Fantask #5

History

Fantask was born from a decisive editorial intervention: in 1968, Claude Vistel, daughter of Éditions Lug co-founder Auguste Vistel, returned from a trip to New York and convinced company director Marcel Navarro to license and translate Marvel Comics, launching Fantask in February 1969 from Lug's base in Lyon. The magazine was a 'petit format' digest (15 × 21 cm) that packed translated Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, and—beginning with issue #4—Amazing Spider-Man stories into a single publication; because French press law required periodicals to contain multiple distinct content sections to qualify for periodical tax treatment, Lug combined several Marvel series rather than publishing each title separately, which meant French readers experienced stories from wildly different publication years side by side. The run was cut short when the Commission de surveillance et de contrôle des publications destinées à l'enfance et à l'adolescence condemned the magazine's content as harmful—citing its 'terrifying science fiction,' 'traumatising monster battles,' and 'violent colors'—forcing Lug to cease publication after issue #7 in August 1969; Navarro relaunched Marvel material the following year under the title Strange.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Cover-dated June 15, 1969 (on sale date per GCD); the fifth of only seven issues of the run before French censorship shut the series down in August 1969.
• Contains the first French-language publication of the second story from Amazing Spider-Man #1 (March 1963, Stan Lee/Steve Ditko)—'Spider-Man vs. the Chameleon!'—marking the French debut of Dmitri Smerdyakov (the Chameleon), Spider-Man's very first costumed villain by publication order.
• Concludes the two-part French serialisation of Silver Surfer #5 (April 1969, Stan Lee/John Buscema/Sal Buscema), '…And Who Shall Mourn for Him?'—a story in which the Silver Surfer allies with physicist Al B. Harper (his first and only appearance before his 2022 revival as Ghost Light) to stop the Stranger's Null-Life Bomb; the story won the 1969 Alley Award for Best Full-Length Story.
• Also reprints material from Fantastic Four #11 (February 1963, Stan Lee/Jack Kirby/Dick Ayers)—the 'A Visit with the Fantastic Four' issue, split across Fantask #5 and #6—and Fantastic Four #12 (March 1963), the first crossover between the Fantastic Four and the Hulk, with General Ross recruiting the FF to capture Bruce Banner's alter ego.
• The Silver Surfer segment features cameo flashbacks of the X-Men line-up (Beast, Angel, Iceman, Magneto, Toad, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Mastermind) and a vision of Shalla-Bal, condensing an enormous swath of the Marvel Universe onto French newsstands for the first time.
• Fantask was the direct progenitor of all subsequent French Marvel publishing: its cancellation led Navarro to relaunch the characters in Strange (1970), which became France's most important and long-running Marvel anthology, eventually spawning Titans, Nova, Spidey, and others.
• The magazine was conceived and championed by Claude Vistel following a 1968 scouting trip to New York; Éditions Lug was a Lyon-based publisher founded in 1950, whose name derived from Lugdunum, the Gallo-Roman name for the city.
• Original art for every page of Silver Surfer #5—the issue partially reprinted here—was later published in IDW's John Buscema's Silver Surfer Artist's Edition #1 (December 2014), and a letter from future comics professional Wendy Pini (then Wendy Fletcher) appears in the original US issue's letter column.

Cast · 40 characters

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