Une Aventure des Fantastiques #15
Une Aventure des Fantastiques #15 — subtitled 'Le Prince des Mers' — holds a singular place in French Marvel publishing history because it packages the exact moment Jack Kirby's unbroken interior-art run on Fantastic Four ends and John Romita Sr. steps in, giving French readers both bookends of that generational transition in a single 80-page volume. The album also reprints Fantastic Four #100, a milestone anniversary issue in which Stan Lee and Kirby paraded virtually every major FF villain — in android form — across the page for the last time together. For French audiences who had no access to individual US monthly comics in 1978, this album was the sole way to experience that historic handoff, making it a key document of how Marvel's Silver-Age architecture reached Continental Europe.
In "Le long voyage de retour !", Magnéto, à la tête de l'armée d'Atlantis, s'empare de New York et tient Jane et Lady Dorma en otage, exigeant que Namor et les Fantastiques Four lui prêtent allégeance. Face à cette menace, les héros résistent en utilisant une arme conçue par Mister Fantastic, capable de retourner les pouvoirs de Magnéto contre lui. Avec la victoire, Namor et son armée regagnent les profondeurs, laissant derrière eux une trêve fragile entre Atlantis et la surface. Written by Stan Lee, illustrated by John Romita with inks by John Verpoorten, and featuring a cover by Jean Frisano, this 1978 issue delivers a tense, pivotal clash with high stakes and enduring consequences.
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Editions Lug, the Lyon-based publisher whose name derived from Lugdunum, the Roman name of Lyon, had been reprinting Marvel material in large-format prestige albums since 1973, when the 'Une Aventure des Fantastiques' line launched with Les Inhumains sont parmi nous! The series presented American stories in broadly chronological order, translated and re-lettered by the in-house Atelier Lug team. Album #15, deposited in the first trimester of 1978, continued that approach by collecting Fantastic Four #100 (July 1970), #102 (September 1970), #103 (October 1970), and #104 (November 1970) — all written by Stan Lee — under the thematic umbrella of the Sub-Mariner/Magneto conflict arc. No issue #101 appears in the album because that issue was a reprint issue in the original US run and Lug, following its policy of presenting forward-moving narrative, skipped it.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Full title: Une Aventure des Fantastiques #15 — 'Le Prince des Mers' (Editions Lug, 1er trimestre / first quarter 1978); 64 pages, colour, softcover (broché), format 215 × 280 mm.
- Reprints four US issues in sequence: Fantastic Four #100 (July 1970, Lee/Kirby/Sinnott), #102 (September 1970, Lee/Kirby/Sinnott), #103 (October 1970, Lee/Romita Sr./Verpoorten), and #104 (November 1970, Lee/Romita Sr./Verpoorten).
- Fantastic Four #102 — reprinted here — is Jack Kirby's final issue as interior artist on the title, capping a continuous run of 102 regular issues plus six original annuals.
- Fantastic Four #103 — also reprinted here — marks the debut of John Romita Sr. as ongoing interior penciller on Fantastic Four, transitioning the book's visual identity from Kirby's bombast to Romita's cleaner house style.
- The central multi-part storyline depicts Magneto manipulating the Sub-Mariner (Namor) into launching a full-scale Atlantean war on the surface world; Fantastic Four #100 is a milestone anniversary issue in which the Mad Thinker and Puppet Master unleash android duplicates of nearly every major FF villain — including android versions of Namor, the Hulk, Dragon Man, the Wizard, the Trapster, and the Sandman — against the team.
- Crystal (Crystalia Amaquelin) appears as an active member of the FF throughout all four reprinted stories, and her elemental powers are the key to Reed Richards' device that ultimately neutralises Magneto in FF #104.
- The album belongs to the 43-issue 'Une Aventure des Fantastiques' line (1973–1987), Lug's flagship prestige album series; the series ran in broadly chronological Marvel order, beginning from the issue point where Lug's earlier monthly magazine Marvel had been forced to stop publication in 1971.
- The Namor–Magneto alliance thread reprinted here connects back to the end of Roy Thomas and Neal Adams' X-Men #63 (1969), as Namor discovers the unconscious Magneto in the Savage Land — a continuity thread that made the album an unusually dense crossover event for French readers encountering it in collected form.
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À la tête de l'armée d'Atlantis, Magnéto conquiert enfin New York. Tenant Jane et Lady Dorma comme otages, Magnéto essaie de forcer Namor et les Fantastiques Four de lui prêter serment d'allégeance. Au lieu de cela, les héros le neutralisent avec une arme construite par Mister Fantastic qui est capable de tourner les propres pouvoirs de Magnéto contre lui. Le prince Namor et son armée rentrent chez eux, et il y a encore une fois une trêve difficile entre Atlantis et le monde de la surface.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).