Review by Woodrow Phoenix
November 1961 began the Marvel Age with the publication of Fantastic Four No. 1, written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby. So much about that first issue is foundational to superhero comics that it has been reprinted countless times in all kinds of formats and sizes. So many reprints, so many references, homages and retellings that there can’t be anything left to discover. Or can there? Fantastic Four No. 1: Panel by Panel is another presentation of that first issue, but this time an examination in the most literal sense.
If you were lucky enough to hold that sixty year-old publication in your hands it would be hard to resist the impulse to run your fingers over it and peer very closely at the panels under a bright light, trying to take it all in. This book does that for you. Designer Chip Kidd and photographer Geoff Spear convinced a collector to let them take his rare, precious actual copy of that first FF comic and capture every page of it in super-high definition. They have taken those images and zoomed in on all that detail, to present every panel of that book magnified, and isolated on a page by itself. Or near enough as the edges of other panels are often visible as the upright rectangles of these pages are different proportions than the enlarged panels.
Since this book is bigger than the original comic this artwork appeared in, Jack Kirby’s drawings are seen here far larger than they have ever been shown before, sometimes stretched right across a two-page spread. The enlargement turns these panels into semi-abstracted studies of the mechanical effects of printing ink on top of cheap paper. Kirby’s black lines spread on the coarse newsprint into greyish textures, the dots of the colours overprinting each other don’t line up so the edges are moiréd and haphazard, but those distortions give the art a weirdly inhuman energy that makes them even more interesting to look at. The aged yellow paper, nearly completely brown in places, further emphasises how archaic this way of reproducing images is now while amping up the nostalgia.
On the off-chance that you’ve never read this comic before, the whole of the photographed FF1 is also presented in full pages at the back of this book so you can read it normally, and each page is annotated in fascinating exactitude by Marvel editor Tom Brevoort, writers Walter Mosley (yes, that Walter Mosley) and Mark Evanier.
Panels in isolation is the opposite of how comics function, so you wouldn’t think this idea would work at all, and a previous version of this concept didn’t. Maximum Fantastic Four, from 2005 was fatally boring and pointless, but that was mainly due to the sterilising effects of garish ‘digitally remastered’ colours on bright white paper and panels floating, denatured in vast areas of white space. By contrast, here Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear’s generous, obsessive approach fills each spread vividly and there isn’t one that doesn’t fascinate in some way. It’s all completely engaging if you allow yourself to sink into these lines and colours and let the oddness of their times do their work.
This book is a celebration of comics, of print, of the strangeness of monsters and heroes and stories, of collecting, and of time itself. There couldn’t be a better 60th anniversary present for Kirby, Lee and their Fantastic Four.
