Annihilus was dying, you see, and had taken over the Baxter Building in a plan to end both our universe and the Negative Zone in one vainglorious attempt to take everyone with him.
The FF were trapped in the Negative Zone at the time, and had to work to get back to Earth.
Meanwhile, the Avengers knew nothing of that, but were trying to burst through an impenetrable "null field" that was spreading from the Baxter Building.
So, both teams working on the same problem, from a different end, unbeknownst to the other. A crossover that wasn't quite a crossover...until the last two pages of each issue--which were the identical scene!!
Of course, John Byrne wrote and drew the FF version. He also "co-plotted" the Avengers version (scripted by Roger Stern), and did the "breakdowns," with "finished art" by Joltin' Joe Sinnott!
So, for your continuing comic education, please take note the same scene done my (mostly) the same artist, but from different perspectives. (Also note the the word balloon attributed to Johnny in the FF version is given to Reed in the Avengers version--No-Prize!! No-Prize!!)
Fantastic Four #256:
Can we get Scott McCloud to do a page-by-page, panel-by-panel discussion of the choices here and their differing effects? And maybe explain what “breakdowns” means?
ReplyDeleteThat's a key point, because "breakdowns" can be anything from just panel layouts & suggestive panel contents to full pencils. Looking at the whole story, a lot of the "breakdowns" in the Avengers story are clearly Byrne's...in other panels, though, the style seems more Sinnott's. He was always a fairly "heavy " inker...
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