Most of the issues of Fantastic Four I own are concentrated in two specific runs - one about a year long, the other less than two years - which we'll get to in the next two weeks. This is from one of the few other issues I own.
Which is appropriate, sort of. This isn't the first Fantastic Four issue I owned - that's not for another 30 issues - but there are things that happen hear that pay off down that line. Mostly that Terrax gets his Power Cosmic stripped away for being a shitty herald. Eventually, Doom tries to help him get the power back, which backfires on Doom, forcing him to jump bodies, which you find out in the first FF comic I read.
The nice thing about reading a comic like that when you're five is that, even if you don't really understand why or how Dr. Doom would switch his mind into some poor random guy's body, you can just roll with it. You don't know any better.
Of course, it also probably didn't have the impact on me it would someone who'd been reading for years, but that's just one of those things. Even with the edict to write as though each comic was someone's first, you can't manufacture that history in someone. Even if Byrne's doing a good job explaining it all, he can't magically make it like I read those earlier issues in real-time, where I've lived through all the Fantastic Four's past battles with Doom. The best that can be managed is to make the reader want to go track that stuff down, or keep following from the their entry point forward.
Fantastic Four's never quite been able to do that for me. I'm usually at least aware of what's going on with the book, in a general sense. Is someone subbing in for one of them, who's scarred or acting crazy, how much of a dick Reed Richards is being at the moment. It's like a comforting background noise, the fan that helps you go to sleep. I'd never want to just sit there and listen intently to the fan, but I like having it running.
Maybe not the best comparison. Certainly not a flattering one, given the wild adventures the characters frequently embark upon, but they're kind of the foundation the Marvel Universe was built upon, since they were the first. Foundations aren't flashy, they're solid and hopefully reliable.
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