My Fantastic Four-ay: Part Six.

I’m just about ready to move on from John Byrne’s 1981-1986 run on the Fantastic Four, but I wanted to touch upon this particular storyline because, among other things, it sets up a character that will return again and again in future creative teams’ efforts on the title. I remember picking up issue #271 and being quite taken with the throwback cover to the 1950s/early ’60s Marvel monster comics, before Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and friends dived back into the superhero genre: I’m not sure where I’d been exposed to that era of Marvel monster books initially…perhaps some of the reprints that popped up as filler material in some of the Giant-Sizes I’d collected, or a friend whose uncle had a handful of original copies of these books (before being all destroyed in a rainstorm, having left his box of them outside. But I was certainly familiar with them, and found them amusing and charming enough that I would eventually draw out my own spoof splash page of such a story (“FONDUU, THE CHEESE DISH…