FANTASTIC FOUR #151-153: 1st Mahkizmo (1974)

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More landlord bullying…But I want to take this opportunity to point out, again, how annoying it is when the writer talks to the reader. It’s just lazy writing.

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Anyway, there’s a lot of jazz in this three-issue arc with Thing and Thundra. She clearly has a thing for Thing.

The villain is a brutish, barbarian-type sexist named Mahkizmo, who disappears after this until John Byrne revives him in 1991’s Sensational She-Hulk (a truly amazing comic–some of his finest work).

He also calls himself…

And look how he treats women…

He treats the FF with similar disrespect, caging them.

He’s also got creatures working for him.

One is named Rampager.

None of them matter. The thing that makes this story better-than-average is that the women aren’t lame weak hostages. Pretty much every fourth issue or so since the beginning, Susan Storm has been depicted as a weak minded damsel in distress, despite the fact that her powers are clearly better than the rest of the team.

Not so, Medusa.

In this story, she also gets captured, and put in chains.

And kicks her captor’s ass.

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Bravo. The vaguely feminist “worlds merging” plot isn’t worth getting into in detail because it’s pretty silly, but Medusa sums up why America is better than Mahkizmo’s dimension…

Yet in the end, it’s Thundra’s sex appeal that ends the story…

Bonus Picture:

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Reed has only four fingers on his left hand.  It’s really hard to see, but this typo is pretty well known–I think someone got a no-prize for it.

4 thoughts on “FANTASTIC FOUR #151-153: 1st Mahkizmo (1974)”

  1. I agree with you re: the portrayal of Susan Storm vs. that of Medusa. Back in the early days of the Fantastic Four, Susan Storm seemed to be either a damsel-in-distress or a weak-minded heroine. Medusa on the other hand was portrayed as much more confident and a better Super-Heroine. Some fans felt that when Sue left Reed and the Fantastic Four at the end of issue #130, that Reed Richards should have dumped the insecure blonde for Medusa!

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