FOUR NO MORE

In case you hadn’t heard — although how you could miss it baffles me — in No. 587 of Marvel’s Silver Age flagship title, The Fantastic Four (once subtitled “The World’s Greatest Comic Book,” the book that launched the “superheroes with human faults” trend in 1960, setting the pace for an otherwise moribund industry), one of the fabled quartet dies. After announcing that one of the four would die in this issue, Marvel kept the doomed one’s identity a secret for weeks, and when the book arrived on newsstands, it was encased in a plastic envelope with the number “3" in the team’s shimmering blue circle surrounded by funereal solid black.

Sealed in plastic, the issue could not be picked up, while we stood there at the rack, and flipped through hastily to discover the fatality. Fiendish marketing scheme: you had to buy the thing to get license to tear open the plastic envelope. Ripping it open in an eager albeit morbid frenzy, I read the whole issue (something I haven’t done for years, decades) to learn who would die. It was Johnny Storm — the Human Torch, ostensibly one of the duo (the Submariner was the other) who effectively launched the comic book company that became Marvel by deploying superheroic conflict in the basic antagonistic elements of fire and water. And now the fire has gone out.

Historic with a capital Hiss.

As a marketing maneuver, the death issue worked: No. 587 sold over 115,000 copies, the highest total for a direct market comic book since X-Men No 1 launched in July of 2010. Second best seller of the month, Spawn No. 200, didn’t come close to FF No. 587 — just 73,000 copies sold.

Now minus a fourth, The Fantastic Four title ceased with No. 588, which ends the pacesetting series on a suitably quiet note: no words are spoken for 40 of the book’s 48 pages, as the remaining FF and most of the rest of the Marvel Universe mourn the death of Johnny Storm.  Even Doom shows up and, uncharacteristically, says nothing. The usual volubility of the Marvel minions is muted, silent, out of respect, we assume, for the traditions of mourning: there are no words to express genuine grief.

Fantastic Four will be replaced by another double-f book, The Future Foundation, in which the remnants of the Fantastic Four, Marvel’s First Family of Comics, replace the departed Human Torch with Spider-Man and form a new supergroup known as The Future Foundation — a good trick considering that Spider-Man is dying in his own Ultimate title.