Comic Book Questions Answered – where I answer whatever questions you folks might have about comic books (feel free to e-mail questions to me at brianc@cbr.com).

Reader Erik T. wrote in to ask, "Hey Brian, did you ever explain why the Fantastic Four aren't in the Infinity Gauntlet? I'm in the middle of rereading it now and it's weird that all four were disappeared by Thanos."

No, Erik, but I will do so now (although, I'll be frank, I could probably just re-post an article I did on a similar topic years ago)!

Okay, let's briefly recap what Erik is referring to. During a storyline that began in Silver Surfer and then continued to the miniseries, Thanos Quest, Thanos collected each of the so-called "infinity gems" (now called the infinity stones) and formed the Infinity Gauntlet. His whole mission was about impressing the entity that he was in love with, Death itself (she was personified as a lady in her interactions with Thanos - she actually brought him back to life to send him on a mission to balance the world out more because there were too many people living).

In Infinity Gauntlet #1 (by Jim Starlin, George Perez and Joe Rubinstein), Thanos decides to put his plan into action by simply snapping his fingers and eliminating half of the people in the universe...

The next few pages show a few examples of the world reacting to the infamous snap. Including Captain America at Avengers headquarters with Sersi and Hawkeye when both of his teammates vanish in front of Cap's eyes!

By the way, as an aside, obviously Starlin just picked someone who was on the Avengers at the time to die in front of Cap and there were not a whole lot of steady Avengers at that point in time (basically just Cap, Vision and Sersi, with She-Hulk and Quasar sort of kind of being members - plus Thor, but he had just been replaced by Eric Masterson as the real Thor was seemingly killed or exiled for finally killing his brother, Loki), so Starlin didn't have a lot of people to choose from, but it is still funny to think of Sersi just chilling on monitor duty, looking up a file for Captain America and then clipping a note to the folder that says "Cap." That really isn't Sersi's thing, ya know?

Anyhow, in the next issue, we get more reactions to the deaths of half of the planet and we see that Doctor Doom survived and he is planning a way for him to take advantage of whatever kind of crazy thing is going on...

Later, at Avengers HQ, we see the list of dead heroes and ALL FOUR members of the Fantastic Four are on the list...

That's weird, right? So what's the deal?

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='What the deal was']

As it turned out, when Starlin wanted to include essentially the whole Marvel Universe in Infinity Gauntlet, he was met with a resounding "eh" from the rest of the Marvel editorial staff. You see, this was a time when there were very specific groups of editors who did not like to share their books with each other. There had been a crossover between the X-titles earlier in 1991 and only the three titles edited by Bob Harras took part in the crossover, with Excalibur (edited by Terry Kavanagh) being on the outside looking in. Excalibur did not take part in the annual X-Men crossover events until 1993, by which point Harras had taken over as the editor of that title, as well.

So a lot of the other editors were unwilling to give Starlin access to their characters (the list of titles that actually did crossovers with Infinity Gauntlet is hilariously random. Like, six different titles from five different editors). This is why the famous battle between the heroes and Thanos...

is made up of such a relatively limited cast of heroes. The X-Men titles, for instance, only allowed Starlin to pick two X-Men characters for the crossover. He chose Wolverine (duh) and Cyclops. Excalibur allowed none of their characters to be used. Same with Alpha Flight. Daredevil missed the crossover. Alpha Flight missed the crossover. Only Scarlet Witch and Iron Man made it from the West Coast Avengers. Only Nova made it from the New Warriors.

And only Doctor Doom was there to represent the Fantastic Four's title (heck, for all I know, that might not have even been through a deal with the FF editor).

Of course, Infinity Gauntlet was a huge success, so much so that Starlin now was forced to use EVERYbody in the sequel series, Infinity War...

So it was a funny bit of irony there. He went from having to adapt his story to only be allowed to use a handful of heroes to suddenly having to adapt his next story to work in EVERYBODY.

There ya go, Erik! Thanks for the question!

If anyone else has a comic book question for me, feel free to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!