[edited after further research]

Does anyone have Sub-Mariner comics issues 14, 15 or 16? Especially the story "The Ghost of Sea Island" in issue 15?

I'm discussing a controversial theory with a fan who's even crazier than me. We reckon that Namor could have had a brief liaison with a 16 year old Susan Storm in 1944 or 1945. I know this would be a shameless retcon, but humour me. I won't go into the evidence, but I'm wondering if this could fit anywhere into Namor's comic at the time?

The Marvel Comics Database indicates that Namor had an apartment in New York at the time, where he could be reached by phone. In the story "The Ghost of Sea Island" he spent some time in a hotel (I mischievously wonder if this could be the guest house operated by Susan Storm's aunt in Fantastic Four 291?)
marvel.wikia.com/Sub-Mariner_Comics_Vol_1_15

Does anyone have any scans of that story?

"He ain't heavy, he's my brother" from the end of the first Judge Rico story, where Dredd refuses help in carrying his clone. I thought at the time that it was a wonderful, touching sentiment, a powerful last line. It was many years before I realised it was also a song.

Dredd was full of such references, e.g. the names of buildings: but I had a vague idea that those were real people. My first exposure to the names "Sonny Bono" and "Ricardo Montalban" were on the sides of city blocks.

I'm always missing stuff in the FF, mainly because the references are often to shows that didn't air in Britain. A random example that comes to mind is when Ben says "hey kids, what time is it?" which apparently comes from something called Howdy Doody. This missing of references is probably why I have a deep seated suspicion that everything in the FF is based on something. Hence my web site.

A distinctive feature of Jack Kirby's New World books was his use of multiple exclamation marks!!! But I'm reading a lot of old Lee and Ditko stories and I don't see them!! Yet the first four issues of the Fantastic Four are full of them!! (From issue 5 normal punctuation becomes the norm, at least  on most pages). My knowledge of non-FF books is limited, so I was wondering,

Did Stan use multiple exclamation marks in other comics of the early sixties or before?

If this is unique, is it a Kirby fingerprint? Or just a sign that Stan was not yet used to superheroes? 

I was just curious about something I read in a comic from late 1978. I remembered that the folks here seem remarkably clued up on events, movies and comics from the 1970s so I have to ask.

In Fantastic Four 206 the team is put on trial by the Skrulls. The issue spends several pages on the Skrull's need to tick all the legal boxes, particularly of the Convention of Fornax. It seems odd to spend so many pages on that. It's never been a consideration before or since, so I wondered, why include it? Any ideas?

To me it reads like a commentary on governments doing the minimum needed to rubber stamp international law. Was this kind of thing in the news in the late 1970s? Or in movies?

I gather that the convention of Fornax featured in the Avengers, but I don't know much about it. Were the politics of the Kree Skrull war a big deal in other Marvel books of the time? Can anyone fill me in?

Thanks for any help. 

We see him already in flame in public, but do we see him flaming on in public?  He flames on in a private garage in front of a single person, a friend. I agree that the team didn't try super hard at secrecy, hence my point about secrecy being untenable. But having a range of secret hideouts seems to suggest that privacy was a goal.

Al the important evidence (essential plot points, characterization, etc.) indicate that ST102 took place at an earlier time. So it is essentially a flashback. There is a long tradition of giving characters their modern appearance in flashbacks: FF 126 being perhaps the best known example.  

Exactly. I don't understand the need to have Stan provide the same input as Jack (or Steve or whoever) on every book. It makes no sense to me. Jack Kirby was prolific, but even at his peak he could "only" produce a book a week. Stan had to put his mark on eight books, plus herd all the cats, plus turn a one office company with no respect into a global powerhouse. And we want him to invent every idea that passes his desk as well?

Isn't it enough that Stan took the work of some of the most talented creators in the history of comics and actually improved it? Isn't it enough that he is the foundation and the door and the roof of the house of ideas? Yet we want him to be the bricks and mortar and fill every room as well! Do we really think that creating a successful business is as easy as hiring good people then taking the biggest cut? If that was true than Simon and Kirby and a dozen other top artists who created their own publishers would all be raking in the cash from movie cameos now. But creating a business is darned hard, every bit as hard as drawing a powerful page. To be able to do that and write top class dialog, and even throw out finished scripts at the same time, is amazing.

To me the idea that building a business is easy or uncreative is just as offensive as the idea that Jack Kirby was a replaceable hack.

Creativity is not limited to what we see on the page, it's everything that gets the ideas into the world's heads. While it's true that the corporate world has plenty of space for parasites, it also requires miracle workers. Just look at the current Marvel movies: these are corporate productions, driven by endless armies of suits, yet they create world pleasers. Other armies of suits have tried and failed to do the same for decades. Easy, it ain't. We can't attribute the movies just to Robert Downey Junior, just as we can't attribute all Marvel's success to Jack Kirby, and that is not to deny they are essential and personally add billions to the bottom line.

I say all this as a Fantastic Four obsessive who believes that Jack Kirby is responsible for probably 80 percent of what matters on the printed pages of my favourite comic. But we have to step back and look at the bigger picture. In my mind Stan Lee was every bit as important and creative as Jack Kirby. As Rob said, Stan was too busy (being creative) to want or need to micromanage.