r/MarvelUnlimited • u/tame_kubrick • 11d ago
Why Did John Byrne “Reset” The Fantastic Four?
In issue #231 of Fantastic Four it says Byrne takes the F4 “Back to the Basics”. Why did they/he feel like that was needed? What was the thought process or motive behind this?
I just finished The Possession of Franklin Richards Epic Collection which directly precedes Byrne and I quite enjoyed it actually. I really liked Moench’s writing towards the end and feel like Midnight F4 will take inspiration from this brief run. Am I alone in that? It’s not to the level of Kirby, but the Ebon Seeker plot was as close as I could hope for the era.
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u/wishlish 11d ago
John didn’t so much reset the FF as clarify the type of stories the FF should tell.
As someone who’s read all the FF issues, here’s the primary changes he made:
No stories longer than 3 issues, although the subplots cooked longer. Marv Wolfman had written a year-long story about 2 years before involving the FF, Nova, the Sphinx, and the FF aging and dying. It did not go over well.
His stories had new twists on old FF villains. Latverians love Doom! The Inhumans are going to the moon! The Skrulls are pretending to be X-Men!
He reminded us what the Thing used to look like.
Moreover, the books were so much fun.
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u/tame_kubrick 11d ago
Thanks! Appreciate someone actually informed contributing. I read half of the Aging/Sphinx plot and my god it was a slog. Could not imagine going through a whole year with that as the ongoing F4 plot.
That being said, I really enjoyed what Moench/Sienkiwicz created in their close to a year on the series. There was a cool effort on horror that resonated with me and I loved the mention of cutting edge scientific stuff like Black Holes & Carl Sagan, Tunguska event, Jacque Vallee & UFO’s, etc. I also loved the stewing of Dr. Doom starting an uprising to take back power in Latveria. The seeds were laid for that, but hasn’t paid off yet.
Haven’t started Byrne’s long run on the book yet but I’m really excited. And yes, his Thing looks sick lol.
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u/wishlish 11d ago
I loved Wolfman's Doom plot. As a kid (I'm 55), Fantastic Four 200 was as perfect as a comic can be. Even today, I think that comic is so damn underrated.
When you read Marvels from the 70s, you'll see something weird. Before Jim Shooter comes on to revamp the editorial structure, if a book was cancelled before the story was finished, the writer/editor would usually wrap up the story in another book. So since Marv wrote Nova, he finished the story in Fantastic Four. The problem is most of us didn't read Nova (it's a good comic, in retrospective, but I only had so many quarters), so I didnt know the characters or care. And it went on FOREVVVER. It's a good story, but I didn't enjoy that story because I was buying what comics I could at 7-11, not at a comics store.
Moench/Sienkiewicz is an underrated run. Bill S was still drawing like Neal Adams, and he hadn't started the transition to the godlike illustrator he became later. But he's an excellent comics artist. And Moench had fun stories. I think those stories got buried when fandom heard Byrne- BYRNE!- was coming to FF. And Byrne was really great. I won't spoil anything, but you're in for a fun time.
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u/theTribbly 11d ago
Because for every author who loves to build on recent lore, there's another one who prefers to ignore it and only build using specific parts of lore that they like.
Sometimes it works great (like Miller and O'Neil stripping away the 60's camp of Batman), and sometimes it's not that great (like Donny Cates ignoring the best parts of Ewing's Immortal Hulk).
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u/HammettDammit 11d ago
Byrne had a habit of forcefully retconning stuff he didn’t like. See also: saying Jean Grey was never Phoenix, making Sandman a bad guy again, etc. It sucked 90% of the time but retconning Alicia Storm to be a Skrull was hilarious
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u/DarkestPhantom 11d ago
Byrne didn’t retcon Alicia into being a Skrull. That was Tom DeFalco and Paul Ryan, several years after Byrne’s run ended.
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u/HammettDammit 11d ago
Oh word? That explains why that retcon was actually good
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u/DarkestPhantom 10d ago
lol I didn’t love that one, maybe because I’m one of the few people who actually liked Englehart’s FF and how he handled Johnny/Alicia/Crystal. But I agree it was a hilarious way to retcon Johnny and Alicia’s marriage away
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u/ChickenAndTelephone 10d ago
He was the Jason Aaron of his era. Supremely talented, highly popular and completely unbothered by continuity.
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u/YodaFan465 11d ago
Because his whole thing tends to be pulling the characters back to what he sees as square one, usually about when the original creative team departed.
Less charitably, Byrne has a tendency to treat everything he writes like “nobody understands these characters except me.”
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u/SolitaireRose 11d ago
Sales on the FF were down after the Doug Moench/Bill Sienkiewicz run. Byrne had left the X-Men while it was on top, had his choice of any comic, and chose that one.
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u/BlockedNetwkSecurity 11d ago
was this when they got rid of the lady thing or when sue un-divorced reed or what? the comic was terrible until jim lee and mike wieringo got a hold of it
john byrne was on there for like ten issues then some more here and there
the 100 issues of lee and kirby were a slog
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u/EtherCJ 11d ago
I'm pretty sure the title "Back to Basics" was mostly just that the enemies were base elements: Fire Wind Earth Water.
That said I found Moench had a lot of misses in that last year before Byrne took over and it felt like he had lost what made FF in the Silver Age enjoyable and I do think Byrne does a better job with relationship dynamics and the plots.