My Fantastic Four-ay: Part Twelve.

We’ve reached a point in the Fantastic Four run, following the big anniversary issue, where it feels like…well, I can’t say exactly that it’s “killing time,” or “filling pages,” or “keeping a monthly Fantastic Four title on the stands while we wait for a new direction and strong creative team to capture readers and sales like it did during John Byrne’s heyday,” because, well, these are actually pretty good. Issues #297 through #302 (cover dates December 1986 through June 1987) came out as I was in the home stretch of my high school years, with #302 being on the stands sometime in February. I missed Byrne on the title (particularly after that underwhelming #296), and while I think I kept picking the comics up out of habit, I was still a high school senior working at the local library and not exactly rolling in disposable income to be wasting on comics I didn’t like. Therefore, there must have been something to the title that compelled me to keep reading, despite the loss of the…