YMMV / Fantastic Four (1961)

• Angst? What Angst?: During Hickman's run, Johnny's ex-girlfriend Psionics, from Mark Millar's run, returns as a psychotic maniac who murders a woman in front of Johnny before getting her head smushed in. Johnny's reaction to any of this? Uh... nothing, actually. And her dad doesn't seem to be terribly upset about it either.
• Audience-Alienating Era: Tom DeFalco's run is usually not regarded one of the FF's better runs between DeFalco (temporarily) killing off Mr. Fantastic and Doctor Doom, putting the Invisible Woman in a Stripperific outfit, retconning that the Human Torch really married a Skrull posing as Alicia Masters, and having Wolverine mutilate the Thing's face.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: So the mysterious shape-shifting alien with all the powers of the Fantastic Four who replaces Dr. Storm and attacks the team is Super-Skrull? You don't say! Because the Fantastic Four have so many other shape-shifting enemies with all their powers combined.
• Designated Hero: Reed Richards, in FF #7, reduces the population of a whole planet to tiny sizes, so that they all could fit into a spaceship and escape their doomed planet. He makes no plans about how to enlarge them back to their normal size... nor did he care.
• Growing the Beard: That's kind of complicated. The very first issues were already a revolution, introducing many great characters that are still noteworthy to this very day: the FF themselves, the Mole Man, the Skrulls, the return of Namor, Dr. Doom, Alicia Masters, Stan and Jack's cameos, the Watcher, the Mad Thinker, Super-Skrull, Molecule Man... and then it kinda lost the steam. The comic started to rely on guest appearances of other heroes, new adventures against threats already seen, and introduced lesser characters like Diablo, Attuma, Gideon and the Frightful Four. But no, don't stop reading yet, true believer! Because eventually, they would regain the energy and take things to even higher levels. The Inhumans, the Silver Surfer, Galactus, Black Panther and Klaw were introduced in a new and non-stop creative sequence!
• Harsher in Hindsight: Johnny blowing up Stamford was bad enough in itself, but many years later the New Warriors did so as well and started a Civil War. A mob attacked him because he had also burned a school, and left him hospitalized.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The team is broke in Fantastic Four #9, but manage to get up because of the success of a (in-universe) film about them. It's amusing to read that nowadays, when the Fantastic Four had two film series that tanked.
  • Ant-Man found the Fantastic Four animated series on TV, and laughed to Ben about it. In one scene he laughed saying "forget about being attacked by your old super villains! You'll be destroyed by the ratings!". This scene became a meme in 2015, when the Ant-Man film became a huge success and Fantastic Four (2015) tanked.
• Narm Charm: Those comics can be a weird read nowadays. Over-the-top scenes and dialogues, the narration boxes are a Large Ham in themselves, every sentence (all and each one) ends with a "!" or a "?", colorful suits, corny superhero and supervillain names, etc. But the creativity of Kirby can not be denied, regardless of his style there's hardly any other Comic Book Run that introduced so many new characters and concepts.
• Never Live It Down: Sue's Stripperific outfit. She never used such an outfit before, neither afterwards. It was only during part of the run, and there was an actual plot behind it (Sue was under the influence of Malicia, and returned to her normal style once she got rid of her), but when people talk about this run, it is likely to complain about that suit.
• Older Than They Think: Reed created a gas that reduced the people of a whole planet in FF #7 (October 1962). But no, before you raise your fingers, Henry Pym did make his invention before this: he first appeared in Tales to Atonish #27 (January 1962)
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Sue Storm was initially disliked by many fans for her weak powers, to the point that they had to make a Take That, Audience! scene to defend her. They increased her powers later, adding forcefields and allowing her to make other things invisible as well.
• So Bad, It's Good: Many fans have looked back upon Tom DeFalco's run as a weird parody in hindsight and enjoy the cheesiness that was the The Dark Age of Comic Books and its attempts to be Darker and Edgier only to fail. It does help that some concepts would later be introduced in Marvel Comics 2 (aging Franklin, killing off Doom and Reed, etc) and were received much warmer.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Yay, we finally get a grown-up Franklin in the nineties... yeah, they basically turned him into Cable. Many fans who wished to see Franklin grow up were infuriated by the lack of creativity in creating Psi-Lord.
  • In the same vein, Hyperstorm, the time-traveling son of Rachel Summers and Franklin Richards, was only used for one arc and never used again because they killed him off. He was only given a backstory for shock value and had no interaction with his parents while in the past. He was just some random Multiversal Conqueror.
• Values Dissonance: Sue is often told to Stay in the Kitchen, and worse, the story treats that as a compliment.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Black Panther was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, almost at the same time of the creation of the Black Panthers party. But Lee and Kirby were first. Marvel even attempted for a short time to rename the character to "Black Leopard", to avoid the misunderstanding, but soon returned to the original: they created it first, why should they give it up?