September 1962: The Diabolical Duo Debuts

 

By their sixth issue (Sept. 1962), the groundbreaking superhero team the Fantastic Four faced the foes they’d inevitably been fated to meet — a super villain team. 

Stan Lee even extended the parallelism to alliteration — a “Diabolical Duo.”

It took six issues because the FF had to meet some opponents before they could team up. 

As an 8-year-old, I’d already read — devoured, really — the third and fifth issues of the title, so I was delighted with Dr. Doom’s immediate return.

The Sub-Mariner I’d never heard of. But even to a child, it was clear that Namor was more hero than villain (I didn’t know the term “antihero” yet).  A kind of seagoing Superman, he boasted an impressive array of superpowers of which flight and super strength were only the most obvious.

Jack Kirby’s art really was fantastic, with those three-panel progressions he used to convey dramatic and emotional power and those breathtaking splash pages. I savored it many times.

“(T)he theme of the issue seems to be how these larger-than-life characters are viewed by others,” comics historian Don Alsafi wrote. “(T)he issue opens on a crowd in awe of the Torch flying overhead, and a courier at the Baxter Building flustered at a chance meeting with the Invisible Girl. And then Stan and Jack further invite us to think of the Fantastic Four as real people (with) the FF answering their fan mail! In fact, when Reed gets a letter from a hospitalized boy, he stretches out the window and across several city blocks to pay him a visit.”

The story was impressive enough to warrant inclusion in the Fantastic Four’s first paperback collection, published in 1966 by Lancer Books.

Charles W. Fouquette remembered it fondly, remarking, “The FF really are a reflection of the ’60s. The family unit, one for all and all for one. A shame that modern writers fail to grasp what makes the FF so special. The sensibilities have changed with the times.”