My Fantastic Four-ay: Part Seven.

So I spent a lot of time talking about John Byrne’s 1980s run on the Fantastic Four, probably focusing too much on the specifics without saying, in the big picture, that it was classically-done superheroing. Imaginative, usually well-drawn, stories that, with the occasional exception, paid off and rewarded the reader for their investment of half-a-buck or so. One time (warning: name-drop ahead) Scott McCloud asked me what was the current title on the stands that perfectly encapsulated the standard of A Superhero Comic. What was “One Exact Unit of Superhero Funnybooking,” one could say. At the time, in the late ’90s, I told him “Avengers by Kurt Busiek and George Pérez,” and not just because Scott and Kurt are old friends. It was genuinely the Platonic idea of a superhero comic…well-written, well-drawn, rewarding to read. Had Scott asked me a decade and a half earlier, I would have said John Byrne’s Fantastic Four. But all things come to an end, and Byrne’s run, having begun in 1981,…