I caught the point about the FF's costumes being black and not blue.  You beat me in making that point Andy.

But beside that point, JB brought up a good issue when he said:

This thread is also serving to point up something that has gone very wrong with comics, particularly superhero comics, in the last thirty years or so. "When Jean came back, the first thing I thought of was a scene that appeared six years earlier."

*************

I started thinking about the current stuff that's out now and what has come before in the last few years and realized that Spider-Man has been married for 20 years.  That between, the comics, movies, and cartoons the comic fans of today only know a married Spider-Man for example.

Even though that was a major change in the staus quo for the character, do you think fans are like this because the stories in general are just going on too long?  Or is it that there doesn't seem to be any downtime in comics anymore?  It just seems as though they go from one big event to the next without any time for character development anymore.

For example, the way JB handled Sue's miscarriage, was handled well.  Wasn't schlepped off in one issue, but was a gradual thing (until it was undone).  Maybe the best example of this was the way Star Trek handled Picard's assimilation into the Borg Collective. After all the action was done, he was back on Earth visiting his family.  Recovering from his ordeal.

Comic fans are thrust from one thing to the next, because the cause of one big event is usually the effect of the last big event.

This issue offers me an added bit of pleasure that dates back to my first days with the FF. I began reading in the mid-1970s (issue #166, the first of a two-part Thing/Hulk battle, when George Perez was illustrating).

A few months after I became a fan, I remember an issue where Ben stumbles upon Sue doing a multi-forcefield trick in a Danger Room-style exercise. He makes a crack something along the lines of "So, you're ready to take on Marvel Girl of the X-Men--one fall, winner take all?"

"What a cool idea," thought this nine-year-old kid.

A decade later, I was finally treated to that foreshadowed Invisible Woman/Marvel Girl bout.

Thanks, John--it was worth the wait.

Why would it be?