Fantastic Four #11

History

Written by Stan Lee and illustrated by Jack Kirby, with inking by Dick Ayers and lettering by Artie Simek, the issue shipped with a cover date of February 1963 and an on-sale date of November 1962. Lee later admitted in a 1970 interview that this was, in his opinion, the worst-selling issue of the run to that point, attributing its poor performance to the green alien cover figure striking readers as 'too unusual and too frivolous.' The first story's fan-mail framing was reportedly inspired by the volume of reader letters Marvel had been receiving on the title — a phenomenon Lee recognized as an opportunity to deepen the connection between characters and audience by staging the response inside the comic itself rather than purely in a letters column. Willie Lumpkin, who anchors that first story, was not a brand-new creation: Lee had originated the character with artist Dan DeCarlo for a syndicated daily newspaper strip that ran from December 1959 to May 1961, and he transplanted the mailman into Marvel continuity here, aging the character up considerably from his strip incarnation while preserving his small-town good nature.

Trivia · 10 facts

• First appearance of the Impossible Man (unnamed Poppupian), a shapeshifting alien from the planet Poppup, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby; he would not return until Fantastic Four #175 (1976), at which point he became a recurring presence in the book.
• First Marvel Comics appearance of Willie Lumpkin, the Baxter Building's mailman, who had previously existed as the lead character of a Stan Lee / Dan DeCarlo syndicated newspaper strip (December 1959 – May 1961) before being transplanted into the Marvel Universe here.
• The issue contains two complete standalone stories: 'A Visit with the Fantastic Four' (the fan-mail / origin-retold story introducing Lumpkin) and 'The Impossible Man!' — an unusual format for the series at this stage.
• In the first story, Lee and Kirby dramatize reader letters inside the comic itself, including a sequence in which the team defends Sue Storm against critical fan mail questioning her value to the group — an early, in-narrative response to a debate that would dog the character for years.
• The first story also contains a flashback revealing how Reed Richards and Ben Grimm first met in college and later served together during World War II, adding substantive backstory to their friendship.
• The Impossible Man's origin is established in full: his people, the Poppupians, evolved instantaneous shapeshifting as a survival mechanism on the dangerous planet Poppup, where the entire species shares a collective consciousness and members have no individual names.
• Reed Richards defeats the Impossible Man not through force but by organizing all of New York City to ignore him — recognizing that the alien's behavior is driven entirely by a craving for attention — after which the alien voluntarily leaves Earth.
• The issue closes with a pin-up illustration of Namor the Sub-Mariner in his undersea lair; Sub-Mariner does not appear as a participant in either story but is indexed to the issue via this feature page.
• The cover carries the banner 'Collector's Item Issue!' — an early and self-aware piece of Marvel promotional language that has since been noted by readers as one of the first instances of that phrase appearing on a comic book cover.
• The issue has been collected in multiple formats, including the Fantastic Four Epic Collection Vol. 1: The World's Greatest Comic Magazine (2014) and various international editions, and the Impossible Man story's dialogue was directly quoted in a Superman #50 (DC, 1990) crossover featuring Mr. Mxyzptlk.

Cast · 12 characters

Full credits

Full plot ⚠ may contain spoilers