Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue at random, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published. 

1 2 3 4 is Grant Morrison’s criminally hard-to-find take on the Fantastic Four, originally published under the Marvel Knights banner in 2002 just as the imprint stopped having any actual meaning, though it did involve Jae Lee of Marvel Knights’ Inhumans fame. The series garnered the wrong kind of interest when Morrison spoke openly in interviews about the incestuous undertones he saw in the family dynamic of the Fantastic Four, and Marvel, having dropped the Comics Code, were forced to reassure their more moronic readers that Johnny and Sue would not actually be having sex in this series. Ye gods.

What readers actually got was a quick “greatest hits” character studies of the Fantastic Four, hung around a plot where Doom (of course) is trying to pull the team apart through darkly psychological means. Issue 2 is Sue’s turn through the psycho-grinder, and no quarter is spared in deconstructing out her adulterous tendency to run off to Namor whenever Reed is too busy to deal with her.

The issue opens with a brilliant sequence where an invisible Sue meets Alicia. Obviously, the blind Alicia can still recognise her, and it showcases Sue using her powers in a simple yet inventive way (something Morrison explored with each character in this series) as well as being a visual representation of her particularly psychological torture as something self-imposed. Lee’s art does incredibly well to cope with having an invisible lead, though his talent for darker material is showcased much better elsewhere in the series.

Meanwhile, in issue 1, the Thing was transformed back into Ben Grimm through Doom’s machinations and it’s obviously gone horribly wrong, as we find him waking up in hospital less one arm – Ben has always been the easiest member of the Four to manipulate due to his immense self-pity and lack of any genuine family ties to the rest of them, and Morrison clearly recognised that. Later, Johnny has some scenes to set up his next issue spotlight, one of which involves the particularly hilarious line spoken by an attractive blonde that Johnny is entertaining: “Johnny, I love what you do to me, but these are third degree burns.”

Issue #2 is a nice character piece for Sue – always a difficult character to write in a way that’s both sympathetic and emancipated - though since it ends on something of a cliffhanger, it’s hard to recommend as a single issue. Certainly, Fantastic Four fans eager to see something that cuts deep into the heart of the Four’s dynamic would do no better than to pick up this (well, Unstable Molecules was pretty good at that too) but it’s strictly a work for people who have much more than cursory understanding of those relationships already, because it’s all Morrison-style Big Ideas and small subtext. Definitely worth buying if you see it.