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.