Unstability: Reading Kirby & Lee's The Fantastic Four #2

The Fantastic Four #2

The Skrulls. A war-like intergalactic empire. Constant cosmic threat to the Marvel Universe. Total ass-clowns.

Arriving in issue two, we find that the Four are famous. Intergalactically famous. Based, apparently, on that one time they beat up that ugly guy in a cave.

Fame and public presence have always been a key part of the Four. In fact, I’d say Marvel in general is more concerned with the public perception of its heroes (we’re talking within narrative here) than DC. But the Four, the First Family of Marvel, are always public figures. I guess I thought that would develop a little more organically.

In this issue, shape-shifting Skrulls from outer space impersonate the Four and wreck an oil derrick, steal a diamond and melt a statue so that the world’s militaries will hunt down the Four and destroy them, freeing the Skrulls up to invade the earth. Because the only thing currently stopping them is the Fantastic Four. Who can be defeated by the military, which doesn’t really present a threat to the Skrulls. Got it?

The Four is chilling in an isolated hunting lodge while all this goes down. Probably to deal with all the fame. Despite the isolation, they still make Ben dress up in his Claude Rains duds. Ben has a couple “This man, this monster” rages, throws a bear head out the window. Then they all get captured by the army. Then they all escape.

Interesting quirk of this particular reproduction: whenever Sue goes invisible, she’s rendered in white with some dotted lines. Meaning there’s no ink on the page, a true blank. It's more noticeable in the reprint. In a pulp printed comic, the ink soaks a little deeper into the page, rather than sitting on top of it and giving the page an added sheen. Here's a picture that entirely does not illustrate what I'm talking about.

Because the Four is awesome at planning, they come up with a plan. What if one of us actually destroys something, in order to confuse our impersonators? Brilliant! Johnny wrecks a rocket, then gets picked up by Skrull Reed and Skrull Sue in a Studebaker, which may or may not be a Skrull. Luckily for everyone, none of the Skrulls is in Johnny form right now, because actually that was a huge potential flaw in an otherwise flawless plan.

But here’s my favorite part.

The Four decide to impersonate the Skrulls and go to the Skrull mothership, which has been waiting in orbit for that one last obstacle to invasion to be removed. Then they fool the Skrull leader by showing him pages from other Marvel comics. But not superhero comics, pages from Strange Tales and Journey into Mystery (which would later feature Thor, but at this point I guess had giant ants?). The Skrulls, despite the fact they’ve been monitoring the planet and have found no evidence of scary-ass troll monsters and giant ants, are like “Oh crap, let’s hightail it.”

And they do. Menace defeated.

On the return trip, they pass through some more cosmic rays. Which, understandably, Ben gets pretty upset about. Of course, everyone else is less than sympathetic, because they are jerks to Ben all day.

And finally, because Reed has not had a chance this issue to prove that he is a dick, he forces the three Skrulls who remained on earth to turn into cows. Permanently. This is an awesome idea and nothing bad could ever come of introducing aliens into the food supply.

My plot summary might seem snarky, but this issue is exponentially better than the first. Sure, the various plots and schemes are ludicrous, but they’ve got room to breathe a bit. This issue seems competent, on the plotting front. The art has some standout moments, particularly Ben’s brief reversion to human form. Some of the panel pacing is odd for a narrative that’s so compressed. Like this sequence.

There’s plenty to say about Sue, and as she develops, I’ll want to say more about her here. But one thing worth noting is that invisibility is not a particularly fun super-power to draw. Kirby seems to revel in panels of Johnny leaving flame trails in his wake and Reed’s limbs distending across the frame (although none of the Reed panels can touch Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, which rivals Eisner in its early formal innovation). But when it comes to Sue, there’s not a whole lot to work with other than showing the consequences of her visual absence.

Next issue: costumes! The Fantasti-car! The Miracle Man (but not MiracleMan).

Unstability: Reading Kirby and Lee's Fantastic Four #1 (continued)

Fantastic Four #1 (part two)

Onward!

Let’s do a quick note on prose and art.

Stan Lee never uses one word when three will do. Of course, there’s the standard comic trope of narrating what’s happening in the panel, which is particularly clunky here because Kirby gets a lot across in his panels. The exclamation points, double exclamation points and double question marks are also flying fast and free throughout. It's funny that in his huckster mode, Lee's letter column prose has a certain energy to it that is hokey but undeniable. This stuff is just leaden.

As for the art, look, Kirby’s an acquired taste at the best of times (see below). And this is not the best of times. He’s still stretching (get it?) his legs with these characters, and the first issue matches the Four up with some pretty generic monsters, so the Kirby design sense that will come into play later in the run isn’t on showcase here. Also absent is the weighty line-work that usually marks something as Kirby-esque. He's efficient, in an Alex Toth kind of way, but paging forward a bit, it looks like it takes him about eight issues to really hit stride.

Another aside: I'm reading these in the quite nice Fanastic Four Omnibus. Nice paper stock, the recolorations that were done for the Marvel Masterwords editions. It even includes letter pages, which I'm looking forward to.

Which brings us to the story. In quick summary, it goes like this: Reed uses a science-y machine to discover a bunch of atomic plants have gone missing. In “French Africa”, an atomic plant gets eaten by monsters or something. The Four use the science-y machine to figure out that Monster Island is at the exact center of the disturbances. They go to Monster Island after an exchange that goes something like this:

BEN: There ain’t no such thing as Monster Island.

SUE: There’s only one way to find out.

NARRATOR: Minutes later, on Monster Island…

Seriously, everyone in this comic is a jerk to Ben Grimm all day. Remember when he warned you guys about the cosmic rays? Does that earn him zero credit whatsoever?

Once there, they are separated in some way I’m not totally clear about. Reed and Johnny fall into a crevasse, where they are blinded, dressed in blue hazmat suits, and meet the Mole Man. Meanwhile, the Thing wrestles a big rocky monster who looks a lot like the thing and Sue does absolutely nothing to help. Back underground, we learn the origin of the Mole Man, who is basically an exceptionally ugly guy who also fell down a crevasse on Monster Island, became master of the underground creatures there (who we never really see) and developed…mole powers. Which are sort of like bat powers? Only underground. He beats the crap out of either Johnny or Reed (we can’t tell, since they are in blue hazmat suits) using aforementioned mole powers. He reveals his plan thusly:

Another strong argument for solar.

The Thing and Sue show up! But they don’t really do anything. Johnny burns through his hazmat suit and scares off a big-ass monster. The Mole Man pulls a “signal cord” and summons those underground monsters he was telling them about:

None of them look especially mole-y.

And finally Johnny “blazes a fiery swath which melts the soft earth”, probably killing all the monsters, because whatever, screw monsters. And the Mole Man too, except probably not, because the comic ends with this:

"Someday he'll thank us for burying him alive."

Yes, Sue, that is absolutely the stupidest thing you can say in a comic book.

And thus, comic books were revolutionized, apparently.

So what’s different? Why is the Fantastic Four #1 a landmark comic, while Challengers of the Unknown from three years earlier is largely (wait for it) unknown?

My suspicion (based on reading all of twenty-four pages) is that it had something to do with Lee and Kirby’s frantic, kitchen sink approach to this comic. There’s a little romance comic stuff in here (Lee had been writing romance comics before publisher Martin Goodman assigned him to come up with a superhero team to rival the Justice League), there’s a bunch of monster comic action. Not to mention there’s cosmic rays, a Monster Island, an underground Valley of Diamonds. There’s a lot of ideas thrown into the blender here.

But I also think it’s not so much a revolutionary comic on its own as it is part of a revolutionary moment in comics. The introduction of the narrative organism that is the shared Marvel Universe and the “Marvel style” of superhero, which stresses the personal over the archetypal has an amazing cumulative effect that’s difficult to locate by dissecting the individual comics involved.

Because, I’m just going to say it, Fantastic Four #1 is not a particularly good comic. It’s easy to write that off as “It was 1961, comics in general weren’t particularly good by modern standards.” But there are pre-1960 comics that read as very modern to a contemporary audience. This is not one of them. The origin story is well done, but the story in which it’s embedded clunks and chugs and then suddenly ends as if no one told them there’d be a page restriction. The plot is resolved in literally one panel, as opposed to four panels devoted to a French legionnaire who feels the earth quaking.

There were no ways to make this bit character more French unless they replaced his gun with a baguette.

I’m guessing it’s not going to get better fast. The stuff I really want to check out is the cosmic stuff, the Inhumans and Galactus and all that, but those are a ways down the line.

In an article published yesterday, Greg Carpenter compared Kirby as an artist to Dylan as a vocalist, in the sense they’re both things you need to learn to love. I’m not there yet with the King and as a pretty direct result, I’m not convinced getting there will be half the fun. But I think about people “subjecting themselves” to Dylan albums knowing there’s something there if they can just get at it, and I’m willing to give it a shot.

Tomorrow, there will be Skrulls.

Unstability: Reading Kirby & Lee's Fantastic Four #1

Given that this week would be Jack Kirby’s ninety-seventh birthday, and that I’m about to go into heavy re-writing on a novel whose working title, Unstable Molecules, is taken from one of the brilliantly science-y concepts that came out of Kirby and Lee’s original run on the Fantastic Four, which I’ve shamefully never read, I figured it was time to delve into the source material. Plus it’s a good way to stretch the writing part of my brain a bit. So here goes.

The Fantastic Four #1

So many exclamation points! So many!!

Note the definite article, which sticks around until issue #16. I'm not sure I have anything to say about it just yet, but, you know, note it.

If you’re a comic book fan, it’s impossible not to come to these issues with a lot of baggage. Much of it centered on the Lee vs. Kirby issue, which is to comics what Lennon vs. McCartney or Jagger vs. Richards is to music.

Let’s put it out there right off: along with most folks, I’m in Kamp Kirby. Not because Stan Lee comes off as a huckster (he does) or because the prose and dialogue that he claims credit for is six kinds of unbearable (it is), but because of this:

The incredible Human TorchHands.

That’s the cover of Challengers of the Unknown #3 from 1958, written and drawn by Jack Kirby. For decades, Stan Lee has made the claim that the idea for the Fantastic Four, a group of intrepid space explorers who are buffeted with cosmic rays and hideously transformed, sprang from his fertile imagination. But this issue by Kirby, five years previous, features intrepid space explorers who are buffeted with cosmic rays and hideously transformed. Just saying.

Structurally, Fantastic Four #1 is a twenty-four page comic divided into three chapters, the first of which is sub-divided into intro and flashback. I admit, I am a little obsessed with the comic’s opening line of prose, which gets echoed in Gravity’s Rainbow’s opening line, “A screaming comes across the sky.” But that’s because I’m a jerk.

The three awesome words are "The Fantastic Four". By the way.

The next panel introduces Reed as a shadowy figure with a gun, one we’d likely assume is the villain of the piece. He very well might be, depending on how you look at it. More later.

Nothing menacing here at all. Nope.

Oh, and we should note that the first issue doesn’t take place in New York City, but in a DC-style New York City stand-in, Central City. I’m interested to see when they make the switch, since the mythology of the Four is deeply connected to New York.

Do we need to get into the gender politics of making invisibility a woman's superpower in 1961, or can I assume?

Sue Storm gets brought on stage next with a bit of physical comedy. Check out the timing on this panel. From the stunned expression of the figure on the far left, the folks recovering in the middle of the panel, and the two men falling at the panel’s right or present side. It’s a great bit of pacing by Kirby.

This is, no joke, The Thing lamenting a lack of Big and Tall stores in New York.

Next, we have the real hero of the first issue, Ben Grimm, the Thing, who is pure Kirby monster material: monstrous in the classical sense of being out of sync or size with the rest of the world. He gets introduced in a sort of Invisible Man get up, including shades. This brings up issues of visibility that run through the storyline of the character (Ben ends up finding love with a blind woman) and of course parallels him with the Invisible Woman. But it also highlights an initial problem with the way the character is drawn. Throughout the first few issues, we never see Ben Grimm's eyes, and I'd argue that it's not until Kirby starts drawing Ben's baby blues that the character takes on the deeply human aspects that put him at the heart of the comic and tie him most closely to Kirby as an artist.

Over the course of two pages, the Thing tears up streets, wrecks a car, and is fired on by police. Like Reed, he’s given a villain’s entrance. But while Reed’s is, initially, just visual, Ben’s is more narrative. His actions are destructive and he’s full of contempt for the people he encounters.

Finally, Johnny Storm shows up, bursting into flames and melting some planes. At least he feels bad about it.

"My bad."

On to the origin flashback! Over the protests of pilot Ben Grimm and his fear of cosmic rays, the Four go blasting into space. Ben because he’s the pilot. Reed because science. Sue because she’s Reed’s fiancé. And Johnny because he’s Sue’s brother, and you should always take your teenage soon-to-be-brother-in-law on all of your space expeditions.

There’s a lot that’s unclear here, of course, because things move pretty quickly. It seems the space mission is military in some way, because the Four sneak onto the base and blast off. But Reed’s connection with the mission is never made clear. Even the “Reed is a scientist” assumption is just that at this point. Most importantly, they must beat the commies into space. So they go past the ONE GUARD on duty and essentially steal a space rocket. Well done, Four!

"If only we'd seen this coming!"

Of course, they are immediately blasted with cosmic rays. Which make a sound I imagine is a lot like an active Geiger counter, and calls to mind a classic Calvin & Hobbes strip.

The sounds of science.

Cosmic rays are the sine qua non of Marvel science-y concepts. The bulk of the Marvel Age is irradiated and mutated, and it’s good to note here the difference between American and Japanese attitudes toward radiation. In Japanese film, radiation introduces (or, more aptly reintroduces, awakes or recalls) the purely monstrous. In American comic books, radiation can induce monstrosity as well as heroism.

"I am unsubtle symbolism! RAAARRGH!"

In choosing “cosmic rays”, Lee and Kirby opt for something that is placed permanently outside of understanding, and is science-y while remaining separate from the science of actual radiation. The elements of the unknowable and, maybe more importantly, the elements of chance, have chafed modern writers of some of these characters, who have tried with varying degrees of success to introduce more intentional or spiritual elements into the characters’ origins (most notably, Mark Waid’s Speed Force accounting for the lightning strike with chemical dousing that creates The Flash, and JM Strazynski’s Spider-Totem, about which the less said the better).

It’s interesting, for me at least, to pause here and imagine a world of superhero comics that didn’t arise at a moment of obsession with atomic science. What if superheroes began forty years earlier when spiritualism was at its cultural peak? I’ve tried (again, with varying degrees of success) to come up with a set of Marvel analogues that get their powers from encounters with ancient gods and myths and totems rather than “science”. It certainly works better in a book about the power of stories and storytelling, but there’s something about superheroes having science-y origins that gives them a sense of newness. They don’t draw their power from older stories, and there’s something vital, if particularly American and mid-twentieth century, about that.

Now that they’ve been irradiated, the Four’s powers kick in. And here comes the amazing twist that drives the dynamic of this comic for decades. Reed, Sue and Johnny are all hideously transformed, but they retain a human base state to which they can revert, while Ben is permanently disfigured. Jonathan Hickman will pick up on this idea of base state pretty brilliantly sixty years later, but there are more immediate results.

"I only casually endangered the lives of my friends and loved ones. So back off!"

It’s tough not to read this as a Lee vs. Kirby moment. As the series progresses, The Thing becomes more obviously a stand-in for Kirby, while Reed retains unquestioned control over the group. And maybe there’s part of me that wants to imagine Kirby and Lee mediating their creative disputes through those two characters. This line of thinking makes these two panels all the more cringe-inducing.

"Everyone, on three: Reed sucks. One, two..."

Here’s my favorite of several articles on why Reed Richards is a dick, but those panels kind of sum it up. Total dick move, Reed.

All right, this is taking more space than I’d intended. So, tomorrow, on to the second half of the first issue. Excelsior!