Collecting the FANTASTIC FOUR from the sixties.....

Jack Kirby's run on the Fantastic Four is legendary; he came up with some truly incredible stories and concepts for the book, but was aided by some really wonderful inkers on his run, including the two men I am naming in this article.

As I get older, I find Chic Stone's inks on the Fantastic Four to be more appealing to me. I started reading the FF through a reprint mag called Marvel's Greatest Comics, picking it up at a time when they were reprinting F.F. 69, which was inked by Joe Sinnott...

...to me, this was a great story to read, and from a period of the Fantastic Four that I would later collect as an adult. The storyline is probably the best Mad Thinker story ever, and a really intense one at that.

Whenever I would pick up a reprint or earlier issue of FF, I would often see Chic Stone's inks over Jack Kirby and find that he and Joe Sinnott had two definitely different styles of inking. In the issue below, the Fantastic Four get beaten, yes, beaten by Frightful Four in their second appearance in the book. Chic's ink work is fairly awesome....

Chic's inks was a bit more minimalist than I expected; it was good, clean, and classic, but very much different from Joe's run on the flagship Marvel title.

As I grew older, I appreciated both styles of inking, and there is a certain innocence and simplicity to Chic's work that makes it seem very sixties in its look. When Joe took over the inks, the FF got a real serious look to it, going first into the lost realm of the Inhumans and then into the cosmic odyssey of the first Galactus Trilogy......

Joe's inks gave the book a sort of grandeur unmatched at the time, with an incredible amount of detail and a powerful special effects budget that, if filmed, could only be reproduced on film by the best digital effects artists. 

The composition of the panels in the first Galactus story is incredible, and Joe really gets to push himself into some of his greatest work ever....

If you have the opportunity to read any of the classic FF from the 1960s, either in reprint or original form, I don't think you will be disappointed. There are so many good points to start at. I am gonna post a few more covers for those of you who want to look up a good era to start reading or collecting at. There are so many good places to start that I cannot list them all in one article, but here are a few favorites:

The story that started the Marvel Age of Comics......

The first Watcher story, which includes also the Red Ghost and the mysterious Blue Area of the moon. Inked by Steve Ditko, of Spider-man fame......

Not the first outing for the Thing vs. the Hulk, but one of the best, and this two part story guest-stars The Avengers.

This one issue story asks the question: what would the Thing do if he thought the Silver Surfer was trying to steal his girlfriend? 

A truly awesome story, built on a misunderstanding, that draws Spider-man and a slightly under powered Thor to the side of Daredevil who is clearly in a lot of trouble with Fantastic Four.

Postscript : For those of you who care about such things, Joe Sinnott has a Facebook page, so anyone who wants to add him and give him some love for his great work, please look him up. Joe inked the F.F. after Jack left, making many an artist look better than they actually were.