The thing about comic book collectors is they collect comics. I mean, that sounds obvious on the face of it, but what that means is that they go out and obtain comics, and then keep them. Maybe they buy new comics every week at their local comic shop, or they only go to conventions to pick up back issues, or they just order trade paperbacks from Amazon, or they back a lot of Kickstarter projects. However they get them, the point is that there's an ongoing influx of comics being added to their collection. And with that comes storage.

When I was eleven, I had a subscription to The Fantastic Four and that was pretty much the extent of my collecting. I got one new comic each month, and very, very occasionally a handful of others if Mom had a little extra pocket change and I was being really whiney at the grocery store. Between the two, let's call it 20 comics a year. Storing 20 comics is not a big deal. You could drop those as a stack on the kitchen table and it wouldn't cause too much of an issue.

After five years of that, though, you've now got 100 comics. It's not impossible to find room for 100 comics, but that's probably enough that if you tried just dropping them on the kitchen table, you wouldn't be able to just slide them to side a bit to have lunch. They could still pretty easily fit in a short box, but you're now starting to consider their space and size, and how much room they take up.

But hey, we added five years to an 11-year-old. That's a sixteen-year-old now. One who can drive and works part-time at McDonald's. That single title subscription is now six titles. And instead of begging Mom for pocket change, McDonald's allows for discretionary income, meaning more purchasing power and more regular trips to the comic shop. So instead of 20 comics per year, we're looking at maybe 100 comics per year. Under the original premise, it would've taken fifteen years to fill a single long-box. Now, it's down to three years. Three years to figure out where you're going to put another long-box isn't a terrible endeavor, but it's certainly more thought-consuming in terms of storage logistics than a single long-box over a decade-plus.

Where I'm going with this is that the more comics you buy, the more storing them becomes a concern. Because not only do you have to consider where you're going to put all these new comics you just got, but that's in addition to the ones from before that you were already storing! If this keeps happening throughout your life -- you keep buying comics -- you eventually start run up against the financial constraints of storing them. You've bought as many bookshelves as you can fit in your home, the books on the shelves are all two or three deep, plus there's two or three more books lying horizontally across the tops of everything else too. You're now essentially running up against three options...

1. Create additional storage space in your home
2. Rent a storage unit at another location
3. Get rid of some of your collection

Me, personally, I have yet to intentionally do #3. I lost a long-box full of comics in a flood back when I was in college, and I've gotten rid of some duplicate books I wound up with, but I've never sat down and thought, "I should sell some of my comics to make more space." The first idea of "creating" mroe storage space I did once basically by selling one house and buying another; I didn't do it in order to get more storage space for my comics, but I did take advantage of that opportunity. I have tried renting storage space, as well, but that was a consciously temporary endeavor while I was moving.

What I don't know, though, is which of those three methods might be more common than the others. When folks run out of space for their comics, how do most people handle that? I see some people selling their comics online, often with a distinct "I need to make more space" type of message, but I have no sense of how common that is against other options.

Please do me a favor, and in the comments, let me know if/when you found yourself running out of space to store your collection, and how you tackled it. One of the three options here, or maybe a combination? Or maybe something else entirely that I haven't thought of! I'm genuinely curious what might be more/less common.

In 1998, a new restaurant opened in New York City called Mars 2112. It was a theme restaurant of the type that were popular in the late 1990s, with this particular theme being, to no surprise, an immersive Mars visit. Supposedly, the owners had studied prior theme restaurants to see where they failed and tried to incoporate as many learnings as possible.

Patrons would enter via the "Cyberstreet" waiting area which featured space themed arcade games. When enough tables were ready, groups of two or three dozen would be "boarded" on a shuttle that took them on a simulated four-minute ride from Earth to Mars and, upon disembarking, they'd be seated in the "Crystal Crater" which was set to look like a hollowed out crater on Mars specifically for the purposes of dining. The waiters and bartenders were all clad in shiny uniforms that looked like they drew inspiration from The Jetsons and Lost in Space, while a few actors would roam the dining room floor in alien costumes to meet and greet the customers. The menu consisted of space-themed meals and drinks which, supposedly, were much better than your average for a theme restaurant.

A second location was opened outside Chicago two years later, and the owners were trying to raise funding for additional spots in Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Minneapolis when 9/11 effectively slammed the brakes on all US tourism, which the restaurant depended on. The Chicago location was quickly closed and the company filed for bankruptcy in 2002. The New York location remained opened but made a number of cutbacks. They continued to struggle, filing for bankruptcy again in 2007, and eventually shuttered entirely in 2012.

Now you may be asking, "What does any of this have to do with comics, Sean? Did they produce some kind of comic to promote the restaurant?"

No, they did not. However, Dumbing of Age creator David Willis worked at the second location as a shuttle pilot that ferried patrons from Earth to Mars. Willis recently noted that he was one of the few people who liked doing that job "because 90% of it was sitting on a chair alone in the dark." Given the limited time that location was open, it completely overlaps with the production of Willis' It's Walky! comic and he said he did a lot of thumbnail sketches for that strip while the simulator was running. Although he didn't say expressly, it seems likely the Mars 2112 gig influenced the space theme of It's Walky!

And as it happens, there is in fact footage online of Willis in his role as a shuttle operator! This isn't professional-grade camerawork by any stretch, but Willis is plainly visible as people enter and exit the shuttle, and he very clearly introduces himself with his real name. Enjoy!

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Skip the AI Cheat Code
https://ift.tt/FZ9wszg

Kleefeld on Comics: John Byrne's Unused FF
https://ift.tt/BUsketf

Kleefeld on Comics: Studying Problems
https://ift.tt/3Eeogbn

Kleefeld on Comics: Dr. Werthless Review
https://ift.tt/pn0BMgC

Kleefeld on Comics: Funeral for a Country
https://ift.tt/CwtW1qK

Shortly after election day last year, I wrote a somewhat rambling post about my cynicsm going into a second Trump administration. After Congress yesterday voted to kill millions of Americans -- and make no mistake, that is precisely what they did; Rep. Derrick Van Orden celebrated online that "17 million people lost health care" and "18 million kids lost school meals" -- and cede much of their own power to a single man, I don't find anything worth celebrating for "Independence Day" this year. Hell, I can barely string together some coherent thoughts.

I'm not going to write anything new and just copy a portion of what I wrote back in November. It's sadly even more relevant now...

Back in the mid-90s, I enjoyed playing a game called Jump Raven. You basically had to fly around this pseudo-future, climate-change-impacted New York and pick up DNA capsules of nearly extinct animals, so that various gangs like neo-nazis (who, of course, were shooting at you) wouldn't get a hold of them and create mutant monsters. The actual game play was a little repetitive, but they used an interesting (custom) software engine and there was a good story around the game. One of the game features was that you could choose what type of music you listened to while you were flying around. All original songs, most of them quite good for a small-ish company's video game. But what stuck out to me back then was that one of the the songs had a spoken word refrain over an electronica type beat. The line was "The average lifespan of nations is 200 years."

At the time, I didn't know if that was an accurate figure or not. But I always thought it casually sounded about right. A lot of short-lived countries of 50-100 years and a few outliers that skew the average upwards. Sounds like there's never been a lot of actual research on it, but what there is puts the figure between 150 and 250. Given that the United States passed it's 200-year mark about two decades before that game came out, it did get me thinking about the country's time was indeed limited. I didn't know by how much, certainly, but with each passing year, I felt we were pushing our luck.

The thing was, though, I couldn't see HOW the country might collapse. I couldn't find anything really comparable. The USSR seemed to be about the closest, but really only in terms of size and power. The political structure and geographic issues were wildly different. Despite thinking about that off and on for decades, it wasn't until 2017 that I started to figure out how a collapse might happen. My guess is that individual states start seceding in "protest" of federal regulation. I could see both progressive states peeling off from a GOP-led capital or regressive states peeling off from a democratic one; who leaves first would depend on who's in power when they finally push brinkmanship too far.

One thing I did make a point of trying to learn from studying the Soviet Union's collapse was what happened to regular people. The collapse is almost always discussed in terms of the politics of it all, but rarely in terms of what happened to Joe Average who was just trying to earn a living. Spoiler: Joe Average doesn't do well. The poverty rate in the region skyrocketed from 1.5% in 1991 to 49% in 1993. Life expectancy dropped from 64 to 57. Alcohol-related deaths rose 60% and deaths from diseases went up 100%. Thousands upon thousands died as direct result of USSR's collapse. By 2004, 20% were still in poverty and by 2011, 53% could still only afford basic necessities (which technically isn't poverty, but not by much).

I've heard it said that the Soviet Union seemed strong and didn't look like it was going to collapse, until it did. And it threw many people into financial turmoil almost overnight. I think a decade from now, people will say the US didn't look like it was going to collapse, until it did. And the people who will fare best in a US collapse are the ones who have already been thinking about how to deal with it. The people who were answering the question "what can I do?" from a tactical perspective.

It was when I started understanding how and why a collapse might occur that I started publicly suggesting that the United States was unlikely to survive as a country past 2030. Now, this was back in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump first took office, so I recognized even at the time that some cynicsim on my part might be at play. But I have circled back to this notion repeatedly, and I have yet to see anything to suggest to me that my 2030 "deadline" needed to be adjusted. I still don't. Trump's time in the White House before did much more damage to the country than I think most people recognize, and even if Joe Biden did everything possible to fix things (which, to be clear, he didn't) it would've still taken decades to repair the damage Trump did.

I am absolutely NOT cheerleading the collapse of the United States here. However it happens and whoever is in the White House at that moment, it will result in thousands upon thousands of deaths. Those who aren't killed outright will suffer massive hardships, many of which will lead to early graves.

I don't have anything to comfort anyone. Yes, you should do what you can. Yes, you should try to avoid collapsing into a ball of despair. But the reality is that things will get worse for everyone reading this. You will see some of your favorite businesses go under. You will see many people you know and love lose their livlihoods. You will see people you know and love have their very existence declared illegal. You will see people you know and love die. There's more than a fair chance you yourself will be one of those people who lose their livlihood, are declared illegal, and/or die. There is no way I can make any of those realities any more comforting.

When Trump was in the White House before, I regularly said that the best way to think of him is to recall the most two-dimensional, evil-for-the-sake-of-evil villains from the chinsiest Saturday morning cartoon you ever saw. This is not Lex Luthor taking power, this is Boris Badenov. We were lucky then that he is a fucking idiot and didn't have a plan. But in seeing that, the Heritage Foundation stepped in this time and explictly outlined a step-by-step process that even an idiot like Trump can follow. People died because of Trump before, but that was as often out of incompetence as malice. That ratio has swung very much more in favor of malice since then.

Other people will have much more practical advice about resisting. Building communities. Establishing (relatively) safe havens. The practical ideas I have are largely specific to me and my situation, and circle around my and my wife's physical safety. The only broader advice I can offer is to mentally/emotionally prepare for the worst, but frankly I'm not sure how to do that. But I can't offer "it'll be okay" or "it'll get better" platitudes with any degree of sincerity because I flatly don't think it will. Not any time soon.

If you are here reading this, I suspect you and I are in some measure of alignment with regard to good and bad, right and wrong, facts and opinions. So I do wish you well. I hope you're able to survive and thrive in every way possible. But luck favors the prepared as Edna Mode said, so do what you can now. Build your communities, stockpile your supplies, plan your escape route, do what you need to do.

Be safe out there.

I first became aware of Frederic Wetham in the 1980s when I began looking into the history of comics. He was largely presented as the most evil villain in the history of the comics with no redeeming qualities, hell-bent on destroying the entire industry. When we started getting the likes of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, the mood was very much, "Okay, we've finally gotten past the bullshit he inflicted on the medium!"

It would be another decade or so, though, before I sat down to actually read Seduction of the Innocent. I was actually pretty astonished. I mean, by then I knew the basic premise of his arguements -- I had read any number of pieces refuting his claims -- but what astonished me was how his ideas took hold in the first place. Because even if you read nothing but that one book, his arguements don't even make sense within that decidedly limited context. It's like that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Bedevere tries to tease out a logical case for proving a woman is a witch by comparing her weight to that of a duck. He moves the crowd through things one step at a time, and you can't help but go slackjawed at how nonsensical it is. Seduction of the Innocent reads just like that.

And that was still well over a decade before Carol Tilley went through all Wertham's archived papers and discovered how he flat-out lied about his 'research.'

Now there has been some measure pulling back on how 'evil' he is presented as. There are not infrequently comments about how he was genuinely concerned for kids' well-being, and his clinc in Harlem was beneficial. And sometimes people will make note about his The World of Fanzines book as proof that he came around to the benefits of comics in the end. And it's all of that that I'm bringing to the table in reading Dr. Wethless, the graphic novel biography of Wetham by Harold Schechter and Eric Powell.

I'll start by saying that this is indeed a full biography. Although we don't get anything about Wetham's childhood, we do join him in 1914 as he starts his professional education. He moves to the United States, changes his name to something less Germanic, gets married, and really gets his start as a psychiatrist. We follow his career around as he repeatedly gets forced out of various hospitals and instiutions basically for being an asshole, continually demanding that his diagnoses are correct and everyone else is wrong. It's not until 1946 that he starts the aforementioned Harlem clinic and it's there that he first discovers comic books. The story then runs through the parts of his life that you're probably already somewhat familiar with -- Seduction of the Innocent, the Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings, etc.

I don't know what Schechter's or Powell's opinions of Wertham were when they went into this project, but it seems like they tried to present as fair a take on the man as possible. They show him clearly very concerned with all of his "patients" (I only use quotes because some technically weren't patients in the strictest sense, even if/when he met and spoke to them in that manner) even those who openly admitted to murdering others. He seems to genuinely want to help people get better... however, he also really comes across as an egotisical asshole to everyone he deals with at a professional level. His career is littered with bosses and co-workers who refuse to even deal with him as soon as they aren't forced to. His books -- he wrote several before and after Seducation -- are read with mockery and reviewed unflatteringly, but he never seems to gain enough self-awareness to take on board ANY criticism. And to top it off, he never seems to have all but a very, very narrow view of how to approach psychiatry and remains willfully blind to other ideas.

The books ends with...

Ironically for a dedicated practitioner of depth psychology, he possessed a remarkably simplistic concept of the underlying operations of the human psyche. If there is a tragic element to his life, it is that this limitation -- his monkey-see-monkey-do view of human behavior -- has so thoroughly over-shadowed his many admirable traits. Fairly or not, in the world of comicdom, he will always remain 'Dr. Werthless.'

Honestly, I think that's still generous. As I've said multiple times in this short review already, he sounds like he was an asshole to anyone who he wasn't in a position of power/authority over, and he spent much of his career -- even before the comic book stuff -- engaging in cynical and often baseless self-promotion. The care that he showed patients does come across as genuine, but that simplistic view of the human psyche he seemed to have makes me wonder how many people he legitimately helped. And of those, how many did he wind up helping by just being someone who listened? That's not nothing, to be sure, but on the flip side, how many people did he make worse by unintentioanlly offering bad counsel? Did the testimonies he offered at various trials help people any more than any other psychiatrist's would have? Given his overall approach, I doubt it, because I see little in his work that seems grounded in actual study.

Overall, the story is presented well. However, the almost strictly chronological approach was a bit off-putting at first when we bounce between Wertham's life and that of a serial killer he later works with. I get the intent might be to show how Wertham showed compassion to a truly awful and sick human being, but since they don't meet until 1934, there winds up being the first quarter of the book where large parts seem like irrelevant tangents. And given that the entire book does indeed include a few out-of-sequence scenes, I think that might have worked better as a flashback. But aside fromt that, things flow smoothly and Powell's portraits of Wertham throughout the book (not just Wertham but everyone) was spot-on.

I don't know if it'll necessarily change your mind about Wertham, depending on where you're coming from, but I don't believe it's intended to. It's just presenting a full biography of the man as honestly as possible, and that's certainly worthy of a read in my opinion. The book is published by Dark Horse and came out earlier this week, so it should be readily available. It retails for $29.99 US.

For the past year or so, I've been watching the TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey. It started in 1982 and lasted only one season; there was DVD release in 2009 but it's not streaming anywhere, so it's a little difficult to find these days. In the wake of Raiders of the Lost Ark's success, a number of media outlets tried to capitalize on the film's popularity with similar pulp hero adventurers; in the case of Gold Monkey, the hero is a freelance pilot based in on a small island in the South Pacific during the late 1930s. (And if you're immediately thinking, "Hey, that sounds a bit like TailSpin" that cartoon was very directly inspired by Gold Monkey. The similarities are deliberate.)

Personally, I had enjoyed Raiders immensely and I recall being eager to absorb similar media back then but, for whatever reason, I was unable to watch more than a handful of episodes of Tales of the Gold Monkey when it was first broadcast. I'm sure it aired at a time which conflicted with something else, but I couldn't tell you what. In any event, I do remember enjoying what little I did see and being disappointed I couldn't watch more of it; I'm pretty sure they didn't even air it in re-runs during the subsequent summer.

Watching the show now, some four decades later, it feels very painfully of its time. I'm sure it wasn't considered a cheap show -- indeed, speculation today is that it was cancelled in part because of its comparatively higher costs -- but it still had the constraint of an early 1980s TV show budget. Everything looks like a set. Expensive effects shots get re-used throughout the series; some of the clips are very clearly then-40-year-old stock footage. The scripts feature a lot of casual sexism prevalent in the 1980s, on top of the more overt sexism of the late 1930s that's added to make it more period appropriate. One of the characters is an alcoholic, which is frequently played for laughs. There's a disturbing amount of yellow-face (although they start to get somewhat better in using Asian actors about a third of the way through the season) and there's a lot of overbroad cultural stereotypes used for pretty much every non-American character.

The episodes are of radically varying levels of quality. Some are quite good and touch on some interesting themes; others feel like every other page from the script was cut. Several have decent stories, but run into pacing issues that come from being forced into a tight run-time with very specific times needed for commercial breaks. You could very much tell when they had a 30-minute story and threw in 15 minutes of padding, or when they had an hour story and had to speed run the whole thing to get it down to 45 minutes. Certainly a lot of problems, too, stemmed from having a large array of writers -- there were few episodes with less than three credited writers and few writers who contributed to more than a single episode.

As I said, though, it is very much of its time. All of those issues were given a pass in the 1980s because that's just how things were. Hell, the fact that one of the secondary characters is wheelchair-bound and that's literally never commented on makes the show downright progressive for its time! But overall, while the show has its moments, it can be hard to sit through and that's why it's taken me over a year to watch -- I simply could not force myself through the series without taking long breaks between episodes.

What does that have to do with comic books?

As I was watching through the episodes, I found myself thinking things like, "Wow, that effect looks cheap!" Or "Why is this scene dragging on so long?" Or "This fight choreography is crap!" There is plenty to criticize throughout the show. But at some point towards the end of the series, I happened across a bit of trivia where Caitlin O'Heaney's character is supposed to get upset and throw a rice bowl she's carrying. But if you look carefully, in the specific shot when she throws the bowl, there's nothing in her hand. She just pretends to throw the bowl off-camera and there's a smashing sound effect heard. That particular shot, it turns out, was actually just a rehearsal where they happened to have the cameras rolling. For whatever reason, O'Heaney delivered a better performance in that rehearsal and they opted to use that take since her hand is only visible for a few frames and the previous shots had already firmly established she had a rice bowl in her hands. It's a technical error, but it wasn't practical to 'fix' it (by re-filming) so they danced around it as much as they could (mostly by the use of the smashing sound effect) and it works well enough for the story beat.

And that's relevant to comics because we're talking about art made in a commercial setting. Setting aside whatever limitations in skill a creator has, there are practical considerations that go into every project. The effects look cheap because they didn't have a budget to make better ones, so they did the best they could. The scene is dragging on because the network required precisely 47 minutes of run-time, and something needs to be stretched out to fill that space. The fight choreography is crap because the original choreographer was ill, and the replacement came in at the last minute and had very little time to work with the actors. That's not to say that every visible problem is the result of some random externality no one had control over and is therefore beyond criticism. Obviously, as a creator, you want to minimize those types of issues as much as possible and, for good or ill, your work will be viewed as professional or not in part based on how many of those external factors you're able to mitigate.

But these issues are very much worth considering if you are a creator and are looking at these other works to learn from them. Many of the now-classic comic book stories were written as serial adventures to be told over months, not in a read-it-all-in-one-sitting collected edition. There's going to be set up and paced for a month-long break between "chapters." The original Superman story from Action Comics #1 was designed as a newspaper comic strip, so it has the pacing for that; it was also designed to be read with more line details and no color.

My whole point being that, when you're looking at a piece of work for inspiration or to study and learn from, try to consider the practical limitations those creators might've dealt with. It won't and shouldn't act as an excuse for any problems/issues you find, but seeing how they might've dealt with those problems can be as enlightening as understanding the parts where everything worked perfectly!

I'm running a little tight on deadlines this week, so I'm going to re-present an interesting (to me, at least) piece that ran in Comics Feature #44 (May 1986), published just as John Byrne announced that he was leaving the Fantasic Four. While other articles in the same issue mention John's departure, it's clear that this was written before that decision had been made. This helps to put some context around Fantastic Four #296, the final issues of The Thing, Johnny's wedding, and the introduction of 4 Freedoms Plaza.

The 25th anniversary issue of the Fantastic Four will be issue 296 which at 64 pages is not just a double-issue, such as they did with FF 236, the 20th anniverary story, but a triple-issue! Writer/artist John Byrne describes FF 236 as being comparable to doing Fantastic Four: The Movie while 296, the triple-issue, will be the ultimate comic book version of the FF. It will tie into so many things which relate to the earlier years of the title.

Of his appraoch to these stories, Byrne says, "The whole thrust of FF 236, the 20th anniversary story, was to do a story that was more or less completely divorced from the regular book so that it could sort of stand on its own as a 'movie.'" By this he means that anyone who'd just stepped off the moon and had never heard of the FF could read issue 236 and understand everything that was going on.

"In the 25th anniversary issue I'm going to be doing essentially the same thing in that you'll be able to pick up on these guys even if you've never seen them before. But I also want to fill it up with all kinds of little, almost subliminal, fanish type styff that people will recognize as being references to earlier stories."

The title of FF 296 is "Return to Monster Island," a reference which will mean something if you're at all familiar with Fantastic Four number one.

"The basic premise," Byrne reveals, "is that Reed, Sue, Johnny and She-Hulk are out in California and they go out to the old rocket base in Central City. It's all grown over with weeds and looking pretty scraggy, the way Cape Canaveral is these days. The first part of the issue, as it now stands, will be a retelling of Fanastic Four number one, as they tell their origin to She-Hulk -- their first battle with the Mole Man and all that." But things start happening as the world is assaulted by wide-ranging earthquakes, which Reed Richards pinpoints as having their source at Monster Island. But Monster Island blew up at the end of FF 1 -- or did it?

"So they go tripping off to Monster Island," Byrne continues, "or where it used to be, and discover that what is now there is basically a very large hole -- into which sea water has been pouring for years. It's been gushing down into the tunnels that the Mole Man appropriated from the Deviants and has managed, in many cases, to work its wat quite a ways down into the vicinities of the center of the Earth. As a result, it's coming back as super-heated steam which is causing vast pressures to build up underneath the crust of the Earth -- which is what's causing all of these giant earthquakes, globally.

"They are about to do what they can to undeo this damage when... the Mole Man turns up. He's still there, still lurking around, and he's got all kinds of things happening involving that group of outcasts he put together." One important facet of this story involves a sequence from Fantastic Four number one in which the Mole Man revealed his mammoth Valley of Diamonds, a concept which has not been dealt with since. But Byrne has managed to work it into the story in a surprising way.

"The Mole Man has discovered that the Valley of the Diamonds is not in fact a natural phenomenon. The diamonds are mystical, and he's discovered that if he melts down the diamonds he gets this glib which, if you immersed yourself in it, you are transformed into whatever you are in your heart of hearts."

What follows is a story in which the FF try to avert final disaster for the world while the Mole Man is convinced that they're just there to make trouble for him again. But if that's not enough (remember this is a triple-issue filled with triple-threats and triple-promises), an important former member of the FF turns up there -- the Thing. Certain changes planned for the Thing, which have not yet been revealed but will have come to pass by late summer, will have driven him to Monster Island, convinced that it is the only place for a monster such as himself. There, the Thing comes face to face with what he is in his heart of hearts.

The Thing is reunited with the FF in this adventure, and at the end, "We get back to New York for an anniversary party!" Byrne explains. "It's kind of a separate story at the end of the issue which unveils the FF's new headquarters and has virtually the entire Marvel Universe guest-starring, including folks from Marvel."

Beyond FF 296 will be the aftermath of the return of the Thing. For instance, what will happen to the She-Hulk, a character John Byrne happens to have a certain fondness for? "We will have to address the very serious questions of whether they will be the Fantastic Four or the Fantastic Five," Byrne reveals.

Other stories in the FF's future include a possible wedding in issue 300 and the finale to "The Last Galactus Story" continued from the pages of the now-defunct Epic Illustrated. It looks as though 1986 will be a landmark year for the Fantastic Four in numerous ways.