Run away! Run away!

The scene: a perfectly ordinary regular day in the life of the Fantastic Four. Suddenly, in the middle of a null universe, Galactus releases an all-destructive, fast-expanding mysterious deadly force!

Panels from Fantastic Four #341 (June 1990), script, pencils, and inks by Walt SImonson; colors by Max Scheele, letters by Bill Oakley



What can it be? Even Reed doesn't know, and when Reed doesn't know, you're in big trouble, buster! But it's serious enough to have him fire up the Kurtzberg generators (and put his soft drink in the Lieber cup holder), and, in the words of Ben Grimm in that issue of Marvel Two-in-One where he teamed up with Bandit and the Snowman...put the hammer down!




What's the danger? What has Galactus unleashed? What are they running away from?

(Click picture to Pruneface-size)

Why, they're running away from Dick Tracy.

Actually, it's not really the world's greatest cop in the world's yellowest raincoat pursuing them...it's just an all-white page through which the movie advertisement on the other side bleeds:




You wouldn't see that phenomena happen in today's comics printed on glossy, heavier paper that doesn't bleed through, but in the days of newsprint, large white spaces were a perpetual problem. When designing Jean Grey's costume for her evolution into Phoenix, Dave Cockrum wanted to make her uniform white, but was overruled by Marvel editorial and that famous iconic uniform became green. Reason: on the cheap newsprint of the time, this costume...




...would have wound up looking like this:




So, there you go. The FF: not running away from Warren Beatty after all. Of course, if they were fleeing a giant galactic version of the star of Bonnie and Clyde, Ishtar, and $, it might go...a little something like this:




And sometimes, just for fun,. I like to wonder what would happen if the Fantastic Four were running away from Beatty's Dick Tracy co-star, Breathless Mahoney herself, Madonna: