Saturday 29 March 2014

JOHN BYRNE'S FANTASTIC FOUR COVER GALLERY - PART THREE...

Images copyright MARVEL COMICS

Hard to believe that, with this post, we're almost halfway through JOHN BYRNE's run on The FANTASTIC FOUR, one of the 'must read' MARVEL mags of the 1980s.  I must confess to enjoying PAUL RYAN's art on the FF when he eventually assumed the artistic duties, but I was never as impressed with the stories as I'd been with some of Byrne's tales.  I'd have loved to see JB continue scripting the series and Paul Ryan drawing it - that would've really been something, don't you think?

Anyway, enjoy the covers here and be sure to rejoin us for another ten in an upcoming post.

This one's another mag I bought before dropping in on Glasgow's Blue Lagoon for a Fish
& Chips tea.  Unfortunately, those particular premises are now gone, though others yet
remain in the city centre





This, I believe, was the first ish of the FF I bought after moving to a new house in 1983.
What's more, I got it from the shop I used to buy TV Century 21 on my way to school when
I was 6.  On the way home with this mag, I stopped in a park and sat on a huge stone to read
it, a stone that had been there at least since I was around two years old.  Maybe around 10 or
so years after stopping to read this ish, the stone was gone - and with it, yet another part of
my cherished childhood, alas




4 comments:

DeadSpiderEye said...

Never really cared much for Bryne, stylistically he's too close designer art for me and he marks the progress towards the intricate linear but static style but that dominates today. 253 is a source of particular angst, I'm not keen on Pifco hair salon product catalogues, I really really don't see how he could've got that past an editor.

Kid said...

You'd be surprised at what artists can get past editors, DSE. Now I'll have to look at 253 in my Omnibus volume and see what you're referring to.

Anonymous said...

Most of these covers are not so instantly memorable as the previous batches but I must have had most of them.Was No.252 a landscape design - I can't recall if I had that one or not. I've read elsewhere online that it was a landscape design so the line "the World's most INNOVATIVE comic magazine" would be a total cheek considering The Titans had done it years before. Late 1983 is where my comic buying stopped for 24 years to be picked up again in November 2007. My memory is really muddled up as I thought the FF's white collars design happened after I'd stopped buying comics but apparently not.

Kid said...

It was landscape of a sort, CJ. The spine and staples were in the usual place, and you turned the comic on its side and turned the pages up, rather than over. And it was still one page per page (if you see what I mean), although one page above another (when there were no ads) sometimes gave the impression of being a Treasury-sized page. The Titans was, as you know, two pages per page and turned from right to left, as per a 'normal' comic.



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