In every installment of I Love Ya But You’re Strange I spotlight strange but ultimately endearing comic stories. Feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have a suggestion for a future installment!

Today, we look at one of Doctor Doom's most absurd death traps for the Fantastic Four!

Fantastic Four #23 (by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and George Roussos) took one of the hallmarks of the early issues of the Fantastic Four (the team bickering) and cranked it up way past eleven as the team tears each other apart as the non-Reed members of the team think that Reed is being a bad leader and needs to be replaced (the three of them vote for a new leader and they each vote for themselves) and Reed, meanwhile, actively talks down to them, calling them morons and fools and that they're lucky that he's there to lead them because if he wasn't, the team would fall apart (he's probably right, but damn, dude, that's harsh).

After the other three bicker over who should be the leader, Reed literally gives them brooms and tells them to clean up their mess or quit or whatever. He is so over them.

Doctor Doom, meanwhile, is taking advantage of this discord within the group by planning a devious plot that involves giving powers to three strangers and, of course, having one of them pretend to be a Maharajah who wants to give Human Torch a futuristic car as a present. The Human Torch, naturally, not only doesn't think that this is odd, but he decides to keep it a secret from the rest of the team so that he can get the car himself (despite the whole thing being advertised prominently in the newspapers, neither the Thing nor the Invisible Woman notice it).

The car, of course, is a trap...

Doom slowly captures the rest of the team and they end up in a facility together. They then get over their bickering to use their teamwork to escape from Doom's initial trap, but then discover that the reason Doom had them in this specific place was because of these solar waves that are planned to come to Earth and...transmit whatever the solar waves hit....into outer space. Yes, you read that correctly. And I love that Kirby and Lee present it as though this is a normal thing that is not insane. "No, no, solar waves come and, you know, they teleport objects on Earth into space. Trust me."

In a clever bit of badassery, Sue uses her force fields to trap Doom along with them, so he must try to get out to help stop the solar waves from destroying them all...

But in the process, he accidentally gets caught by the solar waves himself...

Boy, Doom does not come off well in this comic and this solar wave plan is INSANE.

But awesomely insane. And the visuals are outstanding on it all. Kirby was a genius.

If anyone else has a suggestion for a future I Love Ya But You're Strange, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Again, we're going to have a whole month of these, so, well, more suggestions would be great!