Everything (not really)

Written by Stan Lee – Art by Jack Kirby – Inks by Dick Ayers – Letters by Art Simek

After months spent expanding the Marvel Universe, Fantastic Four #15 does something unexpected.

It slows down.

Rather than racing from one world-shaking threat to the next, Lee and Kirby spend much of the issue simply letting readers enjoy the Fantastic Four’s lives outside of superheroics.

Sue is at the beauty salon when the Fantastic Four emergency flare summons the team. Ben finds himself tangled up with the Yancy Street Gang before trying his hand at professional wrestling. Reed receives an offer to join a prestigious think tank. Johnny is reunited with his cousins, Bones and Tiny, who need help saving their struggling circus.

It’s an odd collection of subplots. On paper, very little of it feels essential. Yet that’s exactly what makes the issue interesting.

Only a few months earlier, Marvel was still relying on one-off monsters, alien invaders, and Cold War villains to drive its stories. Here, the characters themselves are becoming entertaining enough that Lee and Kirby are comfortable devoting entire sequences to their everyday lives.

The superhero action almost feels secondary.

The Mad Thinker returns alongside his Awesome Android, hoping to separate the Fantastic Four long enough to seize the Baxter Building and establish himself as New York’s king of crime.

Bringing back the Mad Thinker for a relatively low-stakes story is noteworthy in its own right.

Instead of introducing another disposable villain, Marvel reaches back into its growing rogues’ gallery. The Mad Thinker had debuted only a few issues earlier, but his reappearance helps make the Fantastic Four feel like an ongoing world where enemies don’t simply disappear once they’re defeated.

Kirby’s storytelling quietly evolves to support the increasingly ambitious structure. Many pages rely on dense seven-, eight-, and even nine-panel layouts, allowing him to juggle half a dozen storylines without sacrificing clarity. It’s easy to overlook, but those compressed pages reflect how much more complex Marvel’s storytelling had become in barely two years.

The Awesome Android also makes an effective foil. Designed to imitate and counter the Fantastic Four’s abilities, the android proves physically overwhelming. And, perhaps most importantly, the Awesome Android looks cool.

The story itself is admittedly slight.

The circus subplot feels like it wandered in from another comic, and the issue never reaches the dramatic heights of recent encounters with Doctor Doom or Namor.

But Fantastic Four #15 succeeds in another way.

It demonstrates that Marvel no longer has to rely entirely on spectacle. Readers are beginning to care about these characters even when they’re not saving the world, and that gives Lee and Kirby the freedom to tell smaller stories without falling back on the anthology formulas of the past.

The Fantastic Four is no longer just a series of monthly superhero adventures.

They’re becoming people whose lives are worth following between those adventures.

Marvel in the 60s – Entry #57