FF Plaza

Batman is my favorite superhero. Spider-Man is the most fun. But my favorite book is the Fantastic Four.

Maybe it's because it's not everyone's favorite. I can lay claim to its one long-running series, flawed movie and spotty merchandising because everyone else is over at the X-Men table. When Wolverine sells out, there's always the Thing.

They're a great secret. Anyone into the Silver Age of Comics knows this was the best book throughout the sixties. It even outsold Spider-Man. That's because Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were hitting ideas they (or the genre) would never touch again. It was like listening to Hendrix play. No one would get this good for another decade.

That hurt the book for the next generation. Creators were so in awe of Stan and Jack's ideas no one wanted to to change them. Luckily John Byrne, Mark Waid and Mike Weiringo proved there's still a lot of life and imagination in the characters. And I've read every issue ever printed hoping someone will do it again.

There aren't a ton of FF websites but the best is FF Plaza, which celebrates its tenth anniversary. Ten years on the internet. Can even Amazon say that? Find me an X-Men site that can boast such a legacy.