In this episode:
Mike and Ed discuss the destruction of lower Manhattan by “Giganto”. Is defending against attacks like this the reason the government is putting up with the Fantastic Four?
In this issue:
The Human Torch is still missing, and his teammates are looking for him. The Thing ends up fighting the Torch when he finds him, although the Torch escapes. He ends up in a rooming house which, in the strangest coincidence, an amnesiac Namor the Submariner has been living. Johnny protects Namor from a mob, and returns him to the sea, which causes his memory to return.
Namor swims back to his undersea kingdom, which has been destroyed by humanity’s atomic tests. Enraged, Namor confronts Johnny and tells him that he will take revenge on humanity. Johnny reunites with his teammates and tells them that the Submariner is back, and that he wants to destroy the human race.
And Namor puts his plans in motion, awakening “the largest living thing in all the world, the deadly Giganto!” The unbelievably large monster destroys lower Manhattan, shrugging off the army’s missiles as he does it. The army straps a nuclear bomb to the Thing’s back, who walks into a resting Giganto’s mouth, leaves the bomb in his belly, and narrowly escapes. (Sidebar: a nuclear bomb detonated in a destroyed lower Manhattan!)
The Fantastic Four confront Namor, who is distracted by Sue’s beauty. The Torch creates a water tornado that draws Namor and Giganto’s corpse high into the air, and then drops them into the ocean far away.
Assumed before the next episode:
Lower Manhattan has been destroyed, and New Yorkers will be wrestling with that awful event.
This episode takes place:
Shortly after the destruction of Lower Manhattan, and the (short-term) elimination of the threat posed by the Submariner.
Episode 9: Giganto destroys Lower Manhattan (Fantastic Four #4) -- May 1962