A couple people asked if I had a better scan of that FF # 14 page I posted earlier. I don’t have a better scan of the original art, but here is a scan of the page from one of the Marvel reprint books. Click on it to zoom in.

To me, the first two panels are a great example of Jack’s visual and storytelling sense of humor — it’s kinda’ wacky, but I enjoy it; Jack’s visual comedy is unpredictable and unique. For example, on this page clearly the Thing could just squeeze past the two cars, or move one car, then vertically take off in his little airship, but that’s boring from a storytelling perspective; instead he piles up all the cars to get them out of the way. His actions don’t make much sense — obviously he’d do tremendous damage to the cars, and I doubt it would be physically possible for even a perfect machine to lift a whole car off the ground, climb up a stack of cars, and put another car on top of a pile of cars without the whole stack collapsing — but the scene works because this is just silly, fun comics-making.

Who cares if it’s physically possible or if it’s against the law. Jack uses this sequence to show the Thing using his strength to thumb his nose at authority (something we’d all probably like to do when someone charges you a ton of money to park your car), and the main result is that great visual of the Thing stacking up the cars. In reality, this action would really result in an arrest and 10,000s of dollars in damages, but that sequence serves a purpose — it reveals some aspects of the Thing’s character (anger issues, his problems with the status quo, and the ability to use his strength to reject authority) but I think the main purpose of this sequence was mainly to give Jack an excuse to come up with the great slapstick image of the Thing making a stack of cars.

I suspect Jack brought 100% of these comedy story elements to the table in the illustration phase. I can’t imagine Lee would micromanage Jack like that in the plot phase, if Lee even gave Jack a plot for this story. Stan may have even found himself scratching his head at times in the dialoguing phase when he saw stuff like this in Jack’s story — in panel 3, you can see Lee clearly goes out of his way to explain to the reader that the Thing unstacked the cars after he had taught the parking attendant a lesson. And in a comic book world, I assume, obviously there wasn’t a single scratch on one of them.

I doubt Jack gave much thought to sequences like this. He probably figured it would be visually funny for the Thing to stack up a pile of cars, so he drew it — and those types of comedic interludes that serve as transitions from one scene to another and tie a whole story together are what made all of Jack’s freewheeling FF stories so memorable and packed with lighthearted fun and personality.