Fantastic Four Epic Collection, Vol. 9: The Crusader Syndrome

Fantastic Four Epic Collection

by Gerry Conway, Marvel Various (Writer)

Collects Fantastic Four (1961) #147-167, Giant-Size Fantastic Four (1974) #2-4, Avengers (1963) #127, material from Marvel Treasury Edition (1974) #2. FANTASTIC FOUR stands tall as one of the greatest super-hero series of all time - and it certainly didn't get there by doing the same old, same old! In this Epic Collection, the strained relationship of Reed and Sue Richards takes a turn for the worse. Sue joins Namor in an invasion of New York City - and the Frightful Four pile on, too! Then, the Femizons and Mahkizmo the Nuclear Man begin a battle of the sexes. Next, the Silver Surfer returns - with a vengeance! The Machiavellian Doctor Doom has captured the Surfer's beloved Shalla Bal and used her to turn him against the Fantastic Four! Giant-Size adventures and a royal wedding round it out as the FF prove that nothing is stronger than the bonds of family!

Genres: Comics, Marvel, Superheroes, Time Travel, Fantasy, Collections, Graphic Novels

520 pages, Paperback

Published August 29, 2023

About the author

Gerard Francis Conway (Gerard F. Conway) was an American writer of comic books and television shows. He was known for co-creating the Marvel Comics' vigilante the Punisher and scripting the death of the character Gwen Stacy during his long run on The Amazing Spider-Man. At DC Comics, he was known for co-creating the superhero Firestorm and others, and for writing the Justice League of America for eight years. Conway wrote the first major, modern-day intercompany crossover, Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man.

On April 27, 2026, Marvel Comics announced on its website and social media accounts that Conway had died at the age of 73.

News of Conway's death from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Sean Gibson]

He only contributes a few issues to this collection, but jeez...George Perez was just masterful.

Also, Medusa is the worst FF member ever, and I will die on that hill.

[Bob Wolniak]

To be fair, this is not my favorite era of the FF. It has short-lived, mostly unexplored themes of a rift between Reed and Sue Richards that could have been much more powerful, somewhat silly stories that are built up and dismissed in a few panels, such as Namor invading New York in order to trick Reed and Sue into realizing they actually love each other (!), a huge build-up to Omega/Ultron defeating the combined forces of the Avengers, Inhumans and FF only to have Franklin wake up from his coma (another unexplored theme with great potential) shut it all down with a mental attack in a few panels and everyone lives happily ever after, a distinctly 70s trope Mahkizmo (get it? machismo...) Neanderthal-like villain, unexplored character development with Medusa, and the overused Human Torch recklessly jumping into situation after situation like a hothead (get it?) before asking any questions. Sigh. I could go on: Reed's on-again, off-again disappearing powers theme is kind of ignored until much later issues. The Hulk emits gamma rays causing The Thing to revert to Ben Grimm. Why hasn't that come up before?

What I do like about this particular volume is that it covers a lot of issues at around 500 pages (almost omnibus-sized) and that it includes Giant-Size issues that have been and remain hard to find, and it bridges the entirety from the Buscema era to the short-lived Perez era for the 70s complete collector.

[Alex Andrasik]

A below-average era of Fantastic Four, bouncing between writers Gerry Conway, Len Wein and Roy Thomas, and equally bouncing between directions. Medusa is sidelined with nothing to do for most of this run as the fourth member of the team and then written out, replaced by a returning Sue who flirts briefly with the idea of becoming a PI before that thread disappears. Pietro and Crystal get married, and in a subsequent story featuring the return of a threat from the Fifth Dimension featured in an obscure Torch solo story from a decade earlier, Johnny finally gets over Crys in favor of a blue-skinned extra-dimensional nobody. Even the Thing's half-hearted "woe is me, the man-monster" schtick gets short shrift. We get an origin for FF frenemy Thundra as the greatest warrior of an alternate future where women rule the earth, a prospect that's presented as refreshingly positive in this telling; that's paired with what's viewed as one of the FF's worst stories, as it's revealed that an all man-run future also exists alongside Thundra's, and *that* world's champion, Makhismo, wants to ensure his future's dominance. I am not so down on this arc; Makhismo is derided overall as being pretty Ma-cheesemo, which observers take as a fault, but to me the story was written with the ridiculousness of male chauvinism well in mind and firmly on display. A better contender for worst arc in this collection is a dismal Doom/Surfer two-hander, where Doom somehow gets the Surfer to crash-land right where he's needed to fall victim to the Latverian monarch's latest scheme (it's implied that Mephisto had a hand in events, which, fine, but the whole thing comes off as the creators shoe-horning in a rationale for a story that readers must have found even more far-fetched than usual). What is that scheme? Confuse him with a Shalla-Bal lookalike, her mind seemingly wiped and her body wed to Doom's, to get Norrin Radd to...sit down in a chair that...sucks out his negative emotions and uses them to...charge up a robot with his Power Cosmic? All too wild, and made more convoluted by the fact that the SB lookalike turns out to be SB indeed, in another manipulation by Mephy. Anyway, the big disappointment here is that this story does nothing to further Doom's Shakespearean side, reducing him to a caricature who himself states that "I just want control! Of everything!" or some such. More interesting is the "war on three worlds" storyline, despite the lame inclusion of Arkon as the main villain, but it's a high-concept "alternate universes collide" type tale that I would have liked to see even better developed, and is surprisingly only slightly marred by coming down to a showdown with an intergalactic hockey player named GAARD! It's fun seeing the "Fantastic Three" of Earth-B where Reed has become the Thing, a development which pushed him to become a science-obsessed recluse, while normal Ben and Sue are able to get married and have a fulfilling life; I like the implication that Ben Grimm has greater emotional resilience than Reed Richards, as he's been able to carry the mantle of the Thing on the prime Earth all these years without giving in to total despair. (The Johnny of Earth-B, poignantly, is revealed to have perished in Vietnam.) This storyline does something I see used surprisingly little in comics, for all that it's a visual medium ripe for this kind of thing: a reveal of dramatic irony by focusing wordlessly in on in-story text that gives a chilling little hint of the deeper plot that's afoot, in this case signs of a similarly-named technology company on all three worlds that seems to have an interest in meddling with dangerous forces. I wish there were more of this kind of thing! Within reason. Note that I closed this book with the conclusion of issue 163 so I can read the next ten issues or so in the "Titans and Crusaders" TPB, which I like to do so that no books in my collection go unfondled :-)

[Justin Partridge]

“A brilliant scientist—his best friend—the woman he loves—and her fiery-tempered kid brother! Together, they braved the unknown terrors of outer space, and were changed by cosmic rays into something more than merely human!

MR. FANTASTIC! THE THING! THE INVISIBLE GIRL! THE HUMAN TORCH! Now they are the FANTASTIC FOUR—and the world will never again be the same!”

Hey, Sue’s back! And Franklin is talking! And it only took until 1976!

I’m being glib again, but really these issues find the title finally solidifying and settling back into what a “FF” comic feels and looks like. And further, and just cool personally, I feel like these are finally starting to feel like the platonic ideal of what I think classic FF is and reads like. It’s bringing me back to the constant searching I would do through flea markets and the occasional grocery store spinner rack just to find my beloved Richards’s.

and really, how could you not. Just a stellar collection of talent this go around (even though I know some of them don’t really last as long as I might want). You’ve got the awesome rotation of Conway, Roy Thomas, and Len Wein bringing more soapy drama and shockingly weird stakes to the table, navigating stories like Sue and Reed’s separation, the first brushes of the team’s other versions from other worlds, and the continued intro of more grounded characters like Frankie Raye into the mix.

And then you just get a belter of a George Perez guest-run to cap off some really solid and interesting looking Rich Buckler, Joe Sinnott, and Buscema pages that really grew on me throughout this volume. I know I was slightly colder on Buckler last time but I think once he stops trying to outright mimic Kirby and starts stretching (I’m so sorry) the tone and scale of the art like Buscema does, the whole title starts to come alive visually again for me.

Also, and again this is probably a more personal preference, but I really appreciate how the title is continuing to experiment with everyone’s powers and capabilities and then further finding really neat ways to use them in tandem with one another to solve problems on the page. There is a particularly awesome sequence in the Perez issues where all four of them team-up to land this 747, I always sort of pop for that stuff (one of the best things about the Krakoa era of X but that’s a whole other plate of noodles for sure) and it’s neat to see that one of my favorite comics was pulling that stuff all the way back in the 70s.

I dunno yall, I can totally see why people don’t like these, the stories aren’t really that earth-shattering and the whole transience of the title re-finding its legs is a little hokey, sure, but again, I just like…I’m constantly having fun with this comic. Even when it’s not constantly changing comics around it and inventing a whole new storytelling language.

I just love my Marvel friends and I’m happy they are all back together again. I love Thundra, I love Doctor Doom setting up a whole college reunion just to fuck with Reed, I love the Hulk and Ben’s whole deal. I just love it.

‘Nuff said.

[Rick]

And this is where I was finally able to begin getting comic’s regularly, and of course that meant an ongoing continuous run of the Fantastic Four.

Fantastic Four #147-149 - Except for the first issue here. My run started with #148, but #147 I was able to get by swapping another comic with someone I knew, so it did not take me years to get that issue the way it took me years to get copies of other issues that I had missed. So we open this volume with the FF at their most vulnerable. It looks like Sue and Reed are headed for a divorce and Namor shows up make sure that happens, then the Frightful Four return at the worst possible time, and then Namor comes back to rub his taking Sue from Reed in everyone’s collective faces. It doesn’t get much darker for the FF than this. But thankfully, Gerry Conway is wrapping up these storylines. And it’s all taken care of by the end of #149. Well, almost all of it. There’s still one little bit left dangling for #150 to wrap up.

Giant-Size Fantastic Four #2 - I’ve read this one so many times, I couldn’t even begin to figure out how many, at the very least a dozen, lets go with that. Not necessarily a great story, just one that I really enjoyed as a kid. I loved the time travel aspects, Reed and Johnny meeting George Washington, Medusa & Ben in gangster land Chicago. Fun stuff.

Avengers #127 & Fantastic Four #150 - This was the first issue of the Avengers that I ever bought. And I got it because it was the first part of the story that tied into this issue of the FF (I did have Avengers #93 which also has the FF in it, well sort of, but I was given that issue). This is a big one. A fun crossover. The Avengers. The Fantastic Four. The Inhumans. A wedding. Ultron (Ultron 7, if you’re counting). Agatha Harkness. And Franklin gets free from his comatose state. Lots of nostalgia for me here, as again I’ve read this story so many times over the years, the narrative itself isn’t much to talk about. As Marvel Weddings go, it’s pretty typical.

Giant-Size Fantastic Four #3 - Probably my least enjoyed of the stories from Giant-Size Fantastic Four run. This one tries really hard to be “meaningful” and fails pretty spectacularly. The story doesn’t even hold together very well and the art looks like it was done without any real forethought. It’s trying to do cosmic and it just comes across as comical instead. It’s almost like the editor decided they needed to cut the page count at the last minute and they reshuffled some pages and redid some art without thinking about it. It’s really just a mess.

Fantastic Four #151-153 - The origin of Thundra revealed and her grim and terrible fate unfolds. In typical misogynist cliche from the 1970s it is foretold that Thundra’s destiny is to be wed to a horrible, brutal, selfish, child-man (no, I’m actually not talking about Donny the whiney baby) so that her world and his can merge. One wonders who writes this stuff. In this case, we know, it was Conway and Tony Isabella. And it’s as awful as it sounds.

Fantastic Four #154 - This is a fill-in issue that reprints an adventure from Strange Tales #127, and only the new framing sequence is included in this volume (you’ll need to check out The Human Torch & The Thing: Strange Tales - The Complete Collection for that particular story). Nothing special here.

Giant-Size Fantastic Four #4 - Unlike the previous Giant-Size adventure, this one is actually a favorite of mine. It introduces a character who will become a star in his own right in the pages of X-Factor but here he’s just a young man named Madrox. This one is from the minds of Len Wein and the mastermind of mutants himself, Chris Claremont. I loved the introduction of this new character, but also the brief appearance of Professor X, a character who at the time I knew very little about.

Fantastic Four #155-157 - Doctor Doom! Silver Surfer! The Fantastic Four! Seriously? Do I need to add anything else? Okay, it’s from Wein and Roy Thomas and it’s pretty darn good. One might think that after the departure of Kirby and Lee, people might finally be getting the hang of spinning a good FF yarn.

Fantastic Four #158-159 - This story was originally intended for publication in Giant-Size Fantastic Four #5, but was repurposed when that title went to a reprint only format. This is a fun story that reunites the FF and the Inhumans, as well as bringing back an old enemy and an old flame of the Human Torch (all the way back to Strange Tales #103, see the previous mentioned The Human Torch & The Thing: Strange Tales - The Complete Collection). It’s a fun story that also reunites the Invisible Girl with the FF.

Fantastic Four #160-163 - And now, more trouble from the Fifth Dimension. Right on top of the previous story, Valeria and her father are back, one might think they’re setting up a Torch and Valeria romance. Nope. This is a sprawling tale that involves 4 different worlds and a plot to destroy three of them. I’m not going to bother explaining it, they have to put several diagrams in the comic to explain this convoluted chaos. But it’s a fun tale regardless of how complicated it may be to explain it.

Fantastic Four #164-165 - While this isn’t the first attempt at reviving a character from the Atlas era of Marvel, it did leave a big impression on me. I wanted to know more, a lot more, about this character Marvel Boy. Even if he was now going by the name of The Crusader. This is Thomas doing what he does best, and the art from George Pérez is gorgeous.

Fantastic Four #166-167 - More art from Pérez to finish off this volume, and it’s just as beautiful today as it was when I first laid eyes on it. This story offers a very different take on the classic Thing vs. Hulk slugfest. Just wonderful.

[Molly Lazer]

Read over the last seven months with my almost eight-year-olds. I thought this volume was an improvement on the last one, with Reed and Sue's marital issues resolved (albeit in a fairly silly way) and quite a number of great villains (returns from Doom, the Frightful Four, Thundra, Namor, Omega/Ultron, etc.). The Fifth Dimension story was a highlight of this bunch of issues. Sue's powers are expanding and she seems to receive more respect as a team member both from the other three FF members and from the writers, a development I've been waiting for for a while.

[Greg Trosclair]

Really more like a 3.5 but I would rather round up for this book than down. Mostly solid stories with fairly solid art ending in the first five issues or so of George Perez art on the FF. This run features the usual cast of characters from the FF during the mid-70's, Dr. Doom, the Inhumans, Earth 2, the return of Marvel Boy/Crusdaer, Sub Mariner and Thundra. It really is pretty good. I lower the rating for some of the art and a couple of stories but overall this is a treat.

[Jimbo]

Another great collection. Finally, things get back to normal only to shatter again and again. FF have, like the Avenger, save the world over and over again.

Doc Doom, Silver Surfer, the Crusader (an angry Marvel Boy), Xeno from the Fifth Dimension, the Inhumans, Ultron 7, and more fill in this book. It is also the first appearance of Madrox of X-Men fame as well as the origin of Thundra.

[Joe Santoro]

this is a bit of a transitional period... where Gerry Conway writes for a bit, then Roy Thomas takes over. Medusa is on the team for some of it (Franklin being just born) but is practically wall paper under Sue comes back powered up and ready to go.

The last couple stories are fun, but Conway ones are rough.

[Adam Wilson]

Another great collection that really picks up when Roy Thomas takes over writing duties.