Fantastic Four #32
Fantastic Four #32 marks one of Silver Age Marvel's earliest genuine family tragedies: the death of Franklin Storm, father of Sue and Johnny, who sacrifices himself to shield the team from a Skrull-planted bomb — a moment of earned pathos that the series had rarely attempted before. The issue introduced the Invincible Man alias (Super-Skrull in disguise), a concept compelling enough that later writers returned it for Doctor Doom in two separate storylines. It is also the debut of Warlord Morrat, a Skrull nobleman whose behind-the-scenes treachery, retroactively confirmed in Fantastic Four #37, deepened the political texture of the Skrull Empire and directly seeded the revenge arc that followed. The issue stands as an early proof that Lee and Kirby were willing to permanently alter their cast's emotional landscape rather than reset to the status quo.
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Produced under the Marvel Method, the story was plotted by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and scripted by Lee, with Chic Stone inking Kirby's pencils — a pairing that dominated Kirby's Marvel output through most of 1964 and gave the book a bold, dense line quality. The issue arrived two months after the Storm family was first introduced in #31, suggesting Lee and Kirby were accelerating the narrative rather than building slowly toward Franklin's end. Long-time Marvel editor Tom Brevoort has noted that by this period Lee was increasingly ceding plot invention to Kirby, though Lee's scripting and letters-page voice remained the book's public personality. The issue's letters column, reprinted in the Complete Marvel Reading Order archives, includes a contribution from a then-teenage George R. R. Martin, praising Kirby's artwork — one of several Martin letters printed in the title during the mid-1960s.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Story title: 'Death of a Hero!' — cover date November 1964, released September 1964; written by Stan Lee, pencilled by Jack Kirby, inked by Chic Stone, lettered by Sam Rosen.
- Death of Franklin Storm (Dr. Storm): Sue and Johnny's father is killed when he smothers a Skrull-planted bomb strapped to his chest, sacrificing himself to protect the Fantastic Four.
- First appearance of Warlord Morrat: The Skrull nobleman who engineers the bomb plot appears (unnamed) in this issue; his name and full role are not revealed until Fantastic Four #37.
- Franklin Storm's first name is revealed in this issue; he had previously appeared only as 'Dr. Storm' in Fantastic Four #31.
- The Invincible Man is revealed to be the Super-Skrull (Kl'rt), freed from the island-volcano imprisonment he has been in since Fantastic Four #18, disguising himself as Franklin Storm to exploit the team's emotional reluctance to fight him.
- The 'Invincible Man' identity was later reused by Doctor Doom against the Fantastic Four in Fantastic Four #196 and Fantastic Four #287.
- The story was reprinted in Marvel's Greatest Comics #24.
- The issue's letters page contains a contribution from George R. R. Martin, later the author of A Song of Ice and Fire, who was a regular correspondent to the title in this period.
Cast · 28 characters
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Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).