…oh, wait. Wrong Ron Wilson. Apparently he’ll be at New York Comic Con in 2008, so you can go there and ask him yourself. It looks like he’s been doing work here and there, but has been kind of quiet lately.

And I know why Ben left the FF within the fictional Marvel universe, but my point is that from a storytelling perspective, he left the FF because there’s a limited amount you can do with him in a solo series while still keeping him tied into the Fantastic Four’s series. That’s why pretty much every character who has their own series takes extended leaves of absence from whatever team they’re a member of (Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, et cetera, in the Avengers)…it’s because when they’re running a major storyline, it gets hard to co-ordinate. So he left for Battleworld both because he had a good “in-character” reason to stay there, and because John Byrne didn’t want to make the Thing’s own series into “Fantastic Four-A”.

It actually takes a half-dozen issues or so before Ben’s back in America and Deathlok’s no longer at death’s door. OTOH, unlike many of today’s comics, you could pick up any one of those issues and still get a non-confusing “done-in-one” experience – it’s just there’s linkage between them and a broader story if you read them all.

Eventually he returned to Earth but didn’t rejoin the FF right away; I don’t know if it was so the Thing series could stand on its own or because Byrne wanted to keep She-Hulk in the FF. During this era he hung out with the West Coast Avengers a bit, and the Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation was introduced. (Why has this concept pretty much vanished entirely for the past 20 years, incidentally? It would be hard to sustain it as a series, but if nothing else it would be a useful dumping ground for characters who didn’t work as crimefighters.)

If you just wanted something to read — just to pass a half-hour — you could choose a book basically at random, and not have to worry if it was Part 3 of a 6-part arc.

Also, it gave the oxygen of publicity to a few minor characters that you almost never saw otherwise.

It’s a really nice “storytelling engine” in a number of ways. First and foremost, the formula of “(Ben Grimm + Friend) team up and Clobber” is great fun on a pure elemental level. And while Ben often does need to use his noggin or his piloting skills, MTIO fights tend to work with Ben’s strengths more than Fantastic Four fights.

What do I mean by that? Read some Lee/Kirby FF stories, and see how many times you get a line like this from Reed: “No, Ben! Brute strength alone won’t get us out of this jam!” In MTIO, more often than not, brute strength and clobberin’ *will* get Ben out of the jam!

Also (compared to, say, Marvel Team-Up, or even The Brave and the Bold), you can usually set up the team-up in a fairly plausible manner. The FF are the most famous superheroes in the world, and everybody knows their address. Having people just wander by (and Reed and Susie are off experimentin’ in the ever-lovin’ Negative Zone, and Match-head’s off workin’ on his hot rod, which leaves just bashful ol’ Benjy!) – it’s not all that big a stretch (so to speak.) And the FF know just about everybody. It’s hard to get beyond 3 degrees of separation, let alone 6, to any Marvel character, and that’s even discounting “casual acquaintances met in the Big Crossover” stuff.

In MTU, by contrast, you’re often reduced to “Spidey web-swingin’ across town, and – hey, look! Isn’t that Wonder Man? And why’s he fighting a giant dinosaur in Central Park?”

But, really, it’s all about the clobbering.