Fantastic Four Epic Collection, Vol. 8: Annihilus Revealed

Fantastic Four Epic Collection

by Roy Thomas, Marvel Various (Illustrator), Gerry Conway (Writer)

Fantastic Four enters a new era as Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway take the reins. Thomas begins where it all began—with the Mole Man. This time, paired with Kala, Queen of the Netherworld, and topped off with a retelling of the FF’s origin. The drama remains at its peak as the Human Torch’s relationship with Crystal runs head on into Quicksilver. Meanwhile, the Frightful Four launch a surprise attack that pushes Reed and Sue to the breaking point. In the aftermath, Medusa will become the FF’s newest member. Then, it’s into the Negative Zone for the origin of Annihilus. Also featuring a new look for the Torch; classic battles with Thundra and the Hulk; the return of Doctor Doom; and the world’s creepiest babysitter, Agatha Harkness. 

COLLECTING: Fantastic Four (1961) 126-146, Annual (1963) 10 (cover only); Giant-Size Super-Stars (1974) 1; material from FOOM (1973) 1, 4, 5

Genres: Comics, Marvel, Superheroes, Graphic Novels, Fantasy, Collections

504 pages, Paperback

Published August 23, 2022

About the author

Roy Thomas was the FIRST Editor-in-Chief at Marvel--After Stan Lee stepped down from the position. Roy is a longtime comic book writer and editor. Thomas has written comics for Archie, Charlton, DC, Heroic Publishing, Marvel, and Topps over the years. Thomas currently edits the fanzine Alter Ego for Twomorrow's Publishing. He was Editor for Marvel comics from 1972-1974. He wrote for several titles at Marvel, such as Avengers, Thor, Invaders, Fantastic Four, X-Men, and notably Conan the Barbarian. Thomas is also known for his championing of Golden Age comic-book heroes — particularly the 1940s superhero team the Justice Society of America — and for lengthy writing stints on Marvel's X-Men and Avengers, and DC Comics' All-Star Squadron, among other titles.

Also a legendary creator. Creations include Wolverine, Carol Danvers, Ghost Rider, Vision, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Valkyrie, Morbius, Doc Samson, and Ultron. Roy has also worked for Archie, Charlton, and DC among others over the years.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Annihilus Revealed collects Fantastic Four #126-146 and Giant-Size Super-Stars #1

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm a FF fan from way back and I'm slowly chewing my way through the series. This is an odd volume. Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway are still picking up the pieces after Jack Kirby and later Stan Lee left. Joe Sinnott does the inks and John Buscema, Ross Andru, Rich Buckler, and Ramona Fradon do the pencils.

The stories are actually pretty good. I read some of them before in Fantastic Four Masterworks #13 but forgot most of them. We get losers like Miracle Man and Gregory Gideon as well as heavyweights like Annihilus. Thundra joins the Frightful Four and Medusa joins the Fantastic Four after Reed and Sue split.

I'm glad the next volume comes out in 2023 because I have no idea how Reed and Sue ever get back together after Reed blasts Franklin with a ray that turns him into a vegetable to prevent him from destroying the solar system. Medusa is settling in as a replacement Fantastic Four member nicely, though. I'm sure fans shit on it at the time, though, as they do any time something in comics changes. I think it freshens things up a bit, though.

It's cool how Conway stayed away from the heavy hitters for the most part, although Dr. Doom does eventually make an appearance. I think they were still figuring out what to do with the Four post-Kirby. Rich Buckler replacing John Buscema as the long term penciller was a nice touch.

Four out of five stars. I'm itchin' to read the next volume!

[Molly Lazer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read over the course of quite a while with my six-year-olds (we actually read Masterworks #13 before getting this book so had to go back and read the issues we had missed between the last epic collection and the first issue of that Masterworks once this book came out). This is a mixed bag of stories, with a great Doctor Doom arc, the fairly unnecessary return of Gregory Gideon, the trippy and utterly baffling "Wild One" two-parter (though my kids loved the Shaper of Worlds), the welcome return of Wyatt Wingfoot, more unnecessary drama around Johnny and Crystal's relationship (good on you, Crystal, for moving on!) that goes along with a pretty terrific story about the Inhumans and the Alpha Primitives...and Reed putting his own son in a coma and Sue leaving him. Yeesh. Overall, this is still pretty enjoyable, though, and the Thing/Hulk mindswap issue of Giant-Size Super Stars is awesome. I'm grateful to Marvel for putting out these Epic Collections with so many issues in color contained in one volume.

[Alex Andrasik · Rating 2 out of 5]

The post-Lee and Kirby slide in quality continues.

Gerry Conway takes over part way through this volume, which sees Sue leave the team to be replaced by Medusa, strain in her marriage with Reed, the end of Johnny's relationship with Crystal, and the Thing just sort of treading water as a character (if it ain't broke and is the most popular part of your series and has a fun catchphase, don't fix it, just have the character lampshade the familiarity of his story beats in a throwaway panel in a Giant-Sized Super Special issue). Villain-wise, we learn that Annihilus is an overgrown bug, the least believable villain team of all returns (why do the Wizard and Sandman tolerate the presence of Paste-Pot Pete?), Dr. Doom treats us to one of his zaniest but probably most effective-seeming plots (so why doesn't he ever try to disrupt the globe's brain patterns again?), and we meet Thundra, whose inversion of the usual chauvinist male tropes was probably meant to be as Profound as it is amusing, but just comes off as an underbaked and slightly icky hash. Through it all, little Franklin's powers keep growing as a background threat (culminating in a classic bit of Reed Being a Dick but also Everyone Else Not Understanding for Drama Reasons), and the Baxter Building's landlord keeps threatening to break the FF's lease. Wouldn't he be about the most unpopular guy in the Marvel Universe after the second time he publicly shook his fist at these folks who have, I don't know, prevented a giant alien from eating everyone's bio-energy on several occasions?

Conway has an annoying habit of drawing attention to the comic-ness of it all in his exposition, which I imagine he thinks hearkens back to Stan's style, but which is really just grating. And out of nowhere, in one of the worst arcs in the collection (the story of Johnny and Medusa getting shot down in the Himalayas by some Abominable Snowmen really didn't deserve two issues), there's some hamfisted and I think dead wrong political commentary shoe-horned in: the Snowmen are getting ready to destroy the world, right, and the behest of their Charismatic Snowman Leader, who's depicted as way smarter but also way more sinister than all the rest of them - with the unfortunate corollary that the rest of the population he leads (and whomever their real world analogues may be, HM) are rather dull and easily led into bad behavior. Keep in mind that these folks are all ape-like with tiny heads and exaggerated features and are characterized by an inability to speak English, except for their special, "more articulate" demagogue leader. In the middle of things, the Torch gets angry - "We were on our way to [Medusa's] homeland," minding their own innocent business, "until you butted in like a grade B LOONEY! So when you find this place in a SHAMBLES around you, BLAME YOURSELF - YOU'RE the jerk who STARTED it!" Mind you, what they "started" was essentially a bid to be able to exist in the wider world by bringing it in line with weather conditions that their Snowman physiology can stand - a decidedly comic book-enhanced take on the idea of simply wanting a place in society. The Torch's ire is justified because the leader of the group is cartoonishly evil, but our "heroes" are still fixin' to bring his home down around the ears of his entire race. In the midst of the battle that follows, Medusa makes sure to approvingly name-check the eugenics program that gives her and her fellow Inhumans fantastic powers (and remember, they subjugate their sub-race of powerless, identical-looking cousins, the Alpha Primitives). Later, as they're being led to a secret chamber by a Snowwoman sympathetic to them (one who is conveniently depicted as far less monstrous than every other member of her race we've encountered so far), Johnny reflects on his recent disagreements with Reed, coming to agree with Medusa that sometimes people act because they have no choice, and Johnny pointedly concludes, "I see what you mean... Maybe life isn't black and white, after all..." Medusa replies, in a caption over an all-black panel, "Only FOOLS ever claimed it WAS, Johnny Storm." I can't help but read this as a veiled critique of "extremists" out in the real world - the strange decision to use a blank panel a signal to the reader to momentarily leave the world of the comic book for that final idea. There's then some silliness with an ancient Asian man who originally taught the Snowmen the ways of, I don't know, civilization, I guess, and who has been kept artificially alive by a small cabal of faithful followers all these centuries, and I don't really know what the point of it is - but the guy pontificates that "Regardless of the danger to ourselves, we have no TRUE RIGHT to inflict our will on others." Which just reads to me as a paean to the idea of clamming up about all this civil rights nonsense, can't you just accept your lot and move on, geez. And so, despite finding it a sin to inflict one's will on others, the guy directs the FF to use a ray that de-Snowmans all the Snowmen, de-monsterfying them and in the process rendering them physiologically human - they no longer need to change the Earth's climate to live in it with the rest of us. (And now their skin is white!) So I guess the message is, if you're different, don't try to "inflict" your interests on others, because that is uncalled for (in the terms of this comic, literally genocidal to all us nice "normal" humans) - just do your best to conform!

I dunno, maybe I'm reading way too much into it, but I know that Marvel has never been AS progressive as our rose-tinted glasses make us think they always were, and as the transgressive 60s gave way to the Nixon-era 70s and beyond, themes in some books, as least, got more and more conservative.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

We have almost arrived at the point when I started buying the Fantastic Four on a monthly basis with individual issues that are contained within these volumes. But many of these issues were ones that were among the earliest I had this title, and it quickly became my favorite comic book from Marvel (well, technically this and the reprints from the Kirby and Lee years in the pages of Marvel’s Greatest Comics). So there’s a lot of nostalgia flowing through these pages for me. But let’s get to it shall we.

Fantastic Four #126 - Based on the first issue of the comic book that launched the Marvel Comics Universe, this gives Roy Thomas a chance to rework, update, retcon their origin a tad. It’s not bad, but I also don’t think it was really necessary. What it’s basically doing is trying to reconcile the disparity between the world of then and the world of now (or the now of when this issue was published). The art by John Buscema is nice (as one would expect) and it’s interesting to see his take on the team’s origin.

Fantastic Four #127-128 - This story takes us back to the very first villain the FF faced: the Mole Man. Ben Grimm hopes to find a cure for his girlfriend’s blindness from the subterranean menace and the rest of the team come to his rescue. There’s some other stuff going on in Subterrania, but this is the gist of it (I’ll leave the rest to surprise you). Thomas and Buscema deliver a fun underground frolic. And one that was extremely frustrating for me personally, as for many years I only had the first issue of this tale and wasn’t able to read the second half of it until comic book stores that sold back issues started opening up and I was able to fill in the gaps of the my early years of buying these addictive things. And while I had a couple older issue of the FF, I think I was given them and #127 was the first issue of the magazine that I bought myself.

Fantastic Four #129-130 - Another fun 2-part tale by Thomas and Buscema which sets up some pretty big changes coming for the team. Again, I had purchased the first part and didn’t get the second for many, many years (the next issue I picked up as a new issue was #138). I was fascinated by the Frightful Four and they quickly became by favorite FF villains. The introduction of Thundra was another bit of fascination for me. But the big shocker is at the end as the tensions rising between how Reed treats Sue come to a full blown disaster. Can their marriage survive, let alone the team, with her departure?

Fantastic Four #131-132 - Thomas raps up his run on the title with this story, with art on the first issue by Ross Andru and the second half by Buscema, and this time the happy home wrecker, Thomas, breaks up Johnny and Crystal (of the Inhumans) for good. It’s a cast of all-stars as the FF, the Inhumans, and Crystal’s new boyfriend Quicksilver have tangle with Maximus the Mad, Omega, and the Alpha Primitives. We also have Medusa joining the FF as a replacement for the departed Invisible Girl. This is the second time Sue was replaced, the first being during her pregnancy when Crystal looked like she was going to make the title become Fantastic Five, and there was no clear sign that this was temporary. And the Human Torch gets his red & yellow FF uniform!

Fantastic Four #133 - New writer Gerry Conway comes on board with another guest artist, Ramona Fradon, to deliver the return of Thundra and some more of her mysterious backstory. The rest of the Frightful Four also appear, but aren’t really involved too much in this one.

Fantastic Four #134-135 - Another 2-parter from Conway and Buscema that begins to develop the struggle between Reed and Sue reconciling (this is going to be a bumpy ride) and brings back the menace (can we really call him a menace?) of Gideon, this time he’s got Dragon Man with him to actually provide the menace, I guess. This is all just window dressing for progressing the agonizing soap-opera elements of Reed and Sue’s separation. This was definitely a dark era for the team.

Fantastic Four #136-137 - This 2-part tale builds directly from the ashes of the previous story and introduces The Shaper of Worlds to the FF. It’s also, in my opinion, probably the worst story from Conway and Buscema’s run. Basically it takes its inspiration from the Happy Days glorification of the 1950s during the mid and late 1970s that I personally found absolutely nauseating. So the less said, by me, about this mess the better.

Fantastic Four #138-139 - And the nostalgia is back, at least for me, with another issue I bought new when it first came out. The return of both Wyatt Wingfoot (always loved the bromance between Johnny and Wyatt) and the Miracle Man (from all the way back in FF #3). And another bit of frustration for me as it again took years for me to get a copy of #139 to finish this particular tale. This 2-parter from Conway and Buscema is an awful lot of fun.

Fantastic Four #140-141 - If you notice by now, I keep picking an issue and then missing at least the next one. And this continues as I bought #140 and missed #141. This is also the last 2-part epic from Conway and Buscema. This is also where the title of this collected volume comes from as the FF are attacked by Annihilus as he wants back what Reed took from him. That being the cosmic powers that saved the new born life of Reed and Sue’s son, Franklin. This story wraps up the mystery surrounding Agatha Harkness that’s been building for the last dozen issues or so and fractures the team even more than Reed and Sue’s separation has. This is the infamous story that has Reed forced to put his son into a vegetative state in order to save not only Franklin’s life, but the lives of everyone on planet Earth as well. Needless to say, Sue did not take this very well. Neither does Johnny. Neither does Ben. Is this the End of the Fantastic Four?

Fantastic Four #142-144 - Yep, this one is a 3-part story. Conway is joined by new artist Rich Buckler, and we get a new threat in the form of Darkoth the Death-Demon. But he’s just a cybernetic puppet creation of Doctor Doom, who has launched a new plan to enclave the world. This story is fun, but badly structured as Doctor Doom’s plot inexplicably involved capturing the dispersed members of the FF and bringing them together to … watch him take over the world. Hmm. Perhaps a surprise attack might have been more effective. Parts of this one just don’t make any sense to me. Here, I’d again picked up the start of a story and missed the conclusion for many years, only this time I missed two issues.

Fantastic Four #145-146 - Oddly enough, this time I missed the first part of this tale, but got the conclusion. This is a weird one from Conway and Andru (giving time for Buckler to do the art for the inaugural, and only, issue of Giant-Size Super-Stars) that pits the Human Torch and Medusa against a race of Abominable Snowmen in the Himalayas. It was cool to see these two together, but it’s such a weird story. Fun, but yeah, it’s weird.

Giant-Size Super-Stars #1 - Features yet another battle of the century between The Thing and the Hulk. These are always fun and Conway & Buckler deliver an interesting twist on this particular story. Thundra also puts in an appearance just to spice things up. Nothing great or earth-shattering, but fun in any case. This was the only issue of this particular title, and the second issue was retitled Giant-Size Fantastic Four.

The volume closes with some neat miscellaneous stuff featuring the Fantastic Four from the pages of FOOM, a few house ads and some reproduced pages of original art. I’d like to give this volume a 4-star review, but I really cannot bring myself to do it. It’s mostly the nostalgia of these being many of my first encounters with the FF that give it that boost and not really the stories themselves.

[Gaute Hjartåker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m trying my best to judge this book on it’s own merits, but it’s hard when following one of the greatest comic runs of all time… But Roy Thomas and Gerry Convay do an admirable job here. Nice balance of super-heroics and interpersonal drama/soap opera. I had a good time reading this, and I went through it pretty fast.

I like the consistency of this book. Some epics make for an uneven reading experience when it’s a hodge-podge of annuals, guest-appearences and mini-series. But this volume is just a straight run of FF comics, with an special (Giant-Size Super-Stars) at the end.

The Frightful Four fights at the start of the book were a bit underwhelming, maybe because I prefer Grand Cosmic FF… In contrast, the regular super-villain bash-em-ups comes off as a bit pedestrian.
The book’s most bizarre moment comes around the middle of the volume with the Wild Ones, a group of villains inspired by 50s culture - Mod/Elvis/motorcycles etc - who fight the “youthies” 🤨 This involves the Shaper somehow - a fun but very odd story. (Hey, it was the seventies.)

For me the highlights of the volume were the arcs with the Negative Zone, and Dr. Doom. This was riveting, very fun stuff. After that, the FF fight an abdominable snowmen-type race in the Himalayas. Their origin story was fascinating, and gave me that “sense of wonder” that good sci-fi/fantasy does.

Maybe not the most essential of FF volumes, but I liked this, and can recommend it. I have a soft spot for early 70s Marvel, maybe it’s wistful nostalgia for an era gone by… but either way, this is some solid storytelling. Can’t wait for volume 9!

[Jimbo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always held FF in my heart. I think they were the first Marv comic I bought way back in the sixties. I think because they were a family, they clicked for me as a kid. They fought, they worked together, but there was love between them. Yes, the Avengers are like a family, but the roster changes constantly. They are a family, but they all have their own lives. FF is different. Their roster changed, but not because they v were doing their own thing, but because their hearts, passions, l and love... needed a break.
Tundra has always been a weird mystery to me. I believe she was a response to women's lib from that 70s era. She's a good character but with a one track mind . . . Too much thinking like a guy, so not the best example. She was reverse misogynist in a way. Interesting, but in the issue when we first meet her, kind of two-dimensional.
Some of the stories were odd, but creative. Doom and Annihilus are always good for the battles of the FF.

RATING 4.5.

[Doug Duncan · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book was alright but I don't think anything about it really stood out. I'm really not a fan of the characterization of Reed in this book especially. I'm sure the real reason she left was because someone wanted to switch the lineup up a bit, but the reasoning was frustrating and didn't feel well done. other than that I think a lot was fairly forgettable.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing—despite a title referencing Annihilus in the title, this Fantastic Four volume barely features the titular villain who is the reason why I bought this book. Normally I enjoy Roy Thomas’s writing, but, between the bait and switch title and the rather disjointed nature of the stories collected here despite their sequential publication, I did not enjoy this book with the same enthusiasm as I usually do with Marvel Epic Collections.

[Jeffrey Greek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oof. This collection contains what might be the dumbest story I've ever read.

[cc · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5