T-shirt #207 - Fantastic Four Grey

T-shirt #207 - Fantastic Four Grey

I love the Fantastic Four. I love the family dynamic, the strong sense of history despite Marvel's revisions and rebooting, and the top talent that often takes on the comic that came to be known as "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine" when Lee and Kirby helmed the flagship title.

The Fantastic Four is a family, and the book is at its best when it remembers that the core concept is family.


It's a bit of a non-traditional family with a man in an "uncle" role living with his best friend and that man's wife and the wife's brother. And though the addition of the first child, Franklin, was traditional (as a product of Sue and Reed's conjugal union), the introduction, later, of Valeria, who would have died if not for the intervention of Doctor Doom: See Valeria Richards Wiki. Again, more subject matter for another day as I plan to devote myself to short assorted nuggets of content since I am here at the beginning of the work week.

The image on the shirt was drawn by John Buscema, who replaced Jack Kirby on the Fantastic Four title, producing issues 107-141 with Sinnott on inks, starting in 1970. Writers Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway.

There is a controversy over who actually invented the Fantastic Four (I side with Kirby), but this is a subject for another time. I have other Fantastic Four shirts.

I have written about the Fantastic Four off and on throughout the blog, such as when I shared a cover gallery and one of my favorite FF covers in T-shirt #168, when I wrote about how Jack Kirby was screwed in T-shirt #83, and when I wrote about the Silver Surfer and shared another of my earliest FF covers in T-shirt #104. Though interestingly, I have not shared my earliest FF cover (#69) as an image yet on this blog. Guess what? Yes, that is also a subject for the next FF shirt. :-)

Today is a collection of random thoughts and pictures. Enjoy.

One of the final Images
of John Buscema's FF run
from FF#141

TIGERS: When I fell asleep, the Tigers were winning Game Two of the ALCS driven by Scherzer's dominant pitching and homers by Cabrera and Avila with a score of 5-1. This morning I discovered that they lost 6-5 when the bullpen loaded the bases and then gave up a grand slam to Big Papi. The ninth was a team failure all around to allow the winning run (because the Grand Slam simply tied the score). Much like Game Two of the ALDS, the Tigers lose a heart breaker after seeing a dominant pitching performance by the starter.

But that's okay. The Tigers split a set of games in Boston against the team with the best offensive stats of the season and the best record in the American League. The Tigers can still close out this thing in Detroit with three wins in a row, and even if they fail to do that, they have proven their mettle on the road in "win-or-go-home" games. GO TIGERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THE WALKING DEAD PREMIERE: I watched this show from 9-10 pm last night while keeping the Tigers radio broadcast alive in my ear and keeping track of plays on my tablet. I love technology.

I was underwhelmed by the season four premiere. Though there were intense sequences and good characterization, the season seems to lack drive and purpose so far.

It is good to have some down time to the story after super intensity, such as we saw at the end of season three. And several of the new challenges to face the survivors were introduced in this episode. Still, it was the least interesting of the last three season openers. Though, granted, it would be difficult to trump the very first episode of the show's first season and the discovery of the prison in the season three premiere.

DUNE: I have decided to re-read Dune, the science fiction classic. I am loving it already and looking forward to the refresher via the audio book edition. At the same time as I am rediscovering Dune, I happend to load a post from John Scalzi's blog, FIND IT HERE, in which he describes the ten books in SF that have meant the most to him. Dune is one of the ten. The first chapter of Dune startling and memorable. The audio edition does it justice.

COLUMBUS DAY

I decided to blow the doors off my students' reality and belief in Christopher Columbus as some great hero and the discoverer of America, neither of which are true. As I recommending books every day to my reading class, obviously, because it's a reading class, I read from Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United States 1492-Present. I told them of the genocide of the Arawak and the pillaging of the Bahamas and Haiti by Columbus and his ilk.

Happy Lies about History Day.

TIDE POOLS

Thinking ahead, I took the Fantastic Four shirt with me to Hawaii and got a picture of myself on some lava at the Kalapana shore in the Puna District. See the spray from the pounding surf behind me?

Cool.

FANTASTIC FOUR RESOURCES

FANTASTIC FOUR WIKIPEDIA

FANTASTIC FOUR COMIC VINE

FANTASTIC FOUR MARVEL WIKI

FANTASTIC FOUR IMAGE GALLERY

- chris tower - 1310.14 - 19:14