"Cat's Paw"
It is the summer of 1979, and Jim Shooter has taken over at Marvel, promising to reign in some of the more free-wheeling aspects of the 1970s. How will this affect Marvel's flagship team book, The Fantastic Four. Marv Wolfman and George Perez are writing and drawing this issue together, and both are considered top-line talent.
The story stars, like many of Wolfman's stories, in medias res, with the Fantastic Four punching out The Sandman. This is what we call a Batman Cold Open, where the characters get to show their powers and introduce themselves before the main story starts. This might also be due to Shooter's influence: every issue had to introduce the characters as if they were a new reader. During this, we are also introduced to young Franklin Richards, who we saw being born in Fantastic Four Annual #6, and who is now about 3 or 4 years old. His dialog doesn't sound very realistic, but this issue is about him. When they return to the Baxter Building, to meet Agatha Harkness, a powerful witch and Franklin's governess. They decide to go on an air/road trip to Denver to visit "New Salem", the home of Agatha's supernatural people.
The Fantastic Four, their young child, and their supernatural governess, all going to a gigantic, hidden city full of the supernatural? What could possibly go wrong?
Side note: before we start our story, the artwork here is awesome: there is a double gatefold portrait of New Salem, showing dozens of supernatural characters walking down streets full of odd buildings. This story does build up a nice background with a sense of imagination.
The main plot is that Agatha's son, a man called "Nicholas Scratch", wants to usurp power, and uses a team called "Salem's Seven" to attack the Fantastic Four. Despite having rather mediocre powers (one guy creates vertigo, so he has the proportionate power of having to get up from a chair after playing video games and forgetting to eat), they manage to overpower the Fantastic Four, for plot reasons. While Franklin wanders into the desert, the villains take the Fantastic Four back to New York, where they set a force field around New York, a force field that several highly powered cameo Marvel characters can't break. But in the denouement, Agatha takes Franklin back to New York, where he uses his mental powers to one-shot the bad guy. Just as in Annual #12, the climax of the story is "well, the hero had a higher power level than the bad guy, well, that solves that!". Everyone in New York forgets yesterday's supernatural takeover, and the story ends with the status quo restored, with the main difference that we have learned more about Franklin Richard's powers.
I am going to give a split verdict on this issue. I think the foray into the supernatural was an interesting turn for the usual scientific Fantastic Four. And the amount of artistic detail used to depict an entire world is also an amount of wonderful effort. The problem is all that creativity doesn't go into making a plot that actually moves forward based on character action, and where all the risks are erased. This could be for several reasons, including needing to fit the events of the story into the wider Marvel Universe, or editorial censoring. Or perhaps Marv Wolfman, generally considered a strong creator, had a problem with wrapping up stories? In any case, while I still believe that these stories, put together, tell a story, I have to admit that at times I can understand why people would consider comic books sophomoric.