Every Sunday morning we showcase a classic comic cover, complete with compelling pop culture commentary, for your cordial contemplation. It’s the Classic Comic Cover Corner!
Fantastic Four #150 – September, 1974
Cover art by Gil Kane
The Internet is reaching a fever pitch in its coverage of the upcoming Marvel film, Avengers: Age of Ultron, but this past week it’s another super-team movie that caught my attention, specifically the Josh Trank helmed Fantastic Four flick that’s headed to theaters this coming August.
Empire.com released the first good image of the FF’s Thing (the CG creature played by Jamie Bell in the new reboot of the Twentieth Century Fox Film franchise) and I have to admit that despite my original misgivings about the direction this movie was headed, this is starting to look like it might actually be a pretty decent take on Marvel’s First Family. (See the new film images HERE.)
Ultron is almost exclusively an arch-enemy of The Avengers, but he has made occasional appearances in other books, like Daredevil, Deathlok, Iron Man, and especially the Fantastic Four. Now with Marvel not owning the film rights to the FF, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see a film based on the 1974 team-up of The Avengers, the Fantastic Four and The Inhumans (which occurred in the pages of Avengers #127 and Fantastic Four #150), but the convergence of popular media stories about the respective upcoming films can’t help but make one dream of the possibilities.
This classic two part story has the wedding of the Inhuman bride, Crystal, and the former Avenger groom, Quicksilver, as a backdrop. The teams meet in the Himalayan mountain refuge of the Inhumans to celebrate the big matrimonial event, but the festivities soon go awry when Ultron, attached to the colossal man monster body of Omega, kidnaps the bride and puts the hypnotic hurt on our heroes.
All seems lost until, in a decidedly deus ex machina moment, Reed and Sue Richards’ comatose son, Franklin, destroys Ultron with a psionic energy blast. Franklin comes out of his coma, and the wedding proceeds as planned, with plenty of super-soap-opera comic book style adornment.
On a side note, another FF item that caught my eye this week was the release of the first poster for the upcoming documentary movie about the original ill-fated Fantastic Four film by Roger Corman, Doomed! The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four. I’m really looking forward to this behind the scenes look at the unreleased 1994 film. (Find out more about it HERE.)
Be sure to follow us on Facebook!
