.

From the piece...

Forty-four years after it was originally published, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's "Fantastic Four" #50 is justifiably regarded as a classic story and one of the building blocks of the Marvel universe. And until recently, it's also a comic I'd never read.

As much as I'm a huge Kirby fan, I've always been more interested in the books he did on his own in the '70s -- "OMAC" and "The New Gods" at DC, then his return to Marvel with "Devil Dinosaur," "Captain America" and "The Eternals" -- than his work with Lee building the Marvel Universe. Even so, working in a comic book store for six years and writing about comics every day for the past five and a half, I was pretty sure I'd picked up on the gist of it, because after all, you don't read Marvel comics for two decades without figuring out who Galactus and the Silver Surfer are.

When I finally did sit down and read through them, however, I realized that #50 wasn't just the story of Galactus coming to Earth and getting chased off when Reed Richards waved around the Ultimate Nullifier, it was a major turning point -- not just for the Fantastic Four, or even Marvel, but for comic book storytelling as a whole.