Fantastic Four #17: Reed's Stretchy Body 31

Fantastic Four #17, page 17, panel 6 Story: Stan Lee

Art: Jack Kirby

Inking: Dick Ayers

Lettering: Art Simek

This is such a lovely panel, even if pretty much nothing about it makes sense.

On board Doom's flying airbase, the Four split up and are faced with deadly traps. Reed is trapped in a room that is filling with quick-setting cement, and survives only by threading himself through the air pockets until he is able to squeeze his way out from under the door.

We'll ignore the aerodynamic possibilities of any flying vehicle having a cement-filled compartment, naturally, and focus on the air pockets. As we all know, cement is well-know for being riddled with air pockets - it's this very lack of structural integrity that make is such a good construction material. Why does Reed need to stretch through them? There's plenty of air in the part of the room not filled with cement, and surely if the cement hardens, he'll have a harder time extracting his over-stretched body from it...

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Check out our coverage of Fantastic Four #17 on our fifteenth episode: Whence Came The Man of Asbestos

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