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Thursday, January 06, 2005

Fantastic Four #101 - Bedlam in the Baxter Building

As opposed to "Bedlam at the Baxter Building", which was from FF ANNUAL #3. This is of course the second last issue of Kirby's FF fun, and the last complete story (as #102 begins a continued story).

The issue opens up strong, with some downtime for the FF and Ben showing off some dance moves. And yes, that is Alicia. I'm not sure exactly what happened to her hair in this issue. Anyway, Kirby/Sinnott drawing the Thing dancing. Cool.



There's another good scene later where Ben is showing off for some kids in a park.

The main story isn't as good as those scenes, and I think they'd have been better off spending another 17 pages of Ben showing his moves. It's a trifle involving the Maggia, Marvel's clever name for an organized crime gang, buying the Baxter Building, evicting the FF, hoping to steal their technology. The Maggia goons manage to defeat the FF rather easily but of course they come back and win in the end. While the plots for the last handful of issues aren't as good, the action scene are good, and Kirby was still clearly having a lot of fun with scenes like the first one.

Published 1970

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Alicia clearly ended up grabbing a misfiled bottle of hair-coloring off her grocer's shelves that week--which is understandable, given that she's blind and all. I expect Ben was simply too polite to mention it to her.

Tom B

bob said...

Ah, of course. How could I forget the classic FANTASTIC FOUR #100A, where Ben first sees Alicia with the new hair, and assumes that she coloured it to impress another man, for how could she ever truly love... a Thing?

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