The Fantastic Four #1

Some people have too much lead in their pencil. Queen Elizabeth the 1st had too much in her face powder. No wonder she went mad and ended up sticking knives through the hands of serving girls who brought her the wrong things.

I can only conclude that Sue Storm's suffering from the same malady in Fantastic Four #1, judging by her behaviour in the inaugural issue of the world's greatest comic mag.

Ace pilot Benjamin J Grimm's minding his own business when Sue Storm nags him into helping her and her pipe-smoking boyfriend steal an unfinished space rocket.

In a bout of McCarthyite fervour, Sue's big beef is that if Americans don't get into space - right now - the commies might beat them to it. This would of course be a total disaster because, erm, er.

It quickly becomes clear that Ben Grimm is the group's nominated adult as he seems to be the only one with the sense to see the insanity of it all.

Still, suitably provoked, he goes along with it and they do what we've all tried to do and fly into space with the aid of a schoolboy.

Sadly, unlike Sue Storm's makeup, the spaceship's a bit short on the lead front, radiation gets in and it's not long before they're crashing into the ground and turning superhuman before going off to give the Mole Man a punch in the bracket.

Oddly, at no point does anyone try to arrest them for stealing a spaceship and at no point in future issues does anyone from the government ever raise this issue.

Your superior intellect is no
match for MY puny
weapons!

Apart from the lunacy of its stars, the thing that strikes you reading this tale now is how serious it is. Reed Richards initially casts an ominous figure, gravely summoning his colleagues to deal with their first challenge. The Thing is of course in his proto-Hulk mode and possibly a potentially bigger threat to humanity than the baddies are.

It also strikes you that it's clearly two separate stories stitched together, the first one introducing the FF and the second detailing their encounter with the Mole Man, and I wonder if the two halves had initially been planned for publication in separate issues before Stan Lee (under instruction from Martin Goodman?) decided to pull them together with the magical power of captions?

It has certain weaknesses, the main one being the uselessness of the Mole Man as a villain. When a man's main superpower is that he's got a stick, you know he's no Dr Doom.

But I don't care. I love it. With its not-totally-willing heroes, and dysfunctional-family vibe, even at this distance there's the sense of something epoch-making unfolding in front of your eyes and it serves as a perfect link between the monster mags Marvel had been doing up to that point and the super-hero mags they'd increasingly concentrate on from that point on.