Kids in 1968 REALLY got their moneys worth, as we see in
Divide and Conquer and also
This is a Plot? and furthermore,
The Peerless Power of THE SILVER SURFER
With that much story, they ain't beatin' around the bush this month; kicking off with Sue suddenly passing out in the middle of the Baxter Building, and insisting she's fine. Other than putting her on the couch, nobody seems terribly concerned about this, and Ben opts to leave to spend his time with his girlfriend rather than seeing Reed faun over his enervated wife.
I think this is also because having Reed show concern for his wife would be straining Jack Kirbys imagination too badly to draw.
As it would happen, because this is a Silver Age comic, and Coincidence is the strongest force in the universe, Ben arrives just as a delivery man drops off a large glowing brick in her apartment. Turns out it was a mistake, delivered to the wrong address; as the mysterious glowing brick was actually intended to be sent to the secret lab of this months villain (who... I guess... lives in the same building?);
THE PSYCHO MAN!
Psycho Man, besides having a kind of ableist name, isn't really named for what he does, and CERTAINLY isn't named for what's interesting about him; he's a guy in a suit of Kirby Armor (which makes him look like a first draft of Darkseid) who has a really cumbersome Emotion Ray that can fill people with a crippling amount of fear, doubt or hate.
The Psycho Man also has three henchmen with him; Live Wire, Shellshock and Ivan who are basically The Enforcers from Spider-Man, except I don't think these guys ever came back.
Adam Warren did a mini-series called Livewires about a decade ago, according to Google, but that's about it.
It looks exactly like a Adam Warren comic called "Livewires", for the record.
Anyway, Psycho Man reveals that he's a bad employer immediately by blasting the delivery man who screwed up his Weird Glowing Brick delivery with a Fear Ray, that shows him a hallucination so terrifying he immediately flings himself out of a window to his death. Or that's what Jack drew, at least. According to the Comics Code, he hit a ledge just below the window and nobody will believe him while he recovers in the hospital.
Dragonball Zs translation has nothing on the CCA.
Anyway, not even waiting for the delivery guy to land in ANOTHER DIMENSION, Psycho Man heads off to retrieve his weird glowing brick, explaining it's a component he needs to upgrade his Emotion Ray to an enormous degree; capable of affecting huge groups of people at a time instead of just one; he also blasts his henchmen with Maximum Doubt in order to make them more subservient, which is really just a means to establish him as a bad guy (as if blowing the Fed Ex guy off the roof wasn't enough proof of that), and hits Ben with the Fear Ray and making off with the brick while he's distracted by that.
While the delivery man saw an unseen (but plainly terrifying) mass of terror when he was hit, Ben just sees... a big monster. Which is kind of underwhelming when the idea is that he's confronting his greatest fear. More of a startled concern than anything else; and eventually he gets over it since, well, it's not like Ben hasn't seen big monsters before.
Ben brings Alicia back to the Baxter Building, figuring that she seems to have been caught up in Superhero Shenanigans *again*, and the Baxter Building is probably the safest place in the city for situations like that. And, as it turns out, Reed has scientifically figured out why Sue passed out suddenly earlier;
she's preggers!
I'm not an expert at how you handle birth announcements, but I'm pretty sure that "My wife is going to have a baby" is a good example of how you shouldn't do it.
Ben is WAY more excited about this news than either of the Richards'.
Anyway, Ben gets back on task really quickly, and decides that any potential future nieces or nephews of his aren't going to have to deal with a world with any kind of Psycho Men in it, and so he recruits Johnny, Triton and Lockjaw to track him down and stop... whatever it is that he's trying to do.
MEANWHILE, IN THE MEDITERRANIAN SEA
Once again straining my disbelief beyond the limits I already thought possible, the Inhumans have arrived at a small secluded island which they have decided to make the place of a new Attilan (as the previous Attilan is still pretty badly wrecked. And by shocking coincidence, this island is ALSO a private getaway recently purchased by The Black Panther! And, because this is the first time these particular groups of superheroes have met, they commence with the obligatory comic book handshake; everyone fighting everyone else.
Eventually, the respective kings realize that they're both good guys, so they stop fighting, and besides, in an EVEN GREATER STILL coincidence, Panther Island is also the secret lair of The Psycho Man (so either he has two secret lairs, or the delivery man mixed up "Alicia Masters' apartment" and "Panther Island, Off the Coast of Greece"), and the two groups decide to team up to fight the more obvious threat of a Guy in Space Armor with a Fear Ray.
So the two groups enter Psycho Mans island fortress, and fight those henchmen from earlier (one of them, has what might be the winner of the Clunkiest Dialogue I've Ever Heard, declares "So his name is Karnak? eh? Well, he'll be NAMELESS FOREVER after he takes the direct hit I'm going to beam at him!"), but they're barely in the book long enough to bring up the page count, so the Inhumans and Panther are in no danger.
And, because the coincidences just can't stop coming at this point; this is also the point where Ben, Johnny and Triton all appear in the Psycho Mans base, alongside the other two groups, having teleported there thanks to Lockjaw. Psycho Man would be concerned at this point since he's... pretty badly outnumbered by some pretty darn heavy-hitting superheroes, but luckily, he just finished building his improved Emotion Ray, and is able to hit all the assembled heroes with his Fear Ray.
Which, again, mostly consists of fighting Cool Jack Kirby monsters, a couple of them actually are confronted with things that are coded to their personalities (Triton gets locked in a completely arid room, Karnak gets his arms stuck so completely in a wall that he'd have to lop them off to escape), but it's mostly Jack having an excuse to draw Cool Monsters that everyone really overreacts to.
Around this time, the one Inhuman who HADN'T shown up yet, the gentleman named Gorgon, arrives at the island, as he was off on a scouting mission, and sees a evil science base that suddenly appeared, and the scene of a struggle leading up to it, and figures, "Okay, that's something I should be involved with". And then we learn the one weakness all of Psycho Mans beam-induced hallucinatory monsters share;
they're vulnerable to earthquakes.
Which is a pretty good weakness, all things considered, if you aren't currently fighting a guy who makes Earthquakes every time he steps; and one stomp disperses all the illusions, and also damages the Fear Ray. Regrouped and kinda ticked off at the impromptu immersion therapy they all suffered, the heroes all confront Psycho Man again who explains his origin and why he isn't particularly concerned about anything they can possibly threaten him with;
For you see, secretly,
THE PSYCHO MAN IS ACTUALLY VERY TINY!
Psycho Man is actually a power-mad tyrant from the
teensy-weensy dimension of Sub-Atomica in the Microverse (last seen in FF #16 -Smiling Stan), who was concerned that the planck-sized planet his people live on is in danger of over-population, so he decides to conquer an UNFATHOMABLY GIGANTIC world in order to give them enough room; and so he had built a proportionally Gurren Lagann-sized giant robot body that would let him go about on Earth and conquer it by affecting peoples emotions with a laser.
There are SO MANY levels to everything about this completely bonkers plan!
God, I love Psycho Man.
Anyway, while he was in the middle of laying out his absolutely bananas backstory, Psycho Man doesn't hear Black Panther sneaking up behind him and just breaking his ro-body; which everyone agrees is fince, because he was a robot, and nobody is QUITE sure if Psycho Man was controlling it directly (and thus trapped forever in a prison a trillion times bigger than his entire galaxy), or from afar, but, well, it's kind of a moot point, he'll definitely come back at some point.
MOVING RIGHT ALONG!
THIS IS A PLOT? is an entirely Jack drawn and written short story about the creative process he and Stan use to write each issue of FF. There was a similar backup story in a Spider-Man annual a few years earlier, and while it's really easy to read between the lines in that one that Stan and Steve Ditko hated each other, this one is just straight up Mad Magazine parody of the Marvel Method and it's pretty light-hearted and goofy. Not sure if this came out before or after Not Brand Ecch, but I think it might have been the inspiration for that book. We won't hold that against it, though.
I would definitely read a comic about a superhero whos costume was a beard, and a ballerina with phosphorous dandruff, fwiw.
Finally,
The Peerless Power of the Silver Surfer is actually a follow-up to the previous annual; focusing largely on the Mad Thinkers abandoned computer; the Quasi-Motivational Destruct Organism (or QUASIMODO), but first, The Silver Surfer!
Ol' Norrin was flying around, still feeling like he backed the wrong horse by saving humanity from Galactus (he hasn't seen a lot of reason to think otherwise) when he's suddenly shot at by hunters; thinking he's under attack by frightened humans again. He realizes his mistake (the hunters were shooting at ducks near him) but doesn't actually feel any better and thinks it's a pretty messed up sport that humans made up here, and leaves again.
While the Surfer is brooding, again, that he's having a hard time finding any humans that aren't big ol' stinkers, he suddenly picks up the psychic anguish of someone hidden deep underground and who desperately needs help; and while the Surfer doesn't think much of humanity, he still can't let something like that sit, and tracks down the source of the despair, only to find... a computer with a face; the aforesaid Quasimodo.
Norrin listens to Quasimodos sad story (built by an genius, was an advanced enough AI that he became sentient, and was stuck in a box) and didn't think to ask any follow-up questions (moral alignment of scientist, if "Quasimodo" was a clumsy acronym for anything he should discourage) and decides to help the poor TV out by using the Power Cosmic to rebuild him into a proper form;
Despite the coloring here, he has fleshy hands; it's... a real look.
Quasimodo is at first delighted to have a body he can move around in, and bodily sensations and everything; but he's horrified when he sees a window and learns that the Surfer didn't do anything to make himself more handsome. Surfer points that that he's an alien comprised of pure Power Cosmic who spent most of his life dealing with Jack Kirby Aliens, so he really has no means to judge what is or is not attractive.
And Quasimodo then blasts him through a wall, because Destruct Organisms gonna Destruct.
And Quasimodo runs amuck through New York, convinced that everyone hates him because he's a metal hunchback with a big eye, and not because he's also gleefully exploding things with his laser vision and general misanthropy (less introspective than you'd think, this guy who was a TV set until recently), and the Surfer realizes he backed the wrong horse AGAIN when it comes to saving the people of Earth; and he flies off and blasts Quasimodo with some Kirby Krackle that turns him to stone.
Ona Bell Tower, which somehow escapes Stans attention.
He's written a lot of books this month, we can let him have this one.
NEXT TIME: Oh, he's Bad Again