fantastic four #28: reed's stretchy body 77
Written by Stan Lee (The Leader!)
Drawn by Jack Kirby (The King!)
Inked by Chic Stone (The Master!)
Lettered by Art Simek (The Letterer!)
The Fantastic Four and the X-Men don't exactly have an illustrious history of team-ups. There's the Pat Lee Fantastic Four/X-Men miniseries from about a decade ago, which was terrible. There was the weird Ultimate X-Men/Ultimate Fantastic Four miniseries that came towards the end of both of those titles, which was about the same level of quality as the parent titles. There's the Claremont/Bogdanove miniseries, which is actually rather good. And then there's this issue, the first meeting of the teams, which is generic beyond belief.
Today's panel comes from the second major battle between the two teams, which takes place on a deserted mountaintop, and threatens to be a repeat of the first battle but without any pesky walls getting in the way. The Thinker and the Puppet Master have other plans, having booby-trapped the mountaintop with all sorts of devices that remove combatants from the team one-by-one.
We see here that Reed somehow gets caught up on a revolving reel that suddenly pops up from the ground. I guess it was lucky that Reed stepped on the exact spot between the two components of the reel, as it's hard to see just how this could have been effective if he'd been a foot to the right.
Check out our coverage of Fantastic Four #28 on our thirty-first episode: Just Three Of The Guys, with special guest-host Shawn Engel.