Marvel Knights 4 (Fantastic Four) 3 – page 19

One of my favourite runs of the Fantastic Four were the issues by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Steve McNiven towards the beginning of this century. They were not quite up there with the Lee/Kirby issues or the sequence penned/drawn and inked by John Byrne but they were well-written and beautifully drawn. Steve McNiven jumped ship after just seven issues and as a reader I followed soon after because although the subsequent artists were fine they did not seem to be in the same league as someone who I thought (although I have been wrong in the past about other artists I had tipped for greatness) destined for superstardom. Because the Aguirre-Sacasa/McNiven combo lasted only seven issues I will never know if they would have kept up that level of entertaining excellence over the long term but it was still very enjoyable whilst it lasted. I think I read somewhere that it was originally planned for inclusion in the regular title but the success of the Marvel Knights imprint meant that it was spun off into its own ongoing MK series running concurrently with, I think, the Waid/Wieringo run in the main title, which was another fondly-remembered set of issues.

I have to say that Sue is not the member of the team I Iike most. Similar to the majority of people it is Aunt Petunia’s favourite bashful blue-eyed nephew. Which other member could sustain a 100-issue [team-up] book excluding spin-offs which included the classic Annual 2 which featured what I considered would be a fitting and definitive end to the Thanos saga? However Sue deserves to be the focus of this splash page. It is over fifty years since I have read the Lee/Kirby story to which I refer so you will have to forgive me if I am a bit fuzzy about the fine detail, but I remember the story by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby where Reed reads out some correspondence from the FF’s readership where some of the fans take issue with Sue because she is the least powerful (and possibly least-relatable to those readers) member of the team. Mr Fantastic has to remind those readers that when the three male team members were trapped in an airtight chamber by Dr Doom and being slowly deprived of oxygen it was Invisible Girl (as was) who came to the rescue. Like any team or indeed family everyone does their little bit to the best of their ability for the greater good of the whole. Sue is the empathetic feminine voice of reason in the team, the peacemaker who has to pacify the sometimes warring members, the glue that binds the team together. In this splash the family have just been evicted from the Baxter Building but she looks up in hope that there will be a return and the other members mirror her optimism. She rightfully assumes the position of front and centre.

When this page became available a good decade or more ago it was not, if I recall correctly, via the usual auction websites; the seller just expressed a desire to sell it. When I enquired about its cost the seller told me to make them an offer. Although this is common practice now (and may even have been at the time), then it was the first time I had ever encountered such an approach. It’s never been my way to low-ball someone in the hope of arriving finally at the price I was planning to pay anyway. I have subsequently been on the end of low-balling and I find it slightly insulting and disrespectful. But I am also not a money-is-no-object high-roller. I am a strictly at-most mid-price collector so in answer to the prospective seller I told them I was going to abstain and just wished them well. Then several years later this splash came up on eBay and I picked it up for only a moderate sum. I am not sure if it was being sold by the owner I communicated with previously; I can hold a grudge like the best (worst?) of them but I did not keep tabs on who that was, and anyway there was no ill-will between us as they were trying to just maximise the financial return they had made on the page, which is something it would be normal to do. I take no pleasure in finally getting one over on the original owner because I can see a day in the future where I too will need to move this page for less than CMV because of the circumstances I will be in. “Ask not for whom the bells toll …”