I read a lot of comic books as a kid. This series of posts is about the comics I read, and, occasionally, the comics that I should have read.

There are many reasons I feel fortunate in my timing in devoting myself entirely to superhero comics. Frank Miller was in his first year a artist on Daredevil, and he was about to take over as writer in a character-defining run. Within a year of the first issue I plucked off stands, John Byrne would start his acclaimed stint as writer-artist on Fantastic Four, and I was properly poised to be in on similarly peak passages in the annals of the startling set of heroes who populated the Marvel universe. On a more basic level, I started buying superhero comics at the start of the summer, which means that my introductory era of unquenchable desire for more and more stories featuring these costumed do-gooders fortunately coincided with the publisher providing the supplemental bonus of double-sized annuals of all their biggest titles. For me, the heroes that immediately took primacy in the pecking order were Marvel’s first family, so I absolutely scrounged for the seventy-five cents required to procure a copy of Fantastic Four Annual #15 as soon as it hit the comics rack at the local supermarket.

Written by Doug Moench, the newly appointed scribe on the ongoing Fantastic Four series, and drawn by George Pérez (with some especially robust inking assists by Chic Stone, Jon D’Agostino, and Mike Esposito), the comic book starts with the cosmically irradiated foursome at their Baxter Building home base. Their elastic leader, Reed Richards, is in a celebratory mode because he’s just had a scientific breakthrough with a device that could help solve the energy crisis. Into this scene, trouble arrives in the unlikeliest form.

As I was still gathering the grand lore of these fictional figures, it was useful to get an introduction to a beloved side figure such as ear-wiggling mailman Willie Lumpkin. Although it turned out that it wasn’t actually that colorful side character crossing into the story. Instead, I discovered of the longest-tenured sets of foes in the Fantastic Four’s rogues gallery. Within a few panels, I learned that the quirky letter carrier was actually a fearsome Skrull.

As I quickly gleaned, the Skrulls were a race from a distant universe imbued with astounding shape-shifting powers. In this instance, the Skrulls were after the new contraption concocted by Reed, convinced it would give them the edge they needed to finally claim victory in their longtime war against the Kree. To achieve their goal, the Skrulls send a gruesome crew, many of them who masqueraded in the Fantastic Four’s neighborhood for weeks.

In addition to the Skrulls, the annual also provided my introduction to the space-crossing hero whose named handily corresponded to that of the publisher. As part of the tangled narrative, the Fantastic Four wind up transporting Captain Marvel into their headquarters, where he is a significant part of thwarting the plan of the green-skinned adversaries.

Fantastic Four Annual #15 isn’t an especially significant issue in the long saga of the Marvel Universe’s founding quartet. In a way, that’s why I still hold the issue in such high regard. When I got good and hooked by these fabulous, four-color adventures, the stories weren’t special because they offers some senses-shattering upending of the status quo. They were special stories because the creators behind them strove to make them as good and engaging as they could be on their own terms. Moench and Pérez took the characters, settings, and history available to them and find a novel way to use them. Ideas burst out of the house they together occupied.

Previous entries in this series (and there are a LOT of them) can be found by clicking on the “My Misspent Youth” tag.