SLOTT RACING

 

I haven't been a fan, in the "fanatic" sense of the word, of hardly any comics-creator since the 1990s, which is pretty close to when I stopped buying new American comics. (I have continued to collect a handful of new manga.) And even in the 80s and 90s, I often resorted to quarter boxes to fill issues of magazines I was only mildly interested in following. But by the 2000s, I had so many comics I even stopped getting many used comics either. By then, TPBs had become profitable enough that public libraries carried a lot of them, and so I could sample newer books at no expense. And that's how I found Dan Slott's FANTASTIC FOUR, which began with "Volume 6, Number One" in 2018 to issue #46 in 2022. (Two issues later, the title rebooted for a new sheriff in town.)

I had already read a smattering of Slott's comics in titles like SPIDER-MAN and SHE-HULK. I thought those stories okay but nothing that compelled me to read everything he wrote for those features. I wouldn't have thought he would be the first writer I ever liked on FANTASTIC FOUR almost as much as I like Stan and Jack.

The last FF stories I read with any frequency was the Tom deFalco run, ending in 1995, and of course I'd read everything up to that point. Some contributors to the FF legend were extremely mediocre, like Thomas, Conway, and Byrne. Others, like Wein and Englehart, were able to work in a few interesting ideas. But as far as I could tell, none of the writers got the "voices" of the characters that only Stan Lee conveyed, and only a few artists, like George Perez, communicated some of the verve of Kirby. That said, I might have missed a lot of great stuff in the 2000s, when I only picked up a very small handful of secondhand books. I did see the introduction of Valeria Richards, whom John Byrne created as a stillborn infant and whom Chris Claremont retconned into a living teen girl, who eventually got retconned again into the legitimate daughter of Reed and Sue. Other characters, who would become important in Slott's run, debuted in the runs of earlier raconteurs, such as an intelligent version of the android Dragon Man. And of course, DeFalco deserves credit for undoing the whole "Johnny Storm marries his best friend's girl" thing from Byrne's run.

             

 Yet, despite my having hopped over a decade of continuity, I feel like Slott went in new directions. The above-seen "wedding of Ben and Alicia" was a welcome development, but far more incisive was Slott's reading of Johnny Storm as a "player," which he arguably was in some of his first appearances. First, he begins dating Sky, an alien female with wings, who believes that the two of them were born as soulmates. But in a few issues, Johnny manages to inveigle the affections of Zora Victorious, a Latverian soldier who idolizes her armor-clad monarch. Naturally, when Doom persuades the young woman to become his queen, this sets up a situation that will make Doom despise Johnny almost as much as he does Reed Richards. I also like Slott's handling of Reed, Sue and Ben as well, but over the years they've received quite a bit of character-buildup from various authors, while the Torch usually gets short shrift.

 

Now, though almost every writer who worked on FF had emphasized that the group was "a family," the only literal addition to that familial group in the 20th century had been Franklin Richards. Claremont's Valeria, after substantial tweaking, was brought into the title as a regular at some point in the 2000s, but I can't speak to how good the book might have been thanks to the original addition. But I can say that Slott captures the "teen-voices" of Franklin and Valeria quite well, and arguably he does even better by bringing in two younger kids, who provide considerable contrast when they're adopted by the newly married Ben and Alicia. This was a clever way of bringing in the ongoing history of the Kree and Skrull Empires, for one child, Jo-venn, is Kree while the other, N'Kalla, is Skrull. The heroes stumble across a space casino where these two pre-teens have been trained to fight one another for the entertainment of onlookers, a faux extension of the famous "Kree-Skrull War." Slott skillfully shows that even though the two kids have been trained to fight for the entertainment of audiences, they actually have a grudging respect for one another and become annoyed when the Thing and the Torch seek to liberate the two kids from the only life they've ever known. Once the Baxter Building has four kids on the premises, it seems more like a "family affair" than anything since Stan and Jack-- and one could even argue that the two creators might have done better on that score.

Not everything is golden. There are a few too many trips to outer space and/or alien dimensions where the inhabitants aren't all that interesting, and that includes the planet from which Sky hails. However, I'll deal with two other stories-- one a mythcomic and one a near-myth-- that should show why Slott's tenure deserves more attention.        

CURIOSITIES: PRETENTIOUSNESS, THY NAME IS MARVEL!

 I've been re-reading a fair number of 1970s HULK comics lately, mostly written by Roy Thomas or Steve Englehart. There aren't any great breakthroughs except for (as I critiqued a long time back) the debut of Marvel's "Valkyrie" as a character independent of her creatrix The Enchantress. But I did find myself more attentive now than I was then to weird minutiae-- like the attempts of writers to associate their kids' comics with adult literature. 

In fact, the title of that 1971 Hulk-Valkyrie yarn, "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?" is a good example of such pretentiousness. The story has nothing to do with either the 1935 Horace McCoy novel or the 1969 Sydney Pollak film, though author Roy Thomas certainly counted on readers to be somewhat aware of the Pollak movie of two years previous. Rather, "Hulks" is a play on a topic raised in a 1970 Tom Wolfe story, "Radical Chic," in which wealthy white people dabbled in "radical" causes in order to seem fashionable. The HULK tale involves similar superficial Richie Riches taking up the "cause" of the Green Goliath, which turns violent when the Enchantress projects the power of The Valkyrie into a young and somewhat obnoxious feminist. I don't know if in 1971 I learned about the Wolfe story in Marvel's own letters-page, but it seems likely. But the references both to Pollak and to Wolfe were all in good fun; I doubt anyone thought them overly pretentious-- unlike the following reference from the very next issue, HULK #143.

Back in 1971 I don't remember thinking anything of Thomas's VERY pretentious reference to William Faulkner for a very logical reason: I hadn't read the novel SANCTUARY then and did not do so until at least the 1990s. But now that I reread this throwaway "apology to Faulkner," my main thought was-- "Really, Roy? Did you want to impress readers who also had not read SANCTUARY all that badly?" Without driving the topic into the ground, there are no similarities between the two "Sanctuaries."   

It would have been far more appropriate to write, "With apologies to Victor Hugo." To the extent 20th-century readers ever thought about the Christian custom of persons seeking "sanctuary" in Catholic churches, most if not all probably would have recalled the expression of said custom in various movie adaptations of Victor Hugo's NOTRE DAME DE PARIS. Not that there's a huge likeness between that novel and the story in HULK #143. Bruce Banner, on the run from the military, accepts the "sanctuary" of diplomatic immunity extended to him by the ever affable Victor Von Doom. The "sanctuary" plays a very tiny role in the two-part story, which is mostly another tale in which a noxious supervillain seeks to co-opt the Jade Giant's power; no better or worse than a hundred like it. 

But still, Roy-- if you were going to make a pretentious literary quote, quote the right author! 

     

MYTHCOMICS: FANTASTIC FOUR 1234 (2001)

Now that I've responded to Grant Morrison's remarks re: his 2001 FANTASTIC FOUR project, a reader might reasonably ask, "So, how much incest is in 1234?"

And I would answer, "If Grant Morrison hadn't referenced Freudian concepts in his interview, I for one probably wouldn't even have noticed that his evocation of that particular social transgression."

There have been a handful of of comics-serials in which the schemas of Freud are integral to the plot, as is the case with the 1987 MARSHAL LAW mini-series, and there are some in which the transgression plays a strong but more minor role, as is the case with Alan Moore's WATCHMEN. In 1234 the incest-transgression is more of a leitmotif.

Did something change between the time of Morrison's interview and the finished work? Did Marvel not want their fantastic franchise sullied, the way DC chose not to commission Alan Moore's 1987 TWILIGHT OF THE SUPERHEROES?

Probably not. At some point in his career Morrison began emphasizing themes diametrically opposed to the "grim and gritty" approach of the 1980s, with its marked emphasis upon reducing superheroes to psychological formulations (as indeed both MARSHAL LAW and WATCHMEN do). Despite Morrison's reference to Freud, he seems less concerned with putting heroes and villains on the couch than on the chess-board.

1234 (which is, incidentally, four issues, each loosely focused upon one of the FF-members), involves a great tourney between Reed Richards and his arch-foe Doctor Doom. This time, to counter the other three members of Richards' fantastic family, Doom brings in three allies of his own. Two of the three-- the Mole Man and the Sub-Mariner-- are, like Doom, the first major super-villains faced by the heroic quartet. The third ally is named "the Prime Mover." Morrison is vague on details, but it's apparently an alien machine, though Jae Lee models the Mover's appearance after an earlier "Prime Mover," a chess-playing robot created by Doom and drawn by Jim Steranko in a 1968 issue of STRANGE TALES. The Prime Mover gives Doom the ability to manipulate certain aspects of reality to Doom's liking, though Morrison also isn't clear about what the machine can and can't do.

So subtle are Doom's initial chess-moves that Ben, Sue and Johnny have no idea that they've been drawn into a mammoth game, even though it seems like another boring day around the Baxter Building, in which everyone's getting on each other's nerves. The exception is Reed, who has closeted himself in one of his labs with a "do not disturb" sign, and his absence exacerbates the irritation of his partners, particularly that of his wife, who gets a little sick of her husband disappearing to hunt down abstruse theories.

The reader doesn't learn until the last issue that Reed's self-isolation is a response to Doom's game, even as the villain starts picking off his enemies one by one-- which involves bringing in the Sub-Mariner to seduce Sue in her moment of weakness and to consign Johnny (and the Thing's girlfriend Alicia) to the subterranean world of the Mole Man. (Despite the cover of the third issue, the Sub-Mariner and the Torch never square off in an outright battle.) As for the Thing, this seems to be where the Prime Mover's talents prove most useful, in that the monstrous hero is not only changed into his human alter ego, but also reduced to his twenties and deprived of one of his arms.

Morrison's basic plot is largely indistinguishable from many similar FANTASTIC FOUR plots, but naturally the author infuses the characters with a mature sensibility foreign to the original Lee-Kirby comics. Morrison doesn't really get to the heart of Ben Grimm, and his Torch is also somewhat under-developed, despite a suggestive scene in which he deliberately provokes his sister after hearing of the alleged activities of the Sub-Mariner. But the writer does give full play to Sue Richards' feminine discontents, her healthy desire for the masculinity of Prince Namor, without compromising the reality of her abiding love for her husband.

And then there's Mister Fantastic, the group's "head honcho," a leader who manages to be at once authoritarian and self-effacing at turns. I won't detail the ways in which Reed Richards defeats Doctor Doom's gambit, though it's interesting that Reed must in part reject a "rewriting" of reality in which Doom becomes a sort of "evil shadow" to the hero. And not surprisingly, the four characters come together in their time-honored manner, re-affirming their unity despite all of their quarrelsome differences.

So, if 1234 isn't really about the displacement of hidden erotic feelings, what is it about?

In his 1944 play NO EXIT, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote one of his most famous lines, "Hell is other people." Later Sartre claimed that he did not intend this to be a general principle; it was a specific judgment of the characters in the play. But for all the fractiousness of the Fantastic Four-- who initiated the trope of "quarreling superheroes"-- it's clear that in Morrison as in Lee and Kirby, "hell is no other people."

And this is the final fate of Doom in the mini-series, who suffers an ignominious scolding from Sue Richards, who calls him to his face a "stupid, lonely, ignorant man." This is simply a more adult reading of the essential conflict between Doom, the self-made tyrant, and his four enemies. In FF#17, Doom confesses to his mirror that "I have never fully understood other human beings," contrasting his obsessed status with the Thing's ability to find love with another individual. Here, Morrison focuses more upon Doom's inability to love, which lines up with his reductive, close-to-Freudian view of humanity:

All men, even the noblest, are driven by the same base impulses. The sweet smile of the peace activist hides his raging need to make war on the makers of war. Behind every "selfless" act, behind every act of so-called heroism, there lies the craving for validation and status in the eyes of others. Is it only the lessons of our experience that makes monsters of us, or saints?

Doom asks this question of his Prime Mover, and Doom believes that he already knows the answer, that he can change the noble natures of his foes by manipulating "experience itself." And when he's proven wrong, he remains alone in his Satanic solitude, unable to anneal his suffering through the consolation of other fellow humans.

ADDENDUM: I should add that at one point in the narrative, Morrison has Doom compare three members of his fantastic foes to characters in Shakespeare's TEMPEST: Reed is Prospero, Johnny is the spirited Ariel, and Ben is scheming Caliban. The comparison significantly leaves Sue out of the comparison, and maybe Morrison wanted readers to do the work of making the only feasible connection: Sue=Miranda, the daughter of Prospero. There are some intelligent arguments out there to the effect that Prospero, despite seeking to marry his daughter to Ferdinand, may have lusted after her in his heart, and that Caliban is a reflection of that lust. Given that Caliban desires Miranda and the Lee-Kirby desires Sue, this is a pretty sharp comparison, though casting Reed Richards as "father" to the Invisible Girl seems less in tune with Shakespeare than with its later spawn, like FORBIDDEN PLANET.

QUICK DOCTOR DOOM COMMENT

I recently defended Marvel's Doctor Doom from the imputation of racism on a CBR thread. I won't bother to cite the thread, since it's so freaking long no one who might read this will bother to seek it out, but here's the gist of my defense, referencing a two-part ASTONISHING STORIES (scripted by two separate authors, Larry Leiber and Gerry Conway) in which the master villain encountered the Black Panther and made some politically incorrect remarks about Panther's subjects being "vicious primitives:"

_____________

I think the author is trying to say that Doom recognizes in the Panther the image of nobility that he himself has internalized. It's true that he has no respect for Panther's subjects, but keep in mind that he also has no respect for his own Caucasian subjects. Doom is generally portrayed as a supreme egotist: he resented the Latverian nobility not because they tyrannized his people but because they tyrannized him and his family. Lee and Kirby, focused on writing exciting adventures for juvenile readers, probably wouldn't have wondered why Doom never put his former people in positions of Latverian power. Yet the way Doom's (admittedly limited) psychology is constructed, it makes total sense that he wouldn't. Being a villain of almost solipsistic proportions, he cares only about his own suffering, his own ideology of success-- which means becoming an icon of aristocratic tyranny, like the nameless aristocrat who causes the death of Doom's father. Yet he also wants to believe that he's not a petty man. That's why he spares the Wakandan from further torture, not because he cares about the man's sufferings, but because gratuitous sadism lessens the majesty to which he aspires. In the Over-Mind arc, Lee memorably has Doom say that "many demons" rule him, but "not those of pettiness or fear"-- or for that matter, racism, which would also diminish his sense of personal majesty.

MYTHCOMICS: "ORIGIN OF DOCTOR DOOM" (FF ANNUAL #2, 1964)

I've opined here that the only mythopoeic element in Jim Shooter's SECRET WARS was his attempt to elevate perennial arch-villain Doctor Doom to godhood via his association with Galactus. I've already analyzed the Galactus mythology here, so Doctor Doom is the logical next choice.

Unlike Shooter and some other fans of Classic Marvel, I never cared that much for the series of Lee-Kirby stories in which Doom became a virtual deity thanks to stealing the powers of the Silver Surfer. Doom was always most interesting as an arch-schemer whose devices were forever being undone by his egotism and his self-confessed inability to empathize with other human beings. An early comics-history, whose title I forget, compared him blithely to Shakespeare's "Richard III," probably because the English monarch also combined scheming and disfigurement-- though only belatedly did Lee and Kirby conceive the idea that Doom might also be a ruler in his own right.

Prior to FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #2, Lee and Kirby had published about half a dozen FF-stories pitting the group against Doom, as well as farming him out to titles like SPIDER-MAN. Clearly the collaborators realized that the character had struck a chord in their readership, though Lee and Kirby often tended to treat the character as little more than a gimmicky, Republic serial-villain. They were particularly slow to build upon the intimations of Doom's status as an over-reacher, as seen in his first appearance in FF #5:

FF ANNUAL #2, in addition to reprinting the first Doom-tale, finally expanded on Doom's past, as well as making he villain the ruler of his own postage-stamp realm of Latveria. Just as a guess, I'll speculate that Lee and Kirby may have started out with the bare idea of having Doom trap the FF at an embassy function as the subject of the annual's longest original story, the 25-page "Final Victory of Doctor Doom." After that, at some point the collaborators decided that Doom himself would become the ruler of his own country-- which may have sparked the rewriting of FF #5, and the genesis of a distinct 12-page origin for the super-villain.

Prior to this tale, there had been comics-features built around villains, but I'm not aware of any super-villains who were featured in a non-continued "origin story:" that is, one not literally under the aegis of the hero's series of stories. Doom is seen in his childhood, at a point when his mother is already deceased and his father, a gypsy healer, is indirectly slain by one of the petty lords of Latveria. Young Victor receives an early schooling in the apparent impotence of his father's goodness against the ruthless power of evil, and on one level at least, vows vengeance on the cruel world by becoming cruel in turn.

However, the lack of parental supervision leads Victor to find a cache of his mother's sorcerous possessions. As seen in FF #5 as well, this delving into the occult somehow serves to make the adult Victor into a scientific genius, able to make things like freeze grenades and robots.

Victor's facility with science not only makes him a power to be feared in Latveria, it causes him to be scouted by a rep for an American college.  Lee and Kirby then brilliantly re-write the loose continuity they'd tossed out in FF #5. Now, instead of Reed simply having heard the story of Von Doom, the two have formed an instant antipathy upon meeting. This serves not only as a foreshadowing of later conflicts to come, but as a myth of the encounter between the Old World and the New.

In my essay on the Doctor Strange origin, I remarked upon the opposition between the respective representatives of American and Eastern Europe, but the Doom origin-tale is far more incisive in depicting the gulf between the moody European vs. the cheery, unconflicted American.  Despite Von Doom's rebuff, Reed blithely trespasses on his future rival's space and tries to warn him against a perilous enterprise: the Faustian experiment of contacting "the nether world." Later iterations of Doom's backstory will assert that the scientist hoped to contact his dead mother, but there's no trace of this motive in Lee and Kirby. It seems more likely, given the egotism assigned to the character, that Doom hoped to gain some form of power from the nether world, presumably without actually signing his soul over to Satan.

Though the "Final Victory" tale in the same issue shows Doom regarding Richards as his foe of foes, the last three pages of the story-- during which Doom is disfigured, takes on his "Man in the Iron Mask" persona, and ascends to the throne of Latveria-- do not reference Reed Richards at all, either as Doom's ultimate foe or as a betrayer guilty of sabotaging Doom's project. Only Doom's forays against the FF and the world as a whole are mentioned, for it's the villain's story. On the final page he's shown at his parent's gravesite, devoting his life to the cause of becoming "master of mankind," in a moment just as iconic as any superhero's oath to devote his life to protecting humanity. And the last scene, in addition to suggesting that Doom's rule may be somewhat more benevolent than those he replaced, creates intrigue as to what new and devilish wonders the tormented genius will next evolve.

NULL MYTHS: SECRET WARS #1-12 (1984-85)

While a relatively recent re-read of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS disclosed some mythic diamonds amid the multi-crossover dross, there's not even the glitter of fool's gold in the abominable awfulness that is Jim Shooter's SECRET WARS.

I reviewed SECRET WARS for the Comics Journal back in the day, and I don't mind saying that the review contains one of my favorite insights for that period of my critical writing. In essence, I said that because Jim Shooter had written for several years about the Legion of Super-Heroes-- characters who ranged from the one-dimensional to the no-dimensional-- he was simply incapable of adjusting himself to the demands of Marvel characters, who tended to be at least two-dimensional.

I still believe this to some extent. And yet, now that I've reread SECRET WARS straight through for the first time since that review, I wonder if my original verdict was a bit glib. After all, Shooter's LEGION work showed that he understood the basics of good storytelling. With a little bit of studious endeavor, is there any reason that Shooter could not have adapted to the Marvel standard of characterization at least as well as average scripters of the period?

And the verdict is: of course he could have; he just didn't care whether he got characters right or not. To judge from this Wikipedia entry-- and from his spotty record as a scripter on Marvel titles like AVENGERS-- Shooter cared primarily about making deals with companies like Mattel and about protecting Marvel's company image. Stan Lee tried to make Marvel's characters as distinct as possible from one another, despite their two-dimensionality. The SECRET WARS script shows no evidence that its writer studied any of the regular titles to get a sense of how the characters sounded at the time. Wolverine's snarliness can't be distinguished from the Hulk's grouchiness. This shorthand approach to characterization allowed Shooter to give the fans the appearance of character-moments, even though his approach contradicted even the bare rudiments of the Marvel style.

If one picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture overburdened with what *seems* like a thousand words should be even better to clarify how bad Shooter's writing is:

This scorecard approach to introducing characters easily rates as some of the worst writing ever to appear in comic books. Beside it, even stories that are nearly incoherent are preferable, like Gerry Conway's clumsy "Ego-Prime" storyline.

I won't dwell too much on the mismanaged characterizations, given that these are failures within the dramatic potentiality, not the mythopoeic one. But as I move away from this topic, I can't resist mentioning one of the worst: a B-story in which Colossus and the Human Torch both fall in love with the same alien girl. Suddenly, because Shooter wants a hyper-melodramatic moment in issue #10, he has the Torch-- a character with his share of faults, but hardly a diehard chauvinist-- disparage the girl as a "chippie," causing Colossus a lot of emotional turmoil-- though it comes to nothing, since the X-Man doesn't even try to knock the FF-member's block off.

There is *potential,* but completely unrealized, mythopeoic content in the rambling mess that is SECRET WARS, but at that, it's entirely derivative of the "Galactus mythology" I examined here  this week. However, Shooter seems to have been less impressed by the original "Galactus trilogy" than by one of Lee and Kirby's follow-ups: FF #57-60, in which Doctor Doom manages to steal the Power Cosmic from the exiled Silver Surfer, so that the monomaniacal villain obtains something close to omnipotent power.

While every other Marvel character in SECRET WARS is treated with a mechanical disinterest, Shooter seems preternaturally concerned with Doctor Doom, who apparently has not forgotten his brief stint as a demigod. Doom seems less concerned with the immediate situation he shares with the other characters-- that of having been dumped on an alien world by an unseen entity called "the Beyonder"-- than in figuring out how he can once more attain godhood: this time by tapping into the power of the Silver Surfer's former master, Galactus himself, who is one of those abducted by the Beyonder. Galactus hovers on the periphery of the action for most of the story, a potential threat to the Earth-heroes as both he and they seek to escape the Beyonder-- but once Doom does manage to siphon off Galactus' power, the planet-eater is summarily dismissed from the storyline, and it focuses almost entirely upon Doom's attempt to act the part of a living god.

While Shooter's exploration of Doom's godhood is mediocre at best, I must admit that he's the only character whose characterization seems relatively in line with his previous Marvel incarnations. Here's a short excerpt:

Whereas the other characters in this scene are all Johnny One-Notes, Doom comes off with an imperious dignity and an obnoxious belief in his own superiority. This at least makes him interesting, while all of the other characters are simply being put through predictable paces.

I've sometimes come across fans who evince an affection for SECRET WARS because it was the first of its kind: a limited series whose influence spilled over into several ongoing titles. This marketing strategy became a standard practice by both of the "Big Two," and generally the crossovers that followed SECRET WARS were never better than "adequate." But even the worst of these descendants of SECRET WARS doesn't evince the original's utter contempt for good characterization and good plotting-- to say nothing of good mythopoesis.