QUOTE: And I discovered something totally counter-intuitive. The pages with more panels were faster to draw! I don't think that experience is unique to me. Maybe it's something these slow-poke modern artists should learn!

Makes sense to me - the more panels there are, the less detail is needed, or even possible, generally.  However, I wonder if the mentality of artists today even centers on such things anymore.  The focus seems to be less on telling story (and telling it in timely fashion) and more on drawing pretty pictures.  They want to draw more detail, to show the reader how nicely then can draw (and they don't seem to care that it will require 4 or fewer panels) at the expense of any logical story flow or of having any meat to the story.

Regarding Reed and Ben in WW II, in Marvel Two-In-One's final issue, Ben does make mention of their time there in a short, elegant fashion that I thought cleared up the whole question.  While I wasn't happy with the alternative explanation offered for Gruenwald's Divergent Realities theory, Ben has a little throwaway line after Reed has explained that "...any attempt to travel back to one's own past activates some kind of Temporal Safety-Valve.  Thus, the traveller is actually shunted sideways, into a universe almost identical to his own." Ben goes to look at Dr. Doom's time machine, reflecting, "'Course if Reed's right about this doo-hickey not bein' a time machine, that kinda raises a whole lot more questions than it answers... I wonder if we've ever really travelled in time?  Heck, maybe I never became Blackbeard, or fought in World War II, or... Boy, this is real confusin'!"  Whether this was added by the editor, I don't know, but it resolved the question for me in an economical fashion.  Of course, now someone at Marvel coming across that line would realize the possibilities for a six, maybe even twelve issue series exploring the whys and wherefores of Reed and Ben's little jaunt into history...

Could you imagine explaining this stuff to new comic book readers?
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It doesn't seem any more difficult than something like this.  A guy, his college roommate, the guys girls friend, and her little brother decide to break into a government facility and steal a space shuttle. They manage to pull it off without a hitch, but apparently this super-smart guy (should have mentioned the super-smart part in the beginning, huh?) forgot to put enough shielding into his design of the space shuttle. (I should have mentioned that the super-smart guy was also the designer.  My bad.)  Anyway, it turns out that cosmic rays start infiltrating the ship and everything goes haywire and the shuttle is going to have to make a crash landing.  Now, luckily, people still had piece of mind that they were able to crash land the ship from orbit and walk away unharmed. But, in the end they ended up developing strange powers because super-smart guy wasn't smart enough to have enough shielding installed in the space ship. And, the government decided to write off the stolen space shuttle as mearly a joy ride by a bunch of kookie kids and they get to go on their way as long as they promise to never, ever do it again.

Oh, their arch nemisis was super-smart guys former college roommate who has gone on to take over a small, eastern european country even though he was expelled from college over an explosion.  See kids, who needs a degree?

My point is, for those missing it, any story can be as convoluted or as easy to pass along to new readers.  It just depends on the effort one is willing to make.

…Grell's reign…

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Wow. I didn't even know Grell had done IRON MAN!!

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He was only writing (maybe some art on one or two issue, but that was clearly the exception. And i'm not even sure if he did.)

I didn't like what i read of his run (and yet before reading the actual stories I was really happy to learn he was the one to get the assignement.)

To me the only positive thing in his run was a new Mandarin, that i liked.

The artist was ok too.