The Giant Box of Comics Book Report: The Fantastic Four in The House of Horrors, Western Publishing, 1968

Let's dive back into the past, a mere 7 years since the fateful rocket ride that turned these unlikely (and, in some cases, totally unqualified) astronauts into the Fantastic Four. The Big Little Books are, to be fair, not very good. These are simple stories, never, I think, intended for an adult audience.

That said, some of the art is actually quite nice.

The format of the book is one page of text, one page of art, illustrating something that has happened on the preceding page. This puts the Big Little Books far more in the realm of the picture book than the comic. It's one of the fundamental ways of differentiating the picture book from the comic book - in the picture book, the picture illustrates a moment, rather than adding to the narrative in the way that the art complements the text in a comic book. Some picture books straddle this border, but then so do some comics. Is Martin Vaughn-James' The Cage a comic, or a very weird picture book?

I honestly find discussions like that pretty boring. I include this book in my comic collection, as it is a publication whose existence hinges fundamentally on a comic book.

Again, unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's very good. The art has a Jack Kirby quality to it, but it's not Kirby. I found, somewhere on the web, the suggestion that it was Gene Colan doing a Kirby style. But try as I might I can't find that article anymore. If I do, I'll pop a link in here somewhere.

Our story is literally the team following a villain, at what seems like a very slow pace, around a house filled with rooms that are only traps - nothing else, no kitchens or bedrooms. Just death trap rooms. And Dr. Weird is using these traps to try to convince the team to work with him? Every few chapters, he confronts them, asks them to join him, and when they refuse drifts off as a cloud of smoke. Then the FF face some more death traps, and then he asks them again. It was a bit difficult to get through.

So I suppose my recommendation would be that if you love the Fantastic Four, maybe you should check it out, at least for the art, but the story will only make you feel embarrassed for our usually much more competent quartet.