FANTASTIC FOUR #264

"INFERNO"
Story & Art: John Byrne | Lettering: Michael Higgins | Coloring: Julianna Ferriter
Editing: Bob Budiansky | Editor-in-Chief: Jim Shooter

The Plot: Beneath the ground off the coast of California, Mole Man prepares to execute the Thing, but Ben pleads with him to listen to reason. Meanwhile, in New York, Reed investigates an energy signature in Central Park.

Just as Johnny's nova flame is about to be used by Alden Maas to reignite the Earth's core, the Thing and Mole Man arrive and rescue him. Together, the trio, joined by Mole Man's Subterranean Moloids, make their way through an army of Maas’s robots only to find him dead in his control room before he could complete his life's work. The remaining robots take Maas’s corpse and walk away into the sea.

Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: Mole Man was last seen in FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #13, where he took in several outcasts from the surface world, turned over a new leaf, and lived in peace as their ruler… until Maas’s boring toward the Earth’s core let loose flowing magma in the Mole Man’s realm, killing his subjects.

(Byrne likes to talk about how often his stories get undone by other writers, but he’s not exactly above doing so himself, sometimes in extremely violent ways. As another example, much as people hate THE NEW TEEN TITANS' Terry Long, I'd argue, if only due to his prominence in the series' heyday, that he -- and his young daughter -- probably deserved a better fate than being killed off, off-panel, by Byrne during his WONDER WOMAN run.)

The Thing recaps last issue’s events for Mole Man:

This is what Neal Adams actually believes.

Later, Johnny explains how he was kidnapped during the race at Wonderworld:

In Manhattan, Reed combs Central Park’s Sheep Meadow for the energy signature he picked up last issue, but finds no sign of it. Just as when Spider-Man received a few urgent tingles of his spider-sense in contemporaneous AMAZING SPIDER-MAN issues, this is a portent of the upcoming SECRET WARS.

Sue suffers a painful spasm and wonders if it’s a side effect of her pregnancy, since the first time she carried a child was not a normal term and so she has nothing with which to compare it (having never read the Lee/Kirby FF, I have no idea what this means).

This issue’s cover is an homage to FANTASTIC FOUR #1. Byrne would revisit that cover many more times over his career. The monster seen on the cover appears within the issue as well, helping Ben, Johnny, and the Mole Man get to Maas’s control room.

Is It Clobberin' Time? Lots of clobbering occurs this issue, but there’s no clobberin’.

My Thoughts: Well, so much for the light-hearted jab at Neal Adams that we had in the first issue. This time his belief is clearly ridiculed and it’s explained that if anyone actually did find a way to superheat the Earth’s core, the planet’s crust would crack and billions would perish. Oh, and the Neal Adams “tribute” character dies, to boot. Though technically, in a bit of fun at the expense of the “Walt Disney cryogenically froze himself” crowd, we learn that Maas actually died over sixteen years ago and kept himself functional with the use of an “Extended Animation Chamber”.

Overall, between the anticlimactic ending (commented upon by the Thing himself on the final page) and the weirdly mean-spirited jabs at Neal Adams, this little two-parter is pretty forgettable and may well be the lowest point of Byrne’s run. Pretty much its only saving grace was Julie Angel’s bikini in part one.

Now, on to other things. A week after FANTASTIC FOUR 264’s release, THE THING #10 hit the stands, and in its final pages, Ben, Johnny, and Reed left Earth:

By John Byrne, Ron Wilson, Hilary Barta, Jim Novak, & Julianna Ferriter.

Next time, we’ll see two of them return with a big green membership shakeup for the FF!