The Fourth Member--A Prologue

One of my earliest and fondest memories of my comics life is the end of Fantastic Four #176 (1976).

I had hopped on board with #170. In the brief half-year of my addiction, I had seen Luke Cage serve as an emergency fill-in member of the FF; Ben Grimm in an exo-skeleton; the Puppet Master striking; a trip to Counter-Earth, featuring a battle between the High Evolutionary and Galactus; and the return of the Impossible Man. Wow, what a nutty and fun-filled 6 months.

And #176 brought them back to Earth, and Roy Thomas and George Perez had a grand old time having the FF chase a rampaging Impossible Man through the Marvel offices. Plus, a Kirby cover!!

But the high point of the issue, for me was this: the FF discover that, while they were gallivanting around the solar system, their foes the Frightful Four had taken over the Baxter Building. The Four rush home, and waiting for them they find this:

I can't exactly explain why, but that panel still sends chills up my back every time I see it. The poses, the facial expressions, the tilted camera, the teasing next issue blurb...if I hadn't already been hooked, this one would dragged me in anyway.

My next-door neighbor and I spent literally every single day for the next four weeks speculating who the mysterious fourth member might be. I was still pretty new to Marvel Zombie-hood, and he was more of a DC guy. But we would put together lists of every bad guy we could think of; we scoured our limited back issue collections, and letters pages, and Bullpen Bulletins, for any ideas. That's how compelling we found that single panel, that simple question of who would be the "final and most fearsome member."

(For the record, all of our guesses would turn out to be very, very wrong...we'll get to that several posts from now.)

What we didn't ask ourselves back then, though, was why such a supposedly awesome group of evil would need to find a new fourth member. In fact, from the page before, look at this:

Yes, the Frightful Four, supposedly an arch nemesis of the Fantastic Four, had to put out a classified ad to find a fourth member. Not so Frightful, eh??

Of course, my limited Marvel experience had me in the dark about the sad fact that the Frightful Four had always had trouble filling that fourth slot. The Frightful Four, rather than being the evil doppelganger of the FF, had always been a trio of second-banana villains trying to step up to the big time, and were always--always--groping to find that fourth member who would put them over the top, and into the big time. And always failing, disastrously.

So over the next few weeks, I'll be taking the wayback machine to study the Frightful Four's fumbling attempts to find that fourth member, and examine why they always came up short. Why they never, ever quite made it to the top. And why that 4th slot was such a revolving door. Join me, won't you?