Plot: Stan Lee
Script: Larry Lieber
Art: Jack Kirby
Inking: Dick Ayers
Lettering: Art Simek
If you've been reading Fantastic Four and FF over the past few years, you'll know that Jonathan Hickman has done a great job positioning The Wizard as a highly-dangerous sociopathic anti-Reed Richards. So much so that Reed adopted a young clone of the Wizard just to ensure that another version of him wouldn't come into the world, that some positive nurture would affect him and make him less of a risk to society.
Which is why it's so hilarious to return to these early stories where the entire scope of the Wizard was to humiliate a 16 year old boy, all whilst sporting some of the worst facial hair ever seen in comics.
In this story, the Wizard escapes from jail and returns to his house, which he is able to shield from the police. He then broadcasts to the entirety of Glenville/dale (I forget which one it is) that he will battle the Torch to prove who is the better man. And, being a 16 year old boy, Johnny doesn't see anything wrong with rushing head-first into battle.
Idiot.
Check out our coverage of Fantastic Four #11 on our ninth episode: Episode 9 - Patriotic Pedestrians Proceeding from Planet Poppup Prefer Poorly Produced Podcasts!
[audio http://traffic.libsyn.com/ffcast/Episode_9.mp3]