Fantastic Four 171 changed my life. I must have been around 13 years old (I read it in 1981, in a reprint). People say that the golden age of science fiction is whatever you read at age 13, because it seems the best thing ever. And for me it was FF171. This is the issue where Ben wears a Thing suit, and he talks about the past, and how life has changed. It is very obvious that the experience has changed him as a person: he started as angry (back in issue 1) then progressed to sort of accepting his problems, but now he had got to a point where he could not accept it any more, he wanted to move on. He seemed so real! I was hooked! He seemed like a real person, with a real past! In the same issue we see Sue at her greatest: confident, beautiful, developing her powers on her own, looking so strong and so mature. At around this time (in another issue) we see Johnny and Ben as adults, talking about old times. It was really powerful to me, how this was a grand, epic, long term story.



Living in Britain made a big difference. The FF had been reprinted from the start (in 1972). Our comics are weekly, so we had almost caught up with America in 1981. I bought most of the comics at jumble sales (rummage sales). Then Marvel UK began a series of pocket books that reprinted the classic Lee-Kirby issues again, beginning at the wedding of Sue and Reed. So I was reading the mid 1960s stories and the late 1970s stories side by side. I could see the big events, how they grew older, the marriage, how themes emerged and developed over decades.



I should also mention that the first American comics I ever read, as a young child, included a reprint of FF issue 7, the Planet X story. It was in a big hard cover book of some of the best Marvel stories ever written, and it affected me deeply. So at the age of 13, when my ideas of what a comic SHOULD be were being formed, I could very clearly see how time passed over the years, and how it changed the team. And it changed them for the better: FF 171 was drawn by George Perez (except for pages 1-3 and those were good too). It was beautiful. Everything was moving forwards, getting better. These four people felt like real people, in the real world (but as exciting as the real world could possibly be). I loved it!



At that point, reading FF 171, I decided that I had to have every single issue of the Fantastic Four. I was a fan for life. I never cared for Spider-man - the early Ditko stories made sense, but after that he never grew up,so he was not like a real person to me. The same goes for other Marvel comics. They never grew up or learned, so they were not real. Why should I care for the current stories if the previous stories made no difference to anything?



So I subscribed to the new FF comics. John Byrne had just started. I wanted to see what happened next!!!! I so looked forward to my first new FF comic (it was FF 151). Was Ben cured forever? (He should have been!) Did Johnny finally marry Crystal? I wanted to see Franklin as a teenager, exploring his powers and having teenage fun! I wanted to see Sue expand her role as a mother figure for the whole Marvel Universe, as the sensible balance to all the worried and stressed female characters who were trapped as sex objects (I was very religious as a child - I still am - so Sue's confidence and style and wisdom and love impressed me deeply). I could see how much the team had progressed from the 1960s to the 1970s, so expected a similar progression to the 1980s. I imagined Reed as the head of a global organization, I wondered how the Inhumans might become a secret part of all world governments... I expected to be surprised and pleased. Naively I thought the improvement from Kirby to Perez would result in even better art (at the time I did not appreciate Kirby's art as much as I do now).



So when I read Byrne's stuff I felt cheated. Not only were the stories small (my first stories were the negative zone stories that had no obvious connection to anything) but it was not the same family, to me.



Reed became weedier and introverted.



Sue was very different - to me she seemed weaker, less self assured.



Johnny looked younger, and didn't have the inner depths - it's hard to explain, but I always saw him like me, as a frustrated observer of life: e.g. seeing Crustal leave him, seeing his family die, being trapped in the child role of the group, and not being able to do anything about it. This produced a depth of character and a personality style that just seemed to be entirely missing in Byrne's run.



As for Ben, he seemed to once again accept his life, and didn't do much of anything.



When Johnny got together with Alicia (and let's not talk about that!) Ben's reaction was not Ben, it was how JOHNNY would have reacted: he exploded, then meekly accepted it. This was Johnny's classic style, with Crystal, the aging ray, etc. The Ben I knew would have been the opposite: he would have had the maturity to not react strongly at first, but it would have led to powerful determination and real decisions. Instead we got him moping around feeling sorry for himself. All of this was such a reversal of characters, they had forgotten everything that made them who they were. These were different characters, younger characters, with completely different personalities, stuck in a twisted imitation of the past (the flying bathtub and skinnier bodies , etc., were clearly meant to be like the early stories, but they were NOTHING LIKE the early stories).



And yet Byrne put so much into each issue that they were still good comics. They were enjoyable to read. And if I was not so concerned with them as real people then I am sure I would have embraced the new team, because they were well written. But they were not the big, grand, deep team I was addicted to. They were something temporary. They were more like the X-Men, a team I had never cared for (whenever I read the X-Men I just want to tell them to "grow up!")



I did not want to abandon the FF. I did not want to accept, as some do, that they really ended back in the 1970s. So I tried to reinterpret the stories in a way that would fit with what went before. And that is how I came up with my theory that issues 1 to 322 form a single complete story, and they only acted out of character in Byrne's run because they were in crisis and would not admit it to themselves.



And that is how I started to see the FF as a single gigantic story. Thanks for asking!