Fantastic Four 73 CBCS 9.0 White 1968 Spider-Man Thor Daredevil Kirby Marvel For Sale

FANTASTIC FOUR #73 — Twenty pages of fighting over a misunderstanding.

Cover-dated April 1968. The setup arrives from somewhere else entirely: over in Daredevil #38, Doctor Doom had swapped bodies with Matt Murdock. By the time this issue opens Daredevil has his own body back and comes to the Baxter Building to warn the Fantastic Four what Doom is planning. The Fantastic Four, who have not read Daredevil #38, are certain the man at their door is Doom wearing a red suit.

So the Human Torch attacks him. Daredevil tricks Johnny into a water tower to put him out, and Spider-Man — who happens past, and who believes the story — goes looking for reinforcements and comes back with Thor. Which means there are now three heroes trying to deliver a message and four heroes convinced they are impostors, and Kirby spends the remainder of the issue drawing the consequences. Nobody in the book is wrong, exactly. Everyone in the book is fighting.

It is also one of the earliest Fantastic Four stories that required readers to have bought a different title to follow it — a habit the industry has never since given up.

The cover is the reason people want this issue. Kirby pencils, Joe Sinnott inks, Stan Goldberg colors: the entire cast in motion, Daredevil swinging in on Reed's stretched arm, the Torch and Spider-Man coming in low across the bottom, Thor mid-stride with the hammer already moving. The banner promises a GIANT GUEST STAR BONANZA and for once the cover copy undersells.

The statement of ownership printed inside puts the title's average press run at 329,536 copies a month. Vanishingly few of them still look like this one.

This copy grades CBCS 9.0, Very Fine/Near Mint, with White pages — the top page-quality designation, and remarkable retention for a fifty-eight-year-old newsstand book.

CBCS 9.0 · White pages · Story continues from Daredevil #38 · Spider-Man, Daredevil & Thor · Kirby & Sinnott · Marvel, 1968

Ships in a Gemini graded-comic mailer with honeycomb kraft void fill, fully insured, within one business day of cleared payment.

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