MYTHCOMICS: MONSTER MARRIAGE SHOP (2021-2023)

 I said at the end of HARUM SCARUM that I'd be analyzing a harem comedy that didn't conform to the predominant pattern of the subgenre. MONSTER MARRIAGE SHOP does include a male protagonist surrounded by comely females. many occupying the same domicile, but all the females are yokai, "monsters," after the fashion of the still-ongoing 2012 manga MONSTER MUSUME. Like the influential LOVE HINA, SHOP telegraphs the inevitability of a particular "till death do us part" joining of the male lead with one of the resident females, though SHOP concludes within a mere twenty episodes. I've read enough translated manga that I feel I have the sense of what it looks like when a given manga has been structured for a long run, only to be wrapped up arbitrarily when some editor/publisher cancels the feature. I can't prove SHOP was not subjected to some similar circumstances. But to me it seems that female mangaka Kaworu Watashiya arranged everything in SHOP to come to an ending that she executes to deliver her specific take on the harem comedy-- one in which the "harem" functions a lot like a feminine support group.

At roughly age 9 male lead Yuto Nikao loses his father (about whom the reader never learns anything). At the funeral, his mother Mrs. Nikao (no first name given) comments that at least she still has her only child Yuto to console her-- except that in the wings a half dozen guys are waiting to date a hot widow. Throughout Yuto's adolescence his mother seeks to find a new father for Yuto, but she has terrible judgment, resulting in a stream of users and losers. Freud theorized that every male child would be conflicted once he was old enough to perceive Mommy having relations with Daddy. But though Yuto never thinks he ought to be the man in his mother's life a la Norman Bates, hearing Mommy Nikao have sex with assorted men has a bad effect on his male ego. Freud assumed that the Oedipal male would resolve his mother-complex indirectly, by seeking a mate reminiscent of his mother. Adult Yuto's solution to his complex takes a new wrinkle: he becomes a "marriage advisor," whose mission in life is to do well what his mother did poorly, facilitating good marriages. However, he also declines to seek a mate for himself, deeming himself an incurable "mama's boy" devoted to niche pornography.              

Then one night Yuto gets off his bus in the wrong place, wanders into a forest, and meets his leading lady, werewolf-girl Ururu di Bianca. She guides him into her hidden "monster town," where every resident is a yokai of some sort. Yuto takes his discovery in stride, and perhaps because nothing but his job defines the young fellow, he starts giving the relatively civilized monsters matrimonial advice.

 This state of affairs irritates the love-god Cupid (apparently all sorts of myth-beings occupy Monster Town). Feeling like Yuto's infringing on his territory, Cupid shoots Ururu with a love-arrow. Ururu comes close to de-virginating Yuto, but she's interrupted by a bevy of monster-girls who want the human's marital counsels. Yuto shakes off his near-rape and decides to open a matchmaking service in Yokai-ville. He doesn't realize, despite many subsequent hints, that Ururu has fallen in love with him now, so she and other monster girls start aiding Yuto in his new business.

I won't spend much time on the ancillary monster-girls. Watashiya seems to be following the example of MONSTER MUSUME, but with an important difference. Though two or three of the other beast-babes-- a succubus, a vampire, etc.-- seem inclined to sex up the human, none are really "into" him as Ururu is. Most of the time, the monster girls just hang around the agency waiting to see what happens, alternating between bonding and sniping at each other-- hence, my "support group" characterization. Almost none of them or the short-term customers actually get married, because in Monster Town, Yuto has to overcome his "mama's boy" fixation, and that means that his deflection into work must be invalidated. Not too many of the individual monster-girl stories are symbolically complex, except as they bear on breaking down Yuto's defenses. 

Not until Episode 14 does Watashiya introduce a ticking clock: Yuto's situation loosely parallels that of folklore-hero Urashima Taro, who was (according to the author) unable to leave Fairyland until he had sex-- which is. of course, what Yuto's been avoiding in the real world, to maintain his connection to the mother he still loves. 

Meisa the Gorgon, the intellectual of the group, expands on Yuto's psychology with the concept of the "frog prince syndrome." Frog princes, rather than importuning princesses for kisses, are deeply conscious of being undesirable. Thus their poor self-image justifies pushing away anyone trying to get close.  

Harnis the Succubus comes up with her own theory of building up Yuto: enter his dreams and have dream-sex with him. However, the attempt triggers Yuto's defenses: even in his mind, Yuto thinks his mother is always watching. Yet at the same time, he resents his mother's control and transforms into a gorilla flinging poo at Mom.

Harnis, perceiving that Yuto has shifted his fixation to Ururu, convinces the dreamer to summon the wolf-girl. But here too the punishing mother intrudes, and Yuto conjures up a lupine dominatrix.       

However, Yuto's dream may have some effect in the human world, for no sooner has Yuto awakened and dressed than a giant version of Mommy Nikao intrudes on Monster Town and snatches up Yuto like he's Fay Wray. The monster-girls theorize that the giant is a psychic projection of the human Mrs. Nikao, and if so, this is the only time the character appears in the narrative's "real time." Both Yuto and Ururu try to reason with the giant, but when Mrs. Nikao tries to eliminate the competition, the monster-girls take her down, though Yuto shows his respect to the "mother" before she vanishes.

With the vanquishing of "Queen Kong," Yuto can at last express his feeling for Ururu-- and though she knows he may disappear, she can't stop herself from "wolfing out" and having sex with him-- though this time, he doesn't want abuse but trusts her not to harm him. Yuto does return to the human world, but with a twist: he, unlike Urashima Taro, returns to a time slightly before he departed. So now he has the chance to return to normal life, so will he do so?

Of course not: within one day he's back in the forest, looking for Monster Town. And though he finds his Fairyland, it's a reversal on the trope of the human who returns to a future-world that's forgotten him. This time. the denizens of Fairyland forget that their human visitor ever existed, even though Ururu (possibly) carries his seed. And this comprises Yuto's last hurdle: the guy who had no confidence in himself must tell all the monsters who've forgot him that he knows them all inside-out. And to judge from the last pages, Yuto succeeds in making his lupine lady love him again. The reader doesn't know how much time has passed: only that Camilla the Vampire and a wolf-boy are regarding a bridal picture of Yuto and Ururu, and speaking of Yuto in the past tense. It's a bittersweet touch to the overall happy ending, implying that a mortal can't endure in Yokai-ville as if he was one of them. But if Yuto pays a penalty for love, most readers would consider that a better fate than expiating his trauma in a devotion to the happiness of strangers.     

HARUM SCARUM

 My next mythcomics post concerns a rather atypical "harem comedy," so it behooves me to advance some general rules for the typical kind.

The baseline definition for the subgenre involves a protagonist continually interacting, usually in close proximity, with three or more uncommitted individuals, all of whom said protagonist finds attractive. Though some variations include a hetero female surrounded by hetero males, or focus upon assorted gay/lesbian permutations, the prevalent pattern is that of a single hetero male becoming the center of attention for three or more hetero females. The dominant pattern is also that of the domestic comedy, though there are also Japanese harem franchises oriented upon horror or adventure.

Most "harem-histories" start with the most popular serials produced by Rumiko Takahashi: URUSEI YATSURA (1978), MAISON IKKOKU (1980), and RAMNA 1/2 (1987). However, none of these serials stress ongoing female romantic competition for a male as do the stronger exemplars of the subgenre. URUSEI clearly takes advantage of what I'll call the "beauty pageant trope," in which, for whatever reason, a male character finds himself virtually besieged by a panoply of gorgeous females. However, of the couple dozen women who populate URUSEI in its nine-year-run, very few of them are interested in protagonist Ataru. URUSEI does begin with a Betty-and-Veronica struggle between Earth-girl Shinobu and alien beauty Lum for Ataru's love. But soon Shinobu deals herself out, and it becomes evident that Lum is the only one who loves/can stand Ataru. The lead female of MAISON never really has any serious competitors either. And while a small coterie of hot girls pursues Ranma Saotome from time to time, thus annoying female lead Akane, the RANMA series doesn't focus purely upon the presence of romantic rivals. All that said, at least one URUSEI tale by Takahashi includes Ataru fantasizing about having a harem consisting of all the females who have continually rejected him-- and that one scene might have had a major effect upon all that followed, considering Takahashi's status as a major moneymaking mangaka.

Closer to the harem-pattern were 1988's OH MY GODDESS and the 1992 OVA TENCHI MUYO (which in turn begat a manga and a teleseries in that decade). However, I don't think the subgenre became dominant until the international success of Ken Akamatsu's 1998 LOVE HINA, in which a harried male student finds himself managing a girls' dormitory. All five of the nubile female residents vie for the male's affections, and that's not including two other irregular sources of competition. 21st century Japan then began producing a titanic number of similar concepts, and I've seen no evidence of the trend slowing down.

This arrangement has led to HINA and many similar franchises as being nothing more than appeals to male sex fantasies. I've no stats regarding what serials are read more by females than by males in Japan or anywhere else. However, I don't think HINA in particular lacks for female fans. Though no reader of either sex experiences the sort of farcical situations of HINA, in real life hetero females certainly do compete for males, albeit more subtly than male competitions. A series like HINA allows female readers to identify with female characters seeking validation of their own feelings, even when a given character is unlikely to be selected as the male lead's destined partner (e.g. middle-schooler Shinobu, whose affection for twenty-something Keitaro was not likely to be confirmed by serial's end).

I mentioned that various permutations existed, and this includes a few harem-like narratives that revert back to the non-harem resolution of URUSEI, surrounding the male with comely females who don't desire romance with him. This is definitely true of the anime PRINCESS RESURRECTION, though at present I've not read the entire manga series. And the mythcomic I'll next explore diverges into even newer terrains.     

MYTHCOMICS: "BREAK YOUR DESTINY" GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI (2011?)

 

"In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation"-- Bataille, EROTISM, p. 16.

"...in these comic circumstances, the beating may be deemed a symbolic displacement for the sex-act, since the female is almost always hot for the male."-- SHOOTING THE SHIRT, 2014. 

The title "Break Your Destiny" appears only on this splash page from the second part of the final SWEEPER story. Shiina's story, and those of other mangaka, were published in various magazines and in a 2013 collection, in order to generate revenue to be donated to the benefit of victims of a devastating 2011 Japanese earthquake. 

Any readers of the SWEEPER manga would have known that Tadao Yokoshima's "destiny" was to be the beloved butt-monkey of the phenomenal ghost sweeper Reiko Mikami, so author Takashi Shiina would have been having fun with that preconception by claiming that "this man's desire is going to change Japan's history." But the history of the Mikami-Yokoshima relationship ensures that none of the Japanese history-books must be changed, and despite the title Yokoshima finds that his destiny is locked in, and by his own free choice.

One element in the story suggests that this is supposed to be set in the early days of the Mikami-Yokoshima relationship: the fact that their colleague, the sweet-natured Okinu, is still a ghost. This state of affairs came to an end in the story-arc "Sleeping Beauty" (circa 1996), during which time Okinu was reincarnated in a mortal form. Okinu forgot her friends for a while, but when she remembered, she rejoined with "Mikami GS" for the remainder of the series in her purely mortal form. And yet, if this story were supposed to be taking place before "Beauty," that would create a continuity-problem, for reasons I'll explain shortly. Since Okinu's being a ghost is not important to the narrative, it's most likely that Shiina simply indulged in a little nostalgia with his friendly ghost-girl.  

  

The setup is only loosely established: Mikami has been hired to dispel a bunch of spirits from a deserted Japanese temple, and she demands that the holdouts inside the temple surrender to her authority, or she'll wipe them out. Okinu reminds Mikami that Yokoshima's being held hostage in the temple, and Mikami seems indifferent to her male assistant's fate, as long as she succeeds in her mission and gets paid. However, to herself Mikami muses, "I am really counting on your charm towards the supernatural, Yokoshima. It's one hell of a gamble whether she might fall for you or not." In other words, though Mikami unambiguously wants to earn her fee for ghost-sweeping, she's not just writing Yokoshima off, but is gambling that he will "charm" the head spirit somehow. (How Mikami knows it's a female spirit is left to the imagination.) But in the period prior to "Sleeping Beauty," Yokoshima-- never a Don Juan at the best of times-- had not demonstrated any special "charm towards the supernatural." It's only in the later adventures that Yokoshima attracts two or three "supernatural girls" into his orbit, and that's what Shiina's thinking of when he, speaking through Mikami, credits Yokoshima with "charm."

Yokoshima, however, was not apprised of Mikami's opinion of his charms, so he's in turmoil at having been deserted. However, the head spirit-- Seiryuto, an analogue to a character from another Shiina manga-- offers Yokoshima a deal. If Yokoshima supplies her with supernatural power, Seiryuto will whisk him back in time to an era where he can become the ruler of Japan and can have access to all the women in the world. Yokoshima agrees, and Seiryuto transforms her temple into a time-traveling spaceship. 

Mikami and Okinu witness the ship take off, and hear Yokoshima bid farewell to them, and to Mikami's "boobs, ass, and thighs." Though Mikami doesn't know what's going on, she demonstrates that she's not as willing to let her assistant disappear as she suggested earlier. She uses a wirepoon gun to fasten a line to the ship, so that it hauls Mikami and Okinu along in its wake. Thus the two intrepid heroines travel in time as well and end up receiving exposition from none other than the famed warlord Nobunaga Oda. This could be deemed a quasi-crossover in that Shiina's next manga after SWEEPER was a fictionalized series about Oda in his teenaged years.

One thing the girls learn from Oda is that they didn't end up in the same period as Yokoshima. He appeared in medieval Japan half a year ago and began using Seiryuto's advanced weaponry to conquer the local lords. From Mikami, Oda finds out how the greedy exorcist offended her assistant, and Oda has a suggestion on how to fix the situation so that Mikami and Okinu can take their buddy back to their time: Mikami must apologize to Yokoshima. The 16th-century warlord shows a remarkable knowledge of the 21st-century term "tsundere," advising the heroine that it's not good to "be too much tsun and no dere." Against her instincts, Mikami tries to practice apologizing, but Oda informs her that she looks like "a complete villain." Oda, knowing that her attitude will never compel Yokoshima to give in, formulates an alternative plan.

Sometime later, Oda's army marches on Yokoshima's lands. Yokoshima doesn't care about fighting Oda, for he's surrounded by the beautiful women of his court. But Seiryuto won't let him canoodle with the hotties, because Yokoshima can only endow her with his supernatural power as long as his lust is not satisfied. Presumably the alien yokai has been blocking Yokoshima for the past months for that very reason, since he's just as desperate for sex as he was working for Mikami. Yokoshima doesn't want to confront Mikami on the field of battle, but the court ladies affirm that they won't give him nookie if he has no temporal power. Boxed in by his Faustian bargain with the alien, Yokoshima dons his armor and joins his army in the field.

Oda's alternate plan was to still have Mikami apologize to Yokoshima, but with a mask over her face to conceal her insincerity. But headstrong Mikami pursues her own destiny, and dons the horrendous mask of an oni, which just stokes Yokoshima's fear of her. Despite her mixed signals, Mikami makes a sincere (for her) effort to apologize, but her need for absolute control causes her to deny her apology seconds after making it. Yokoshima is unable to follow Seiryuto's counsel and convert his fear into anger, but his fear of Mikami's vengeance drives him to attack her with his sword. She mostly blocks his blow, but he hits her mask and it splits. Seiryuto is then surprised at the disappearance of her power-source, for even though Mikami maintains through her words that she doesn't need her assistant in any way, her "crying eyes" belie her lying words. For some vague reason, Seiryuto's loss of power propels her and the three ghost-sweepers out of the medieval era.

And what is the reward for Yokoshima's virtue, his realization of how important Mikami is to him, and he to her? Why, his reward is vice-- the vice of Mikami's wrath. But going on all evidence, she's insincere again in saying that she's punishing him for having physically attacked her. Mikami resents that Yokoshima pushed her into losing her prized self-control, not to mention any anger she might feel at his willingness to leave her. Seiryuto builds on Oda's tsundere comment by claiming that Mikami is "99.9999 percent tsun"-- which is another way of saying that Mikami has no dere to spare. Okinu tries to see the sunny side of torture by saying, "Well, but at least their hearts are connected-- I think." 

And yet Mikami does speak a truth of sorts in her final adventure-- one that makes the most sense if she utters it after she and her butt-monkey have endured all the travails of the 1991-99 series. In some of those adventures, Mikami became hazily aware that she's conceived a liking for Yokoshima, but she would never verbally admit it in his presence. But this last time, when he protests that she ought to show him "some grade of affection" after he chose her over rulership of Japan, Control-Freak Mikami makes the admission, "This is how I show affection! Through my whip of love!" 

Such a confession is entirely in line with a female who became obsessed with control after she failed to hold the attention of the men in her youth with traditional female traits. The final words of Mikami explain why she didn't fire the horny teen who kept ogling and molesting her, and it certainly was not because Yokoshima worked cheap. It's because he's so besotted with her beauty that he'll endure any rigor, any torture, to be near her-- and his passion transforms her into the perfect domme for such an intrinsic sub. As with many similar figures from Japanese pop culture, her violence becomes a "symbolic displacement for the sex-act." But at least Takashi Shiina offered some "grade of affection" for his character Yokoshima in the story "Stranger Than Paradise," in which it's revealed that (maybe) Yokoshima and Mikami eventually tie the knot-- though even holy matrimony is not enough to resolve all the conflicts in this equally sacred "battle of the sexes."

                         

              

TSUNDERE, TSUNDERE

 (Apologies for the above pun to Blur and their nineties song, "Sunday, Sunday")

On this blog I've written quite a bit about the appearance of sadistic tendencies in various fictional characters, particularly of the feminine gender, who as a group are better known for "giving" than for "taking." Jordan Peterson has noted that females are generally more "agreeable" than males and less given to overt confrontation. Yet I think there are often currents of aggression that become intermingled with the most agreeable temperaments, and one might say that many of these have, in Japanese culture, manifested in what has been termed the "tsundere"-- the understanding of which is crucial to my impending conclusion to my ongoing GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI analysis.  

So what's a tsundere? Grokipedia and Wikipedia agree on this basic definition:    

A tsundere (ツンデレ) is a character archetype originating in Japanese anime, manga, and visual novels, depicting an individual who initially behaves in a cold, hostile, or irritable manner—known as the "tsun" phase—before gradually revealing a softer, more affectionate and vulnerable side, referred to as the "dere" phase.

Grokipedia also adds a categorization I don't find in the Wiki essay:

The archetype has evolved to include variations, such as "Type A" (harsh exterior dominating initially) and "Type B" (affectionate by default but with tsun outbursts)

I for one have only seen the tsundere term used for Type A: the sort of character who projects hostility or indifference, whether to many people or to one specific person. I can see at least a chain of logic for Type B, though, and I can also see how readers of manga, and of fiction generally, will particularly have a tendency to use the term interchangeably for (a) those that project an aggressive vibe but have some level of agreeability hidden beneath a tough exterior, and (b) those that project an agreeable temperament but also evince aspects of aggression on occasion. Neither Type A nor Type B are intrinsically feminine character-types, and indeed I can think of prominent male archetypes along roughly the same lines. However, in this essay I'll confine myself to feminine examples, because traditionally aggression becomes more problematic, psychologically and socially, for females than for males.

Grok and Wiki also agree that the term "tsundere" was not coined until the very early years of the 21st century, though there had been several fictional progenitors of both types. Takashi Shiina's Reiko Mikami is unquestionably a member of Type A, and if the online translation of Mikami's final story, circa 2011, is an accurate one, that story might be among the first manga-stories to incorporate the newbie term. Rumiko Takahashi's Lum is sometimes labeled as a Type A as well, though I deem her a Type B based on the above description. But Lum may be the first major manga-female who intermingled agreeability and aggression so thoroughly that she's often deemed the first of the type, though she appeared over 20 years before the term was coined.

              

Shiina's indebtedness to Takahashi has been mentioned in online interviews with the two of them and is played for laughs in one of the late SWEEPER stories, "GS Mikami 78." This tale depicts a demon-battle in the career of Mikami's youthful mother Michie and includes a cute in-joke wherein young Rumiko Takahashi witnesses the fight and is inspired to create URUSEI YATSURA. Shiina is very careful to make sure his readers know that the joke has Takahashi's approval. That said, Michie is a closer analogue to Lum than Mikami is, and the "GS 78" arc even shows Michie winning over a reluctant male lover with her passion-- a thing Lum repeatedly seeks to do with Ataru, though with far less success.

Actually, in her very first appearance Lum does have some strong character-traits in common with Mikami. An alien race, strongly resembling the traditional Japanese ogres called "oni," threatens to conquer Earth. But the ETs offer a deal: they will withhold all attacks if a randomly chosen Earthman engages their champion in a game of "oni-tag." Lum is the champion, and she's totally okay with helping her people conquer an unoffending planet. Earth's champion can only win the contest if he tags Lum's horns, but her ability to fly makes that difficult. Ataru only earns Lum's wrath-- her "tsun" characteristics-- when he manages to pull off her bikini-top, which might be viewed as a deflected defloration motif. Lum then begins fighting Ataru on a personal level, the female responding to the male's crude advances, and she even sneers at his lack of toughness when he's knocked out by a fall to the ground. However, the moment Ataru defeats Lum, this time using her stolen bikini as bait, Lum shifts into the "dere" phase, and for the rest of the series she tries to convince Ataru to marry her willingly-- which is precisely where Lum's resemblance to Reiko Mikami ends. 

One assumes that on some level the Lum character knows she's not really Ataru's wife until they have the ceremony, but she reacts to his dalliances with other women as if he were a cheating husband. This leads to the series' most familiar trope: Lum violently punishing Ataru for his fickleness. In this she's certainly a revenge-figure for every woman who dealt with a trifling male, even though the comedy stems from both (a) the fact that she doesn't have any literal claim on Ataru, and (b) the fact that, if only because of their propinquity, Ataru does come to love Lum better than any other appealing woman-- though, much like Shiina's perpetual victim Yokoshima, Ataru always wants as many women as the world offers. But Lum generally projects an agreeable "Type B" personality no matter how many times she's moved to violence.

Shiina's final SWEEPER story appeared in or around 2011, the year that a great earthquake devastated Japan, prompting several manga-artists to contribute special stories .to generate revenue for victims. Possibly, had the earthquake never taken place, Shiina still might have found some other reason to present this capstone to his original series, which had concluded in 1999. The cover highlights Mikami's comeback by mentioning that Shiina's profit-seeking ghostbuster had "arrived in the 21st century"--though thus far this two-part tale has remained the last hurrah for Mikami and her crew. It does show that by 2011 the term "tsundere" has become accepted by manga-practitioners, enough that Shiina expects his audience to understand the context. And in the final SWEEPER story, Shiina pokes a little fun at how the term's meaning might, or might not, apply to so extreme a personality as Ghost Sweeper Reiko Mikami.

               

MYTHCOMICS: THE RECKONING WAR (FF: RECKONING WAR ALPHA, FF VOL. 6, #40-46)

 

Following the respective departures of first Jack Kirby and then Stan Lee from the FANTASTIC FOUR title, almost every later raconteur said something or other about how the starring characters needed special treatment because they were a "family," as opposed to super-groups that functioned like loose affiliations of super-policemen. But saying this doesn't mean anything if a creator doesn't have any insight into what sort of conflicts and tensions are unique to families. 

FANTASTIC FOUR certainly wasn't the first adventure-series organized around a familial matrix. In the Silver Age of Comics, there had been two notable predecessors, and both of them-- DC's TIME MASTER and SEA DEVILS-- came closer than the oft-mentioned CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN to the makeup of the FF: smart leader, strong sidekick, leader's girlfriend, girlfriend's kid brother. Stan Lee or Jack Kirby may have seen one or both DC-features and subconsciously imitated the template of the character-types. But they added elements one would never find in those strictly juvenile DC titles. Maybe their success stemmed, as some have argued, from combining Lee's penchant for soap-operatic drama with Kirby's passion for sci-fi tropes. But whatever "origin story" fans might choose to write about the creative success of FANTASTIC FOUR, Lee and Kirby arguably produced the first adventure-series built around a family where the female characters had some agency opposed to the will of the males. In fact, I see in the Lee-Kirby oeuvre a gender-dynamic reminiscent of what little we know about the sex-roles of primeval families, which coalesced around the female's need to "nest" and the male's need to "hunt."

In juvenile sci-fi comics, "hunting" doesn't connote tracking down savage beasts. Rather, it means that the heroes are always seeking the next adventure to please a dominantly male audience. When a familial ensemble included girls/women, the females' function was often to worry about how the group could possibly overcome the Peril of the Polka-Dot Gorilla. Alternately, the girl might be a tomboy who was as enthusiastic as the guys at seeking the next adventure and so didn't challenge the male priorities, like the girl-member of SEA DEVILS. Family conflicts showed up in crime melodramas or even in teen humor titles, but not appreciably in adventure-comics.

 Yet almost from the start, FANTASTIC FOUR showed the tense dynamic of a family cooped up in the same "nest," often depicting Reed and Sue playing "mommy and daddy" to a fractious couple of "siblings." Sue Storm, though, not only fretted when the Thing and Torch quarreled, but apparently considered at one point chucking the "den mother" gig for a seat on the throne of Atlantis.

I don't want to suggest that Stan and Jack were more than loosely aware of the molds they were breaking. Clearly, they were mostly flying by the seats of their respective pantalones. But over time, many of the latter-day raconteurs on the FANTASTIC FOUR gave such matters as "female vs. male" agency a lot of thought-- and that brings me to Dan Slott. In tandem with assorted collaborators, Slott's run on the FF title-- from issues #1-46 (2018-2022) -- has done the most to logically extend What Stan and Jack Wrought, at least in terms of gender-dynamics, culminating in the arc called "The Reckoning War."

There's a lot of backstory stuff Slott works into "War" that one has to track down in other features. An advance ad for the arc claimed that WAR was "fifteen years in the making." Well, what that really meant was that Dan Slott introduced the idea of the war back in a 2005 issue of his SHE-HULK run and then sat on the idea for fifteen years, possibly with the hope of being able to develop his concept in a plum series like FANTASTIC FOUR. I don't say this in disparagement. I like the fact that Slott's FF run culminates in the ambitious Reckoning project. (There's some romance-stuff between She-Hulk and Jack of Hearts that also comes from the SHE-HULK title, but I found it easy to roll with.) But Slott's main foundation for his new epic was in a 1964 story told by Stan Lee and Larry Leiber, the origin of The Watcher from TALES OF SUSPENSE #53.

                         

Of course this simple cautionary tale about the perils of arming rude savages had to get a more "cosmic" treatment by Slott, which is more or less what fans expect these days from FANTASTIC FOUR and similar Marvel titles. In the new narrative, the benighted Prosilicans don't just get atomic power, but some Watcher super-technology that dwarfs anything that even the most advanced Marvel-aliens can come up with. 

The Prosilicans launch a war of dominion, and when their opponents retaliate, nine-tenths of the then-known universe is destroyed. Only the power of the Watchers can preserve what's left, by sealing the corrupted parts of the universe into a veritable "outer darkness" called The Barrens. So in this iteration, the Watchers swear their oath of non-interference not because they harmed one world with their act of Promethean generosity, but because the entire universe was almost expunged. But millions of years later, the Watchers' original hubris will come back to bite the universe in the ass again.

       

One Prosilican, name of Lord Wrath, apparently survives all those millennia in the Barrens and finally decides to annihilate the protected one-tenth of the cosmos the Watchers saved. He rustles up three henchmen, similarly immortal Prosilicans who also sport super-powers and the euphonious names of Ruin, Rapture, and Reject. Together they are "the Reckoning," and they start disseminating Watcher-tech throughout the galaxies to foment in what might be called (after David Brin) "Negative Uplift."

Everywhere various alien empires go to war, and of course one group of aliens just has to hassle Earth, home of the Fantastic Four and that premiere alien-fighter, Reed Richards. First Reed gathers intelligence from She-Hulk, who informs him of her experiences with various time-guardians and the Reckoning prophecy. Then the FF stumbles across Nick Fury, who became an aide to Uatu the Watcher in a very involved subplot. Uatu is out of the picture for a bit, but Fury brings a gift to the party; a device with which super-genius Reed can perform a "Positive Uplift" on himself. Or maybe it's not so positive, according to worried Mrs. Richards (and anyone who ever saw FORBIDDEN PLANET).

On the plus side, with this intelligence-boost, Reed instantly figures out that all the galactic brush-wars are "smokescreens" for Lord Wrath's real purpose: to get hold of a handy reality-nexus with which to end reality. On the minus side, Super-Big Brain becomes so clinical that he disregards Johnny Storm's plea to cure his affliction (yet another earlier subplot) -- and that's just for starters. Both the Torch and the Invisible Woman pursue other avenues against Wrath, and so do independent actors like Doc Doom and The Silver Surfer. But following a foray against Wrath's henchmen, Reed does something to his old friend Ben that makes turning him into a rock-monster look like small potatoes.

  

Even Reed using a coma-gun to shut down his son's mind (way back in FF volume one, #141) can't equal this act of cold-blooded intellectual hubris. Reed deceives his best friend Ben Grimm into thinking that his wife and his kids have been destroyed, just to snap the big guy out of a tendency to get freaked out in combat with Rapture, For Reasons. The "fake death" sequence is not strictly necessary for the plot, so Slott may be saying that even a well-intentioned desire for boundless knowledge-- in other words, endless "hunting"-- holds peril for the "nest" of the family.    

 In other news, the Silver Surfer brings Galactus back from the dead (I didn't even know he was sick), and the Watcher tries to persuade his fellows to go to war against the Reckoning. The other Watchers respond by putting Uatu in a chair and making him read old WHAT IF comics. Not really, they're not that inhuman. Uatu is just forced to watch so many scenarios of alternate realities that they jumble his ability to know right from wrong. Fury and the Invisible Woman liberate Uatu, and for good measure, they all learn that the narrative about how the Barrens were created is not accurate, and that there was a Watcher-thumb on the scales.

The Richards and the Grimm kids don't get a whole lot to do in most issues, but they do manage to neutralize one of the henchmen. When Reed and Sue are finally reunited, Sue rightfully busts Reed's chops for his manipulations and secret-keeping, and in contrast to most of the Lee-Kirby oeuvre, the excuse of saving the universe doesn't quite suffice.

  

And now it's time for the big showdown: Thing vs. warrior-bitch Rapture, while everyone else piles on Wrath. And it's a big confession time for Reed too, as he admits that all the knowledge he's gained from the Watcher-uplift means nothing next to all the little things of their relationship. Then Reed faces off against Wrath with the Ultimate Nullifier, which should kill both of them.

 But after all this heavy stuff, it's time for a little eucatastrophe. Reed learns one thing he didn't know: using the Watcher-made Nullifier kills the Watcher who uses it, and that has the effect of removing the Watcher-boost from Reed's brain. The Surfer shows up with the revivified Galactus and they save the universe from destruction. And Uatu goes from being one of a race of godlike aliens to being the Only God in Town, able to repair all the problems and to change the Barrens into the Borderlands, "a canvas of infinite possibilities." (Uatu does miss the little detail of curing the Torch's flame-problems, but Slott had to leave something for #46, the wrap-up issue.) 

  The last Slott issue has nothing to do with the Reckoning War, but, but it does sum up the FF's family dynamic. In this finale, Mister Fantastic reaches out to a sister he never knew, as well as introducing her to two other half-siblings, all creations of their mutual and utterly irresponsible paternal unit. Yes, there's a minor kerfuffle with Psycho-Man. But this time the "nesting" takes precedence over the "hunting," and I have to tip my hat to Dan Slott for "reckoning" the best way to resolve the tensions between action-adventure and family drama.