This genuinely surprised me, for altho the FF was primarily a sci-fi title, it did not seem to me that ANYTHING should be kept strictly off-limits. After all, their principle villain was known to dabble in the mystic arts, which alone should be enough to cue readers that Reed Richards was probably very open minded about such things.

(Tangent: Several years back I was talking to an editor about the possibility of working on a book with a well known magician, who it transpired was interested in doing a Dr. Thirteen series. He wanted to play up the skeptic angle, and I quickly pointed out that that was the part of Terry Thirteen's personality that DIDN'T work in context. After all, he lived in a world where ghosts, demons, aliens and all the rest were demonstrably REAL. I didn't want to see him played as Agent Scully, who I used to say could get raped by a werewolf and STILL be a "skeptic" the next week!)

The most exasperating part of Waid's run on FF had Reed Richards having to be taught to "believe" in magic, to surrender himself and lose his massive ego before he could use it as a weapon. Lame.

Waid even made the critical mistake of doing research into "real life" magic to get a sense of how it "worked."

I prefer Stan Lee's method of just making #$* up.

••

…were the parts between the front cover of his first issue, and the back cover of his last.

It's interesting that this comes up at this time for me, as I have been going through some Golden-Age Captain America stories, and I was noting that most of the villains would fall along the monster variety. In the 1940's, Captain America fought vampires, zombies, and even the Frankenstein monster, along with many freakish creatures.

John Byrne wrote: ...After all, he lived in a world where ghosts, demons, aliens and all the rest were demonstrably REAL. I didn't want to see him played as Agent Scully, who I used to say could get raped by a werewolf and STILL be a "skeptic" the next week!...

One thing that has bothered me about the way some writers have written supernatural stories in superhero comics is the stories where someone like Superman or Batman would encounter, say, a ghost and would react skeptically about the existence of ghosts when they would have all ready been established as having met other characters such as Deadman and the Spectre.