Fantastic Four original art - FF #7 inks from John Lucas!

Just a few months ago, I purchased a page of original Aaron Kuder art from Fantastic Four #5, the wedding issue for the Thing and Alicia. Since I had just picked that up, I wasn't really in the market for another page of FF art from the same run, but then a few popped up for a really good price, and what can I say? It was a great deal and I went for it.

The following pages are from Fantastic Four #7 and are not actually by Kuder - John Lucas helped out with some inks in this issue, and these are his inks over the Kuder's blue lines. That is to say, Kuder's penciled pages are still out there. This actually made it more attractive for me, as I had just bought some of Kuder's work, so now I have something a little different.

I got a total of four pages, each in various stages of development. Let's take a look!

This is the only fully inked page in the lot. You can see Lucas's signature at the bottom of the page.

This one has a great shot of the Human Torch going nova in front of Galactus. I finally have some Galactus art! Thank goodness.

And here's how the page was printed in the comic.

The next page, and the subsequent ones, too, were all partially inked. I don't know if Kuder inked the other parts on his own, or if Lucas did the whole page in different stages, but what's not inked is printed blue line. Here we have the middle three panels of the page, where Reed tries to fool Galactus into thinking that he has the Ultimate Nullifier once again.

And here's the page in its completed form!

The next page has inks on the top two panels, with some really nice shots of Reed and Galactus, with Sue and Ben at the bottom.

Here's the page as it was printed.

Lastly, here's a page that has an un-inked Galactus crashing into some Latverian mountains.

This page also has the best shots of the Thing, and we also see Johnny, Sue and Dr. Doom, too. So this page has the full team and Doom! That's great!

Here's what the final page looked like in the comic.

This is actually not the first artwork from John Lucas that I've got in the collection. A full fifteen years ago (!) I got a sketch of Ben Grimm in my much-ballyhooed Thing sketchbook. The above image is from Wizard World Philadelphia way back in 2004. Nice to see John still at it!