Fantastic Four #6

The Diabolical Duo Join Forces

By Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers

Villains: Dr. Doom

Guest Appearances: Namor

So, What Happens?

The Torch has been hunting for Dr Doom but only succeeds in stirring up the crowd outside the Baxter Building. Sue adds to the commotion by invisibly pushing herself through the throng and making her way up to the team’s headquarters by their private elevator.

When she gets upstairs the team are reading their fan mail and Reed takes the time to stretch across the street and visit a young fan in hospital.

Out at sea Namor is found by Dr Doom and the two of them head to Namor’s undersea palace to discuss their shared enmity for the Fantastic Four. Doom reminds Namor of how the surface dwellers had destroyed Atlantis and provides him with an extremely powerful magnetic module that he wants to use against the FF.

Namor makes his way to the Baxter Building just as Johnny has discovered and burned his sister’s hidden pin up picture of Namor. Their squabbling only comes to a stop when Johnny turns on the Sub-Mariner but Namor manages to easily avoid his attacks.

Despite Sue claiming that the noble Namor must have come in peace the guys aren’t as trusting and search their headquarters for any secret weapons he has brought with them. They fail to find any and are instead taken by surprise when the whole building starts rising in the air and heading towards space.

With Namor having delivered the magnetic device Doom is now able to tow the whole building out of the atmosphere. Despite his part in the plot Namor is also trapped along with the team as Doom sees him as another obstacle towards world conquest.

The heroes try in vain to get at Doom’s space ship. Reed’s attempts to stretch towards it leave him with a burned hand and Johnny forgets that the vacuum of space will kill his flame instantly, leaving him needing rescuing by his team mates. Despite having to fight off the still belligerent Thing it is Namor who saves the day.

He leaps from meteor to meteor to reach Doom’s ship, and uses his electric eel powers to ignore Doom’s energy blasts and then sending Doom fleeing out of an escape hatch so he flies off into the oblivion of space.

Namor quickly gets the hang of Doom’s technology and puts the Baxter Building back where it came from before destroying Namor’s ship and magnetic grabber. Even though he was largely just freeing himself from Doom’s death-trap he has done enough for Reed and Johnny at least to downgrade him from dangerous villain to merely misguided and for Sue to go back to singing his praises.

So is it any good?:

It has some nice art, Dick Ayers is a solid, middle ranking, Kirby FF inker. He’s better known for his work on pre-hero titles and is not really up there with Sinnott or Chic Stone on FF but he gives his figures a solid grounded look with far fewer outright bizarre figures or panels than some inkers, he was far less messy than the inkers who would follow like George Roussos or Vinnie Colletta.

I liked the splash of the Torch flying over some construction workers and the art on Doom’s visit to the deserted Atlantis and on the Baxter Building flying away from Manhattan a lot. In fact the art remains strong as the action moves to outer space with only the section of Namor leaping onto Doom’s ship letting it down.

The story is important in that it brought back the adversaries from the previous two issues, something that had been trailed by Johnny worrying about Namor, and indeed about the possibility of him teaming up with Doom, throughout issue 5. In fact everything we have seen since the cliff-hanger ending of issue 3 has been linked together in a way that was extremely rare in the competing DC comics of the time.

While Doom’s plot here wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a contemporary or even golden age DC comic, it is the most ‘super hero’ plot yet, Namor’s role is something new.

Sue spends a lot of time talking about his nobility but it isn’t just talk, it is in fact Namor who defeats Doom once the team has injured and exhausted themselves in vain. The Thing can only contribute by turning on Namor and ignoring the peril they are all in, but Namor manages to singlehandedly deal with Doom. Namor was wheeled out as an adversary for almost every new hero so it would have been easy for readers to discount Sue’s praises and forget his heroic side but in this issue at least he is a very effective anti-hero, he might have his reasons for siding with Doom but he also saves the day far more effectively than the nominal heroes of the book.

Looking for signs of sexism in the treatment of Sue is like shooting fish in a barrel, but this issue is particularly bad. The only times she uses her powers in the whole issue is to try and push through the crowds around the Baxter Building sending several onlookers flying and to try and grab her prized Namor pin up from Johnny. The rest of the time she is swooning over Namor, dealing with her baby brother’s teasing and, with the whole team in danger, contributing only by bandaging Reed’s arm. It’s no wonder that one of the letters in this issue’s column calls her for her to be thrown out on the grounds that she never does anything.

Doom is less effectively written than Namor. As with his previous appearance he really tackles the team from afar via technological gizmos and doesn’t really interact with them at all. He talks about hating them, and Namor, as possible obstacles to taking over the world but there isn’t really a personal element to his rivalry yet. In fact his scene convincing Namor to join him and demonstrating his technology is probably the first real glimpse of Doom we’ve seen and in it he comes across as a lot more of a sly and treacherous ingratiator than as the imperious ruler of later appearances.

When at the end he flies off into space he is given a brief epitaph that suggests it wouldn’t lead to instant death but there is less reason to think he will be back as the teams main adversary than there would be for Namor.

Are there any goofy moments?

It was a simpler time and the young audience probably wouldn’t have had much patience with mushy stuff but the whole scene of Johnny finding Sue’s hidden photo of Namor is quite bad. Photographs, especially signed ones, seem to have been the silver age comics shorthand for unrequited love, they obviously allowed the new or forgetful reader to see just who from previous issues the characters were swooning over. It’s all a bit Lois Lane. Namor obviously has one of Sue as well but thankfully nobody takes that one and runs around teasing him like Johnny does to his sister.

Less goofy and more ‘total lack of understanding of astrophysics’ but almost everything that involves the meteor shower is particularly dumb.

Oh yes, Namor absorbing and then redirecting electrical, energy because electric eels can do it (not that they actually absorb it)

Trivia:

Namor also used his electric eel powers in a handful of Strange Tales appearances (where he also blew himself up like a puffer fish). The first reprint of the Strange Tales appearances (in Marvel Tales #9 from 1967) had a footnote saying that Namor could no longer use these powers and from that point on they were generally ignored. However John Byrne made use of them in Namor’s own early 90s title.

Very minor, but, as he had in issue 4, Namor wears red trunks throughout this story. He would be back to the Green trunks he wore in the 1940s in his next appearance in issue 8 but the red ones reappeared on the cover (but not the interiors) of FF annual 1. Everyone looks subtly off in this issue, Doom is depicted as being quite green throughout (as indeed he had been in issue 5)

Also on the subject of clothes, Reed visits a young fan in hospital and explains that his outfit is made of unstable molecules. This is the first mention of this and as it comes in a scene where the FF are reading their fan mail presumably had some connection to reader’s questions. The idea obviously stuck, Tales to Astonish 35 published the same month has Hank Pym making himself his Ant man costume from the same substance without any mention of getting the idea from Reed Richards.

Is it a landmark?:

Yes. Doom and Namor were still making and breaking alliances as recently as the Dark Reign event and even shared a title in Super Villain Team Up. It is also the first time any non-feature characters had reappeared in a marvel title.

Where can I read it?:

The first Fantastic Four Essentials and Masterworks and Omnibus volumes.