Fantastic Four: The Lost Adventure #1

History

Kirby drew the pages for a story intended to run as Fantastic Four #103, but the issue was shelved — reportedly after Lee found it insufficiently exciting — shortly before Kirby departed Marvel for DC Comics in 1970. When Marvel eventually needed to account for the unused pages, Lee, Buscema, and Romita Sr. heavily reworked the material into a flashback sequence for Fantastic Four #108 (March 1971), renaming the villain the 'Nega-Man' and embedding the story into a larger ongoing plotline. Decades later, recovered copies of Kirby's original uninked pencil pages — including margin notes in Kirby's own hand outlining his plot intentions — made a proper reconstruction possible. Marvel brought in writer Stan Lee to script the story as originally intended, longtime Fantastic Four inker Joe Sinnott to finish the inking, and artist Ron Frenz to draw a handful of panels where Kirby's original art could not be recovered; John Morrow, editor and publisher of The Jack Kirby Collector, contributed a historical essay contextualizing the entire production.

Trivia · 8 facts

• The issue publishes, for the first time in its intended form, the story Jack Kirby originally penciled for Fantastic Four #103 circa 1970, titled 'The Menace of the Mega-Men!' — making it the effective 103rd consecutive Lee–Kirby Fantastic Four collaboration.
• The creative team for the 2008 restoration consists of writer Stan Lee, pencilers Jack Kirby and Ron Frenz (Frenz completing missing panels), inker Joe Sinnott, colorist Christopher Sotomayor, and letterer Dave Lanphear; the issue was edited by Tom Brevoort under editor-in-chief Joe Quesada.
• The story introduces Richard Janus (the Mega-Man / Nega-Man) as a former college classmate of Reed Richards whose experiments with negative energy created a powerful, destructive alter ego — and whose confrontation with the FF ends in a self-contained resolution distinct from the heavily altered version in FF #108.
• The Invisible Girl (Sue Storm Richards) plays an active, decisive role in the story's climax, including a moment where she prevents Janus from shooting Mister Fantastic — a beat that was altered or removed in the FF #108 reworking.
• Annihilus appears as a threat emerging from the Negative Zone at the issue's conclusion, tying the story to the broader Negative Zone mythology Lee and Kirby established in Fantastic Four Annual #6 (1968).
• The super-sized package includes reproductions of Kirby's original uninked pencil pages complete with his handwritten margin notes, accompanied by a scholarly essay by John Morrow (editor of The Jack Kirby Collector and publisher of TwoMorrows Publishing) documenting the story's troubled production history.
• A full reprint of Fantastic Four #108 (March 1971) — the issue that first cannibalised Kirby's pages as a flashback, credited with 'last-minute revisions, deletions, and addenda' by Lee, Buscema, and Romita — is included, allowing readers to directly compare the two treatments of the same source material.
• The issue has been reprinted in Marvel Masterworks: The Fantastic Four Vol. 10 (2014) and Fantastic Four Epic Collection Vol. 6: At War with Atlantis (2020), as well as in a Spanish-language edition in Los 4 Fantásticos (Panini España) #3 (2013).

Cast · 8 characters

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