Marvel 1981 Week--Fantastic Four #236 (Part 2)!!

It's Marvel 1981 Week, kiddies, and this is the second part of an examination of the epic Fantastic Four #236, their 20th anniversary issue (by Byrne, Byrne and Byrne).

Our heroes, and Alicia Masters, are trapped in a tiny, scale-model town (Liddleville--get it?), with no powers and no way out! How? Well, they're victims of a plot by the Puppet Master, and...

Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever wrote Doctor Doom as well as Byrne. Byrne realized that, in the haughty, egotistical mind of Von Doom, he doesn't have to actually kill the Fantastic Four to win--he needs merely entrap and humiliate them to prove his superiority:

So Doom leaves them to own frustrated devices. But while the FF may be powerless, Reed still has his real super-power intact: his brain. He dopes out a way to give them back their powers. But someone doesn't want to play along:

Ben eventually relents:

Now, these next panels just might make you tear up:

Goddamn it, Byrne...sniff, sniff...

Now comes lots of fighting, lots of smashing of robots:

Snap, crackle pop. Hee.

They escape the confines of the fake town...but they have to find Doom and lure him there in order to reverse the "transmit-their-minds-into-synthe-clones" machine. And unlike many a previous FF scribe, Byrne prided himself on a strong Susan:

And what does she find?

What? What?? Show us!!!!!! Damn it!!!

Anyway, more of Doom and his warped world view:

And when Doom gets to the lab:

And voila!

But what happened to Doom?

Yeah, which is it? Both, actually...

D'OH!! [SPOILER ALERT: Doom eventually escaped!]

This is, in my opinion, one of the top 10 stories in Fantastic Four history. In Byrne's first shot at scripting Doom, he nails him; he pays homage to the Fantastic Four's root, while building the characterization and setting up for the future; and he tells a ripping good comic book story. Great, great issue.

And the last 14 pages of the book?

Yup, they took Jack Kirby's storyboards & Stan's script from an episode of the 1970s FF cartoon, and turned it into a comic story. Sadly, it's just a re-telling of the first Doctor Doom appearance from FF #5.

So, there's not really much of interest there, except for the cavalcade of Marvel inkers used to finish and ink the breakdowns. Oh, yeah, and H.E.R.B.I.E. in a pirate costume:

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

The Fantastic Four weren't the only ones celebrating an anniversary in November 1981:

Power Man and Iron Fist, fighting hordes of plant people and faux gods in K'un Lun? Count me in!