A monster that looks suspiciously like a baby Fin Fang Foom is on Reed’s dissection table, but that’s not what makes this issue so cool.
Nor is it the amazing Kirby drawings of Attuma, usurper of Namor’s throne and Atlantean troublemaker.
(This is the character’s debut.)
Nor is it the team and Sub Mariner fighting side by side.
No, what makes it so special is Kirby’s photo-realistic collages. Great stuff. They even made it to the cover! Oh, and also what makes it cool is Reed being a life raft.
And a Manta Ray.
Plastic Man is a pretty stupid character–but there’s something charming about the way Reed turns into stuff without actually taking the form of the thing he’s mimicking.
At the end of this issue, Reed finally realizes that Susan may “like” Namor’s muscles, but she loves Reed’s brain. Soon after this, they’ll get engaged and married. Because every gal wants a rubbery geek who is kind of a grouch all the time instead of a rich, muscular man who can fly. Of course, his ability to elongate and reform his body parts may having something to do with it.
This issue was the direct inspiration for the episode of the awesome 1967 Hanna-Barbara ‘Fantastic Four’ cartoon show, however, the title was changed from “On the Side of Sub-Mariner” to the slightly more mature-sounding “Danger in the Depths”. Since at the time of the production of this episode the Sub-Mariner had been licensed out to CBS for their lackluster “Marvel Super Heroes” show, he had to be put under ( embarrasingly thin ) disguise here as Prince “Triton”, although no such alterations were deemed necessary for either the Lady Dorma, or the villainous Attuma. ( ???-!! ) Atlantis was also “subbed” out ( see what I did with that??? ) for Lemuria, for the same reason. In spite of all these little revisions in detail, “Danger in the Depths” was nevertheless an extremely entertaining entry into this excellent late-Sixties adventure series.