Status Updates From Fantastic Four Epic Collect...

#130-133 (Ramona Fradon!)

#126-129

How do you totally tank a Dr. Doom story? He writes himself! But Conway did it with an unreadably bad epic that was both boring and stupid. I hate all the characters! I hate this era of the book! Buckler's art looks like Sal Buscema with tons of trapezoid mouths. The Super Special will be an oasis I hope. Almost there....

Make it stop. It's SO BAD. Conway is running the book into the ground. Loathed the 1950s-bashing two-parter in 136-37. Young hippies...! The dredging up bottom-shelf villains like Miracle Man, and for a two-parter? 138-39 unreadable. Skimmed and winced my way through. Even Buscema's art is suffering. He knows these stories by a punk suck.

Ugh. #134-35 a low point in an already bottom shelf run of books. Gideon and Dragon Man add up to tedium and melodrama. Lameness. I'm reading only to get to better issues, which I fear won't appear until next Epic. Demystifying and disllusioning these mid-70's issues I hadn't read before. I missed nothing!

Enter 1973 and Gerry Conway, but... Thundra vs Thing in a dawn battle in a ballpark? And now Dragon Man returns next issue? Ugh. Glad Thomas' short n' sour tenure is behind us, but Conway's isn't getting off to the strongest start. The art is beautiful. Hanging in there...!

Proto-woke Roy Thomas' awful two-part Alpha Primitives uprising storyline has me wanting to quit--again!--but Gerry Conway is on the horizon, so I'm hanging in there. The art is beautiful. Too much romantic melodrama! Johnny got his red costume, and Roy retcons in how Johnny loved Golden Age Torch. Yeah, right.

F. O. O. M. #1, Spring1973