Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Comics Magazine #1

History

Erik Larsen, a longtime Kirby devotee and co-founder of Image Comics, conceived and shepherded the project as writer, penciler, and layout artist, with Eric Stephenson serving as co-plotter and colorist throughout the run and Bruce Timm contributing as scripter, penciler, and inker. Larsen provided layouts for most issues — with Keith Giffen handling the remainder — to maintain visual continuity across a rotating stable of pencilers that included Ron Frenz, Frank Fosco, and Jorge Lucas. The single most resonant creative decision was recruiting Joe Sinnott, the inker whose line had defined the look of Kirby's FF pages through the Silver Age, to ink portions of the series in retirement, lending the book an audible echo of authenticity. The series was edited by Bobbie Chase under editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, and issue #1 shipped from Marvel on December 20, 2000, with a February 2001 cover date.

Trivia · 8 facts

• The story of issue #1, titled 'The Baxter Building Besieged!', kicks off when Doctor Doom dispatches his Servo-Guards alongside the Enclave — scientists Maris Morlak, Wladyslav Shinski, and Carlo Zota — to raid the Baxter Building and loot Reed Richards's laboratory on his behalf.
• During that raid, the dormant Android Man (also called the Super-Android), originally created by the Mad Thinker and brought to the Baxter Building by Reed for analysis, is reactivated; it battles the entire Fantastic Four lineup — Reed Richards, Sue Richards, Johnny Storm, Ben Grimm, and Crystal — until Invisible Girl defeats it by projecting a force field inside its body and expanding it.
• The issue's five-person FF roster includes Crystal (Crystalia Amaquelin Maximoff) as an active member, reflecting her in-continuity tenure with the team during the late Kirby era the series emulates.
• The creative team for issue #1 lists Erik Larsen and Eric Stephenson as writers, with pencils by Bruce Timm, Keith Giffen, Jorge Lucas, and Larsen himself, and inking by Bruce Timm, Al Gordon, Jorge Lucas, and Joe Sinnott — an unusually large collaborative crew assembled to approximate a single stylistic voice.
• The series as a whole is explicitly designed to slot into Marvel continuity between Fantastic Four #100 and #101, functioning as a 'what if Kirby never left' thought experiment rather than an out-of-continuity elseworlds tale.
• Joe Sinnott, the Hall of Fame inker who had defined the look of the original Kirby FF pages, came out of retirement to ink portions of the series — most frequently over Ron Frenz's pencils — giving the project a direct physical link to the Silver Age pages it was honoring.
• The 12-issue series was issued to mark the Fantastic Four's 40th anniversary in 2001, and the complete run was later collected in both a hardcover edition (2011, reissued with a new trade dress) and a paperback edition, keeping the series in print for subsequent anniversary milestones.
• Other major Marvel characters appearing across the series include the Avengers, the X-Men, Thor, the Hulk, Black Panther, the Silver Surfer, Namor, the Inhumans, MODOK, and Annihilus, all rendered in a period-accurate visual and tonal register.

Cast · 10 characters

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