Fantastic Four cover logos, part one

This November marks 49 years of Marvel’s Fantastic Four comic book series. (More or less; the first issue had a cover date of November, though I’m not sure what day it actually arrived at newsstands, etc.)

A year from now there will probably be all kinds of hoopla. Genius/contrarian that I am, I thought I would post something marking a half-century of this series a year early.

Fantastic Four was the first superhero comic book I really got into. (I read the Transformers comic book before that, but never “branched out” from it to any other series.) At one point I had heaps of Fantastic Four comics, including about 140 consecutive issues at a time when that was more than one-third of the total issues ever published, along with a significant minority of the remaining two thirds of the series. I stopped reading it nearly a decade ago, now, for the most part, and I’m not sure when I last bought a new issue.

But the FF stays with me, as have a lot of Fantastic Four comics even after one or two rounds of purging. And as this is (very loosely) a design blog, I thought I might do a little retrospective of the many and varied Fantastic Four logos appearing during the past 49 years.

Admittedly it may well be that someone has already done this, perhaps even my friend Sean; the guy used to run a gigantic Fantastic Four web site and currently posts to his blog nearly every single day(!!) so it’s entirely possible I could have missed something like that. But what the hey; I write this blog as much for my own entertainment as for the edification of others.

Above is the decidedly-iconic cover to the very first issue of the Fantastic Four. (Scanned from a reproduction; if I had a mint copy of FF #1 I would probably be busy playing Sotheby’s against Christie’s for the auction rights rather than writing a blog post.)

Way back then, no one had any concept that the series would last six issues, let alone a half-century. Yet it did, as did the basic design of that wacky logo, apparently designed by Sol Brodsky. Without meaning any slight to old Sol, however, I’m pretty sure that the original Fantastic Four logo was not the product of extensive thought and experimentation. I’ve got a Marvel history coffee table book which I believe contains a cover from an earlier series with similar lettering (I would scan it in if it were handy, but it is not). I think I also recall someone once commenting that, at the time, he “thought it was a funny animal book” based on the style of the logo.

At any rate, it isn’t what I would come up with were I tasked with designing the cover logo for a new series about a team of science-fiction superhero adventurers. Yet, more than one lasting design began almost accidentally. In this case, although the details have continually been tweaked as will be seen below, the original FF logo is the Fantastic Four logo, and will presumbly remain such for as long as the concept exists even if the series itself continues to experiment with different looks now and then.

The above is probably the closest thing to a settled, basic, “final” version of the original logo that exists. The “wackiness” is toned down just a bit, and an outline has been added while the definite article (“the”) is absent. The title is also left-aligned, as has been the case for most of the history of this version of the logo (in this case, the resultant white space is used for a blurb, as is the case with many other covers).

It could be a toss-up between the previous logo and the above version, admittedly, in terms of the “most basic” version of the “traditional” logo design. A thinner outline plus a drop shadow has appeared on many covers; I’m not going to attempt to count them up and compare but it could be that this version has gotten more use than the plain, outline-only version.

Frequently, though, the responsible parties have apparently felt that neither a single outline nor an outline-plus-drop-shadow were quite enough.

The above version from the late 1990s, for example, has: 1) an outline, 2) a drop shadow, 3) an outline around the drop shadow, and 4) one more outline around the whole thing for good measure. (Plus a gradient effects on the inside of the main letter forms.) Yowzas.

While on this cover from several years ago, we have: 1) an outline, 2) inner and outer strokes added to the outline itself, 3) an inner drop shadow, 4) an outer drop shadow and 5) a second, red drop shadow which almost looks like a registration error but presumably is not. Who knows. Ai-yi-yiii.

There have been at least a couple of further variants of the “traditional” logo over the decades, as well. This squarish version with an increased x-height was used briefly about a decade into the series’ existence.

Then there was this about ten years ago, combining a condensed version of the traditional logo with a beveled effect.

The mid-1990s animated series (and accompanying tie-in comic) featured a squared-off version of the classic FF logo. As a teenager I loved this version of the logo when it was being used, though looking back from years later it seems rather ill-advised and stiff. (It is interesting that the drop shadow is below-right, which is more or less the traditional position for shadows in graphic design, whereas all other FF logos place it below-left.)

There have also been a number of Fantastic Four logos which bore no resemblance to the traditional logo. At this point I think it’s not unreasonable to break this post into two parts; part two will appear tomorrow.