IDIOMS PULPY AND TALKY

 I saw FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS yesterday, and prior to crafting a review for the movie-blog I decided to mediate on why I found myself less than captivated with the movie, even though it's a general improvement on the standard MCU product.

One problem is that of all the previous adaptations of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR have been unable to put across the unique blend of action, pathos and imagination found in the comic book, with the possible exception of the 1967 FANTASTIC FOUR cartoon, which was largely a straightforward recycling of the original stories. Though the FF was the conceptual flagship title of Marvel Comics, the property was owned for several years by 20th-Century Fox, and thus was outside the grasp of the Disney-owned MCU during its formative years. Disney's acquisition of the FF franchise in 2019 finally made it feasible to integrate the FF into the current universe. Because for the last five years most MCU movies and television shows have become creatively constipated and generally unprofitable, some fans held out hope for STEPS to be a game-changer. At present STEPS' box office won't even come close to the billion-dollar mark of last year's DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE, so it's not going to alter the MCU's downward spiral in terms of popularity. It's possible that STEPS will enjoy aesthetic prominence, though, given rumors that the company plans to go forward with an Avengers-FF crossover and possibly a STEPS sequel after that.

                

  While I've not followed any of the publicity statements by director Matt Shakman or the movie's four credited writers, it seems obvious that they all sought to choose a particular SF-idiom not found in previous adaptations. In my 2023 essay THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION, I expatiated on two idioms that had influenced the science fiction genre since its formulation in the late 1800s, calling them, informally, "gosh-wow" SF and "philosophical SF." The new names in my title. "pulpy" and "talky," are not meant to be any less informal, but they're a little more direct in encapsulating distinct forms of narrative appeal. "The pulpy" appeals to sensation and emotional melodrama, while "the talky" appeals to ideational concepts. Some critics automatically prefer the latter idiom, as per the nostrum that "science fiction is a literature of ideas." Yet not all ideas are good just because they share a didactic approach, any more than all sensations are good because they share a sense of immediacy.

In the SEEDS essay, I argued that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, as well as other Marvel raconteurs to a lesser extent, tapped into the two rough idioms of science fiction because they all had been exposed to those idioms in the 1950s through the proliferation of SF cinema in that decade, and they sought (as their chief competitor DC Comics did not) to convey both idioms to their young readers. The Marvel creators were not the first in comics to do this. But when they crossbred the SF idioms with the superhero genre in the 1960s, they created a self-sustaining mythology-- one that the MCU managed to adapt for cinema, to some extent bringing things full circle. 

The Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR was the most fully developed blend of the two idioms, allowing the quartet of heroes to vary their adventures from high-tension battles with supervillains to meditative reflections on man's place in the universe. But because Shakman and company chose to launch STEPS with their take on the highly praised "Galactus Trilogy," they clearly chose one idiom over the other-- and thus failed to capture the rich dichotomy of the original comic book. I know that during my viewing I found myself pulling back from all the homages to 1995's APOLLO 13, which was fine for a mundane film about space-exploration but became draggy within the context of a superhero franchise film.      

Indeed, the only places in the film that I saw any of the "pulpy" idiom of the original comic was in sequences showing how the "real" Fantastic Four had been adapted into kids' cartoons, like that of the 1960s Hanna-Barbera toon mentioned above. Shakman et al advocated a "talky" approach to their Galactus story, and yet didn't succeed as well as they might have with respect to some of the ideas they raised. I'll engage with more specifics in the blog-review of STEPS, but I wanted to get these idiomatic divagations out of the way first.   

SPIDER-FEMME, SPIDER-FEMME PART 1

 Though Spider-Woman is hardly the worst character to debut during the chaos of the early Bronze Age of Comics, her initial origin is certainly one of the least prepossessing.

Most Marvel fans know that Spider-Woman was born from an attempted trademark violation. Sometime in 1976, the year after Modred the Mystic made his two appearances, Filmation Animation Studios contemplated a new set of superheroes for Saturday morning television. One of those superheroes was going to be named Spider-Woman. Marvel Comics, who held the trademark on Spider-Man, may have made some legal protest to Filmation. The upshot of the conflict seems to have been that in order for the company to claim "Spider-Woman" as a Marvel trademark, the company needed to publish a Spider-Woman. Thus, in MARVEL SPOTLIGHT #32-- dated February 1977 and thus actually issued in late 1976-- a Spider-Woman was introduced. Presumably Marvel so informed Filmation, for when the studio debuted its cartoon lineup in late 1978, their arachnid-character had assumed the new name "Web Woman." The lineup failed so quickly that had Filmation done their own Spider-femme, few would have remembered her.

The debut of Marvel's heroine was not much better. Archie Goodwin cobbled together a loose story in which an amnesiac woman named "Arachne" was captured somewhere in Europe when agents of the organization Hydra observed that she had strange powers. Hydra's leader Count Vermis formulated a plan to turn Arachne into an assassin to kill Hydra's foremost enemy, Nick Fury of SHIELD. Hydra apparently makes Arachne's costume for her and gives her the Spider-Woman name (though Arachne never uses that cognomen). Rather than taking time to devise some brainwashing device, the evildoers command a handsome blonde Hydra agent, one Jared, to make love to Arachne. Then the schemers arrange for Jared to be captured by SHIELD's European division while Nick Fury happens to be present.

 Arachne attacks SHIELD, apparently willing to kill Fury even though Jared is still a living prisoner. Arachne herself accidentally wounds Jared fatally, after which Fury reveals how Hydra tricked the heroine, and Jared dies expressing revulsion for having even touched his super-pawn. Arachne then speeds to Hydra's base and decimates it, chasing down Vermis. The master villain then reveals that he knows that Arachne was the creation of the mad scientist The High Evolutionary, who mutated animals to become the demi-human Knights of Wundagore. Arachne was ostracized by the other creatures there, and thanks to Vermis' prodding, she breaks through her memory blocks and remembers that the reason for her outsider status was her heritage of being a mutated spider, given a human body.

Perhaps Arachne would have retained that status had she never been revived. But for whatever reasons, those of good SPOTLIGHT sales or of long-term trademark protection, Marvel decided to launch Spider-Woman in her own title. However, to give her some early exposure, the heroine became entangled in a very messy five-issue arc by Marv Wolfman in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #29-33 (July-November 1977).

Though the spider-femme's origin is only incidentally touched upon, the sequence does end with the revelation that she's actually a human mutated by exposure to a spider-serum, which story would be expanded upon in the series proper. It isn't necessary to go over every beat of Wolfman's five-part story. It's only relevant that Spider-Woman is recaptured by Hydra, that she becomes part of a whole world-conquering scheme, and that, though it's revealed that she's not repugnant because she's a reborn spider, Wolfman loosely repurposes Goodwin's idea that she somehow repulses people for an unknown reason.

The only other interesting point is that all five issues are confined to England-- and I theorize that Wolfman chose that setting so that he could revive Modred the Mystic, in whose creation Wolfman was loosely implicated. True, one of the other guest-stars who teams with the series-star The Thing is also Shang Chi Master of Kung Fu, and his character was based in England. But Shang Chi vanishes from the sequence after issue #29, while other, more important aspects of the story evolve from the release of four elemental demons who are trying to capture Modred, who's still a resident of Old Blighty. At the story's conclusion, Modred is actually the individual who divines that Spider-Woman is a human being. Wolfman would later seek to explicate this facet of the character's nature in the first eight issues of SPIDER-WOMAN.

I don't know if Wolfman cherished some hope that Modred would accrue some strong repute from the story. But what happened was that roughly two years later, Roger Stern made Modred one of the puzzle-pieces of the aforementioned AVENGERS arc, "The Yesterday Quest"-- and for the most part, Modred did not come off looking good in said arc and the character remained a minor figure for several years after.

As for Spider-Woman, neither her SPOTLIGHT debut nor her TWO-IN-ONE appearances cast her in a very strong light. Yet as Modred declined, she advanced-- and the early issues of her own title show that she had more staying-power than the trademark-swipe that led to her creation.

SELLING THE SUPERHERO WOMEN

 

I started to respond to Tom Brevoort's post on Marvel's 1977 reprint collection THE SUPERHERO WOMEN, and to its attendant comments on that blog. But I decided I would do so here first, and reprint my remarks there afterward. 

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First, I agree with Tom that the selection from SPIDER-MAN #62 doesn't really make the character of Medusa look all that great. Of course, there was no inherent sexism in this guest-starring story, because Stan Lee had written other Spidey stories in which male guest-stars like Quicksilver or The Iceman acted stupidly in order to make the story work. A better selection would have been Medusa's solo story from MARVEL SUPER HEROES, published around the same time as the Spidey story, which in turn may've been designed to get casual readers interested in the long-locked lass.

The RED SONJA story is an okay selection, and the FANTASTIC FOUR entry is well chosen. This story depicted Sue Storm gaining her force field powers, thus responding, after roughly three years, to fans' complaints about her lack of overall power. 

I have the impression that the MS MARVEL selection arose from the company's ongoing agenda to protect the "Marvel" name in any character. Certainly that agenda underlay the creation of the "Marvel Captain Marvel" in the first place, and since a CBR article mentions that the company was taking pitches for various "Ms. Marvel" concepts as early as 1972-- two years after UNCANNY X-MEN and Marvel Girl were off the stands-- that applied to the final, approved version as well. (I couldn't locate an online recapitulation of the story that Jean Grey herself was considered as a possible "Ms. Marvel.")

The selection of the two-part THOR story featuring Hela was a strange one. Since she wasn't purely villainous, she wasn't all that consequential to THOR in particular or to Marvel as a whole. Why not the first Enchantress story, since she was at least important to the universe, and since the tale was a good stand-alone? Maybe Stan just wanted to spotlight some of his post-Kirby work with the God of Thunder, which work was actually pretty good. I'm not surprised there was no Sif-centric story, because I can't think of any at all up to 1977.

A better choice IMO would have been issues X-MEN #62-63. Granted, Marvel Girl was usually a pretty weak sister for most of the feature's run, but this was one of the few times, if not the only time, she was allowed to shine and save the day. And until re-reading the issue, I'd forgot that it included Magneto hitting on Jean Grey big-time, in the old "reign at my side" context. So, Mags, checking out the Young Talent? Sort of like that story where Magneto has the mentally enslaved Scarlet Witch do a hootchie-koo dance for him, years before she was retconned into his pride and joy.

The "Femizons" story was meh, and I suppose the CAT and SHANNA stories were attempts by Stan to repeat his "Well, we tried" defense. The Black Widow story from SPIDER-MAN is another story where the guest star acts stupidly to make the story work, but it holds some historical interest for debuting the bitchin' catsuit-costume. 

That leaves only the Wasp's debut story in the ANT-MAN feature from 1963, which is IMO the best story in the collection. Though Stan's only credited with the plot for "The Creature from Kosmos," I'd theorize that he gave scripter Ernie Hart a pretty thorough breakdown of the whole story, since Stan was after all doing his best to build his then-small universe. For an early Silver Age adventure, it's pretty layered. Ant-Man starts having existential doubts about who will carry on for him while simultaneously grieving for his lost wife Maria. When he considers the possibility of a partner, 1963 readers might have expected (if not for the cover and splash page) the introduction of a kid sidekick-- "Pismire, the Ant Wonder!" Instead Henry Pym gets a meet-cute with Jan Van Dyne, a young woman who slightly resembles Maria, and thought balloons establish that both are instantly attracted to one another. Despite Pym's defensive reaction to the effect that Jan is just "a child," I think it's obvious that she's close to 20, and probably a bit older, given that there's no question of her inheriting the Van Dyne fortune when her pop gets killed. None of that Magneto-type trolling for Old Henry!

I also don't think there's a good argument for Jan, before or after she becomes The Wasp, being an "airhead." Her determination to avenge her dad is what leads Pym to play "Batman" to her "Robin," and to give her the chance not just for vengeance, but to take up the life of a superhero. But she accepts the duty partly because she knows that he's attracted to her, and not as a kid. So all of her subsequent expressions of stereotypical femininity-- drooling over other men, or her frequent references to shopping-- are part of her plan to stay close to Henry and keep reminding him that she's a woman, not a sidekick. And of course, she may actually LIKE shopping. I have it on good authority that some women really do!

NEAR-MYTHS: THE TOWER OF BABEL:THE DELUXE EDITION (2021)

This is not my standard review of a "near myth" work, since I'm not going to dissect in detail the stories collected here, which appeared in a couple of JUSTICE LEAGUE titles in or around the period when Grant Morrison transformed the title. Most stories in the collection were written by Mark Waid, who in my view has always been a sort of dull version of whoever he chose to emulate, be it Kurt Busiek with KINGDOM COME or Morrison with his follow-up JLA stories. Thus Waid is significant only as a negative reflection of Morrison, and, for that matter, the JLA writer whom Morrison most challenged during his run: original Silver Age scribe Gardner Fox.

In this mythcomics post I recapitulated the history of the dominant writing-strategies of Silver Age DC Comics vs. Silver Age Marvel Comics thusly:

The JUSTICE LEAGUE comics title of the 1960s has never received a lot of respect even among Silver Age comics-fandom, and one reason may be that the early comic, for several years written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Mike Sekowsky, is perceived as being too "old school." Most team-features in both the Golden and the Silver Ages followed what I'll call a "plot-based model," in which "character moments" are kept to a minimum, as the author concentrates on the events of the plot, usually showing how the members of the team work to overcome some common enemy. The plot-model seems like an easy row to hoe, as indicated by countless spoofs of the model, but DC Comics pursued it almost exclusively, even when Marvel Comics in the 1960s advanced a "character-based model" that over time become the dominant paradigm.

Calling those strategies "the plot-based model" and "the character-based model" was a bit of an oversimplification, though many fans over the years have used similar terminology. Certainly the raconteurs who wrote superhero comics in the early Silver Age did not intend to follow such rigorous models; they were in large part "riffing," trying to find profitable ways to re-invent superheroes for a post-Comics Code readership. DC Comics started its efforts with re-imagined revivals of its most successful costumed characters from the 1940s. But Marvel, the rebranded version of the entity variously called "Timely" and "Atlas," had fewer such major successes, so that the key Marvel creative personnel had to create more original characters. DC initiated the Silver Age with single-character features like The Flash, Green Lantern, and (arguably) the Martian Manhunter, and then launched a team of said heroes in the Justice League. Marvel's superhero line was not initiated until roughly five years after DC's example, and it began with a quasi-emulation of JUSTICE LEAGUE, a team book made up of all-original characters, and only within the next year did the company launch such single-character superhero features as Hulk, Ant-Man and Thor. 

While no reader's experience of the elusive "sense of wonder" in SF/fantasy is paradigmatic, team-books arguably oblige the creators to increase the quantity of SF/fantasy concepts in order to provide multiple threats for multiple protagonists. Thus it's my experience that the first Silver Age team-books, the JUSTICE LEAGUE of Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky and the FANTASTIC FOUR of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, offered the greatest opportunities for stimulating the readers' sense of wonder. Lee and Kirby certainly did not neglect the "plot-based model" of superhero scripting in conceiving of their menaces, whether they were strong concepts like Galactus or weak ones like the Enfant Terrible. Fox, for his part, concentrated on plot more when he conceived of foes for the Justice League, but there are interesting if minor character-moments even in the earliest JLA stories.                                 

I've sometimes expressed to other fans that in terms of raw creativity I deemed Fox's JUSTICE LEAGUE the equal of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR, and the reaction I got was usually a negative one. What I believe those fans were favoring in the Marvel team-title was the fact that Stan Lee perfected a strategy of building on his concepts so that they began to seem like part of a larger tapestry of interconnected wonders. Most of Fox's concepts were confined to whatever story they first appeared in, and so they had less cumulative effect than, say, the recurring concepts appearing in DC's single-character features (Green Lantern's "Guardians of the Universe," for example).

Raw creativity, of course, is just one element in communicating the sense of wonder from author to reader; an element that gives the reader the impression of "richness and profusion of images," as referenced in this essay. Based on my formulations there, said profusion provides the potential for the development of fantastic content into the even richer forms of myth, but the actuality of mythicity stems from articulating the raw material into organized patterns of conceptual thought. 

As noted above, Lee and Kirby had their share of so-so concepts, but FANTASTIC FOUR became a testing-ground for all of their best"sense of wonder" ideas. In contrast, what keeps Fox's JLA concepts from attaining their greatest possible development is the fact that each of them was largely isolated from all the others.

Grant Morrison's JUSTICE LEAGUE is a vision of what the Fox-cosmos might have looked like if many of the one-off concepts had been given the same inter-referentiality seen in the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR comics. In contrast, Mark Waid's JLA feels like a regression to Fox's least inspired concepts. Waid trundles out abstruse concepts with potential, all right. In the titular story of the collection TOWER OF BABEL, the Leaguers are put through a series of transformations just as weird as any Fox ever devised. Said transformations are brought about when Batman's enemy Ra's Al Ghul implements strategies Batman himself devised to nullify the abilities of his fellow heroes in case any of them were suborned by evildoers. But even though Waid devotes considerable space to the character-conflicts that evolve as a result of this predicament, he doesn't really invest the proceedings with an independent "sense of wonder," as Morrison did with comparable concepts. In many ways Waid resembles Fox at his least inspired, when he simply churned out this or that concept to meet a deadline, and so failed to make those particular concepts emotionally resonant. Thus "Tower of Babel" is not much better, in terms of evoking the sense of wonder, than an inferior Fox-tale like the 1966 weird transformation tale "The Plague That Struck the Justice League."

Ironically, even though in his JUSTICE LEAGUE stories Morrison eschewed the soap opera dramatics that one often associated with the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR, he came closer to the emotional resonance Gardner Fox successfully executed in stories like "The Justice league's Impossible Adventure." Thus Waid fails both the tests of good drama and sense-of-wonder in his lack of inspired work.

STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS ON STATURE

 In my essay PROTO CROSSOVERS AND SUCH PT. 2, I reversed myself on the determination as to whether "spinoff" characters who didn't get their own features in a timely fashion could be deemed "proto crossovers." In the case of Marvel's Black Panther, I decided that the period separating the Panther's introduction in 1965 and his joining an ensemble-team in 1968 did not invalidate either his first appearance or all appearances in between from proto crossover status. Since all of the Panther's appearances indicate that editor Stan Lee was trying to find some way to work the character into a regular berth, through the Panther's guest-shots in FANTASTIC FOUR and CAPTAIN AMERICA, that counts as an "intent toward centricity" in a major way.

However, it's a little harder to draw as straight a line with many other characters. Also spawned in the pages of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR was the character called "Him." This artificially created man-god disappeared after two 1967 issues of the FF comic, with no suggestion that he had any special destiny to work out (unlike the Panther in FF). Him didn't show up again until two years later, in THOR #165-166, wherein the character battled the Thunder God for the hand of Lady Sif. The end of that story, too, did not suggest that he was going on to any feature-status, either alone or in an ensemble.

So there's no clear indication that either Lee or Kirby had any particular intent to give Him starring-status. Kirby's main focus was on using his original story to dispute a philosophical point, but having done that, there's no strong sense in the THOR story that the King saw Him as anything but a convenient menace for a one-off tale. Since it was editor Stan Lee's job to keep his eyes peeled for promising franchises, and since he'd already made a few efforts to conceive of a spin-off series for the not dissimilar FF-character The Silver Surfer, Lee might have mulled over the possibility of using Him somewhere, but never really pursued it. Yet as Marvel fandom knows, Him was duly given a face-lift by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane, and rechristened with the more marketable name of Warlock, in 1972.

So five years expired before Him graduated from a Sub to a Prime, with no real evidence in between that anyone meant to spin the Original Orange Man off into his own feature. On the basis of that apparent lack of intent, I would tend to say that those five years are enough to invalidate Him's original appearances as "proto-crossovers." He's just a Sub character who's eventually given Prime stature long after his debut, simply because someone conceived of a way to rework the original concept. One may see a parallel to the television character Frasier Crane. In all the years that Frasier was a support-character on the series CHEERS, I saw no effort by the writers to suggest that they might want to spin him off until CHEERS came to an end, and the writers realized that the character of Frasier could sustain his own series. So neither Warlock nor Frasier Crane, within the period of their subordinate status, are proto-crossovers just by virtue of graduating to featured status.

Are there exceptions to my five-year "statute of stature limitations?" Probably, and I'll record them as I think of them. I tend to think that charisma of support-characters is even more limited. I've mentioned that in the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN the teamup of The Enforcers and The Green Goblin counts as a proto-crossover, because the Goblin was clearly intended to be a major continuing villain. Yet the later interaction of competing villains Green Goblin and Crime-Master was a null-crossover, because in his one and only story, the Crime-Master is killed and never comes back, meaning that he was never intended to be a regular recurring Spider-foe. But it's not necessary to kill off a character to show that the author doesn't mean to keep doing things with the support-character. 

A minor villain-mashup appears in BATMAN #62 (1950), wherein established villain Catwoman interacts with new crook-on-the-block Mister X. Had Mister X made even one more appearance in the BATMAN series, his appearance with Catwoman might be deemed a "proto"-- but since he never appeared again, X comes up "null." Note: any Bat-mavens reading this will remember that this 1950 opus is the one where Catwoman temporarily reforms. However, this has little effect on her overall persona, since she starts out the story in villain-mode and in future stories drops her uninteresting pose of "good girl" pretty quickly.

However, I wouldn't set any statute of limitations on charisma-crossovers resulting from the cross-alignment of Sub characters showing up in the "universes" of Primes wherein those Subs did not originally appear. A particularly nugatory character is the 1962 ANT MAN villain, The Hijacker, who was so lame that no one bothered to even reference his existence for the next fifteen years. Then it appears that Bill Mantlo, desiring a forgettable villain for a toss-off issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, revived Hijacker to fight The Thing and Black Goliath in 1977. Lame though The Hijacker was, he still counts as an Ant-Man villain, and whatever little charisma he had does get somewhat enhanced by his meeting with one major Marvel hero and one bush-leaguer (who at least had his own short-lived series).

"WHY DID KIRBY THINK HE COULD WRITE?"

 I saw this question on Classic Horror Film Board, so here's my answer.

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That's a complicated question, and a lot of different people will give you different answers. I've done as much research as I can into the subject, but obviously I'm speaking of matters I didn't witness.

From his first independent ventures in comics, like a POPEYE imitation comic strip ("Socko the Sea Dog"), I think Kirby only "wrote" in the sense that he would map out the pencils and then add dialogue later. I'd be surprised if ever in his long career he actually wrote a script for anyone else. He hooked up with fellow artist Joe Simon within a few years of getting into comic  books, at least partly because Simon had a better head for business and for seeking out editorial contacts. When Simon and Kirby hit it big with Captain America (to be sure, an independent creation of Simon's), the two artists became flush enough to open their own studio. I would guess that Simon "wrote" in the same way as Kirby but the studio did accept scripts by other hands; in one interview, Kirby admitted that some other guy originated the Red Skull during that period. The only comment I've seen from Simon was the offhand remark that during their association he "would never let Kirby write," but he didn't elaborate. Most of the dialogue from the Simon-Kirby titles, both at Timely and at DC, is jazzy and efficient, but it's so much unlike the weird dialogue Kirby produced in the seventies that I tend to think the two artists had ghosts come in and smooth things out. 

Kirby and Simon collaborated on the farcical FIGHTING AMERICAN-- whose dialogue, TO ME, sounds a lot like the wacky scripting of the solo Kirby stuff later-- and then the two parted ways in the mid fifties. Then we see a few features written purely by Kirby, not quite as free-wheeling, but still tending to a lot of gosh-wow exclamations. He had a success with CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN in 1957 but he was teamed with writer Dave Wood. Was that at the insistence of his editors at DC, who wanted some quality control? I would think so, even though on the whole the CHALLENGERS stories were driven by Kirby's profligate imagination. I theorize that Wood just kind of went along with whatever wild gimmicks Kirby turned out. This is an important point because in Kirby's mind, he was really "writing" the whole feature and Wood was just adding dialogue that would suit DC'S editors.

Kirby got on the outs with DC's management and Atlas Comics, soon to become Marvel circa 1960, became Kirby's main account. Editor Stan Lee didn't immediately start turning out masterpieces with Kirby, and it seems like to Lee Kirby was just another jobbing artist, even though the two of them had crossed paths at Timely, when Lee was just an office boy. Then DC started its superhero revival, so Lee naturally turned to one of the artists best known for that genre, and thus FANTASTIC FOUR was born. There are a few surviving documents indicating that Lee did not at this time turn over sole creative effort to Kirby, and this would be logical, given that Kirby hadn't exactly had a ton of hits over the past ten years.  Once books like FF and THOR became successful, slowly the working relationship became more fluid, and it appears that Lee let Kirby "have his head" more often. For all that, though, it's obvious to me that Kirby did some things-- such as crossovers-- only because Editor Lee demanded them.

Over time, Kirby came to resent the fact that Lee got the writers' salary, when he Kirby was the one inventing most of the new heroes and villains. Personally I don't think he appreciated Lee's contribution to the dramatic heft of the new wave of superheroes, and I think he came to believe he had done it all and Lee just filled in the dialogue as had Dave Wood. In the eighties COMICS JOURNAL editor Gary Groth certainly encouraged Kirby in this belief, during which time Kirby dismissed the idea that Lee had ever contributed to the stories. He got both a writer's and penciler's salary when he went to DC, and so his later work at Marvel, Pacific and elsewhere was usually though not always on the same terms. 

And that's my view as to why Kirby believed himself both the writer and creator of everything he did after breaking up with Simon, except for a few isolated special projects.

MYTHCOMICS: “ORIGIN OF THE FANTASTIC FOUR” (FANTASTIC FOUR #1, 1961)

 

The following analysis was originally part of a larger essay analyzing the first FANTASTIC FOUR story in terms of its symbolic discourse. I found that the main story—the narrative in which the four heroes contend for the first time with the Mole Man and his subterranean creatures—did not meet my standards for a mythcomic, unlike several other FF stories. However, in more recent years I’ve decided that certain vignettes within full-fledged stories may be more mythic than the story as a whole, examples being “The Origin of the Batman” and “The Heart of Gold.” I’ve decided that, for my 300^th post mythcomics post, that the Origin of the Fantastic Four deserves the pride of place. Readers may observe that my writing-style for this overall project proves a little different here than my usual blogposts. _________________________________________________

At the conclusion of the main story’s 8-page “teaser,” in which nothing substantial is revealed about the foursome, there ensues a five-page explanatory flashback that establishes that the heroes are not aliens, but began as ordinary-- if quarrelsome-- human beings. Indeed, the first panel of the flashback begins with a quarrel between Ben and Reed. The substance of that quarrel is almost all we readers ever know of the characters in the introductory story.

The four characters speak to one another as if they have been acquainted over a long period, though readers don’t get any of the backstories circulated in later retellings of the origin. Readers are told that Reed is a scientist who has designed a moon-rocket and that he wants Ben, an experienced pilot, to fly the ship to the moon, with Reed along for the ride. Ben refuses. He asserts that the venture is too dangerous because humans don’t know enough about possible peril from “cosmic rays” in outer space.

About Sue and Johnny, we know even less. Sue is Reed’s fiancée, Johnny is her younger brother, and both of them enthusiastically support Reed’s moon-jaunt without hesitation. Ironically Ben, later seen to be the most caustic and reckless of the foursome, is the sole voice of caution. At this point Reed, Sue and Johnny are little more than living personifications of the “space race” that dominated American feelings in the early 1960s, for Sue emphasizes that they must reach the moon “unless we want the Commies to beat us to it.” The political rationale is merely a cover for the real motives behind the trip-- more on which later-- but what persuades Ben to join the team is not patriotism but a challenge to his manhood. Sue implies that Ben’s caution is rooted in cowardice. Ben’s reaction—in which he agrees to pilot the moon-rocket after all—is perhaps unusually intense, suggesting that he may have ulterior motives for overvaluing the opinion of another man’s fiancée. Later events bear out this supposition.

With the conversion of the “doubting Benjamin,” the foursome’s next act is to commit what looks like high treason. The rocket designed by Reed Richards is being kept launch-ready at a nearby “spaceport,” which is guarded by a man wearing an American army uniform. No military organization is ever mentioned by name, but since Richards does not want to wait for “official clearance” before mounting his lunar expedition, one can only assume that Richards constructed the ship for American authorities and then had a falling-out with them over the best time to launch. In later retellings the military is no longer involved: Reed uses his own resources to construct the rocket. In short order the four adventurers—whose qualifications for space travel remain anyone’s guess-- sneak aboard Reed’s ship and successfully launch the rocket, unaided by any ground crew.

During the flight, we finally get the real motive for Reed’s wish to undertake the forbidden flight. In the first panel of the story’s tenth page, a voice from within the rocket—not attributed, but probably Reed’s—asserts, “We had to do it! We had to be first!” This is the true motive for Reed’s desire to make the flight as soon as possible: the desire to win the race against all comers, to have the glory of being “first.” Such Promethean endeavors have been undertaken by hordes of “mad scientists” since the type came into being. In most “creature features,” the act of overreaching results in the scientist himself being cursed with some evil fate or fantastic transformation. But here it is not Reed, the overreacher, who is punished for his hubris. He, Sue and Johnny—the three who believe in their doomed cause-- are transformed, but not in a truly undesirable manner. It is Ben, the doubter, who reaps the bad fortune that would usually devolve to the hubristic scientist. Is it because he knew better than the others the potential peril of the journey, and went anyway, with a divided heart? Or is it because he coveted the fiancée of another man—the man who “got there first” in an affair of the heart?

The creators provide no details about the mysterious cosmic rays suffusing Earth’s atmosphere; rays which in the next issue they will portray as a “belt” surrounding the Earth, like the authentic “Van Allen radiation belt.” In 1912 cosmic rays were identified, as well as being misnamed, since these “rays” were actually super-charged particles, called “cosmic” because they were supposedly generated from the depths of space. Other Marvel Comics heroes would also become empowered as a result of encountering radiation—the Hulk, Spider-Man, Daredevil—but these other early heroes gained their powers from man-made ventures into the world of radiation. Only the Fantastic Four gain their powers from venturing into forbidding—though not literally forbidden—territory, and only in their case is the radiation that affects spawned by the universe itself. Given that their powers make it easier for the foursome to explore many aspects of that universe, one might view the failure of Reed’s original mission as a blessing in disguise—at least for three out of the four explorers.

Ben’s earlier fears are justified. Reed’s brainchild does not have shielding adequate to screen out the radiation of the “cosmic storm area” through which the ship must pass when it tries to leave the Earth’s atmosphere. The would-be astronauts lose control and the ship crashes back to Earth. All four survive the crash, but in a sense, they are “reborn” from their brush with the mysteries beyond the familiar realm of Earth. Sue’s mutation is the first to manifest. This seems fitting, given that she’s the reason that both Ben and Johnny undertake the flight, and the factor that makes it possible for Reed to have his pilot. The sole female, in one way or other the focus of attention by all three men, disappears from their sight just long enough for Johnny to worry that she may never come back. A Kleinian psychologist might read this scene in terms of the primal fear of infant life: that the mother, the primary female in an infant’s life, may leave and never return. Then Sue’s invisibility wears off. This cues a new outbreak of hostility between Reed and Ben. Moments after Reed embraces Sue, Ben criticizes Reed for having possibly cursed them all with even stranger powers.

In later issues, Reed will become the very epitome of the hand-wringing Marvel hero, tormented with the memory of how his actions turned his friend into a misshapen freak. But in this origin story, Reed never expresses a single regret, before or after Ben loses his humanity. The great scientist is on the whole arrogant and self-absorbed, at most irritated that Ben should challenge the purity of his motives. “I didn’t purposely cause our flight to fail,” he rationalizes, tacitly refusing any responsibility for the inadequacy of the ship’s shielding. Though Reed never shows any awareness of Ben’s unvoiced affection for Sue, obviously the creators knew all about it, and may have chosen to “punish” Ben as Reed might have wanted to punish a potential rival.

Ben threatens to attack Reed, at which point he transforms into the rock-bodied Thing. His true feelings also spring forth as he rants, “I’ll prove to you that you love the wrong man, Susan!” Reed transforms as well, becoming the rubber-limbed Mr. Fantastic, and he subdues the Thing, though not without an expression of horror at his own transformation. Immediately thereafter, the excited Johnny displays his newfound power of turning into a man of fire. As the flashback draws to a close, all four of them are so sobered by their sudden acquisition of super-powers that Ben’s coveting of Sue is dropped and never mentioned again in the story, though his unrequited feelings do crop up later in other stories. Even the emotional consequences of Ben’s grotesque transformation are put on hold, and the four adventurers swear to dedicate their powers to becoming the “Fantastic Four.” _________________________________________________

Few if any of the myth-tropes from the vignette are reflected in the main story about the Mole Man. However, I will note that even though creators Lee and Kirby never made any further direct references to Ben’s hidden passion for Sue Storm, they found a way to compensate for their monster-hero’s amour by giving him a consolation prize: Alicia Masters, a near-lookalike for Sue who showed up seven issues later in “Prisoner of the Puppet Master” and remained the Thing’s inamorata for the remainder of the Lee-Kirby years.

INHUMAN DESIRES

 In a recent post on RIP JAGGER'S DOJO Rip devoted a few posts to Marvel's Inhumans features and noted, "The Inhumans always proved to be a hard sell for a self-titled ongoing series."

I had made a similar observation in my review of the 1998-99 INHUMANS graphic novel by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee:

The Inhumans were introduced in the mid-sixties by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in FANTASTIC FOUR, and the prevailing wisdom is that they were mostly Kirby's designs. However, subsequent attempts to launch the characters in their own series were largely unsuccessful. Though personally I liked the characters, I found that they were too static and lacked a viable group dynamic. The pattern for THE INHUMANS slightly resembled the Lee-Kirby THOR. In both features, the stories alternated between a fabulous otherworld where most of the characters had super-powers, and visits to the mundane world of humanity. Yet, what worked for Thor-- a central character with a retinue of support-figures-- didn't really work for the five main characters of THE INHUMANS. One reason was that four of the continuing heroes-- Medusa, Gorgon, Karnak, and Triton-- were eternally deferential to Black Bolt, who was not only the leader of their group, but their absolute monarch, and the ruler of all the Inhumans who dwelled in the remote city of Attilan. This meant that it was difficult for writers to evoke the standard formulas of Marvel interpersonal drama.

 

Now, to pull at these threads somewhat, I should not that a "viable group dynamic" is not a guarantee for success. The Silver Age (roughly 1956-1970) gave rise to a larger number of adventure-teams than had been typical for the Golden Age. One of the few teams that had endured from the early 1940s until the mid-fifties was Quality Comics' BLACKHAWK, and this was the only feature that DC Comics continued, starting in 1956, after allegedly purchasing all of the properties owned by Quality once that company dissolved. It may be no coincidence that Jack Kirhy and Dave Wood initiated another team of uniformed crusaders the very next year, resulting in the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which endured throughout the remainder of the Silver Age. Then within the next three-four years DC and Marvel respectively debuted JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA and FANTASTIC FOUR, which both enjoyed more long-lasting success than any team that debuted in the Golden Age. JUSTICE LEAGUE survived even though it did not originally boast any sort of "group dynamic," while the FF practically defined said dynamic. Both BLACKHAWK and CHALLENGERS, which were "old school" in terms of interpersonal drama, were gone by the early seventies. At least one of Marvel's team-books with the new emphasis on drama, THE AVENGERS, prospered. However, a good group dynamic didn't save X-MEN, which concluded its first run in 1970, even though it was resurrected to spectacular success in 1975. And of course a number of solo Silver Age characters from both Marvel and DC also pooped out by the early seventies, notably THE SILVER SURFER, which had received just as much promotion in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR as had THE INHUMANS.

All that said, the thing that currently interests me most about the Inhumans is that Jack Kirby designed them at a point where Marvel was doing very well with most of its line, even if Kirby himself felt that he was getting the short end of the stick in a business sense. Some fan-sources assert that Marvel had some notion of launching THE INHUMANS as a full series sometime in the mid-sixties, but that this plan was dropped, so that the characters didn't get their own berth until debuting as a "co-feature" in 1970's AMAZING ADVENTURES. I tend to believe that Kirby thought the characters up without much input from Lee when the group appeared in 1965 (not counting the solo appearance of the character Medusa, who had appeared sans origin a year or so earlier). But the fact that Kirby didn't seem to have imagine any raison d'etre for these characters suggests to me that in his own work he didn't focus on interpersonal drama to the degree that Stan did. Kirby certainly knew how to evoke drama and pathos, and he probably contributed his fair share of such moments in FANTASTIC FOUR. Nevertheless, I think he did it largely because that's what his editor Lee wanted, not because the continuing "heroes with problems" was his creative preference. Indeed, most if not all of the "team-books" that Kirby did after ending his collaboration with Lee hearkened back to the "old school approach" of the Golden Age. Whether Kirby did the Boy Commandos or the Forever People, a Newsboy Legion for the forties or for the seventies, the team-members were mostly "a swell bunch of guys," which phrase was once applied to the Justice Society of the forties.

To be sure, Kirby's Inhumans, whether in the pages of the FF or in their own feature (a few of which Kirby wrote and drew), were more dour than brimming with bonhomie. But I'm not sure that anyone who followed Kirby's act with these characters ever managed to give them more complex or evocative characterizations-- even though, as noted above, Jenkins and Lee did a better than average job.

 

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.

INCEST WE TRUST PART 6

I'm recycling the title of the essay from a series that ended way back in 2010. I do so merely to provide an easy link to one of my posts that dealt substantially with the influence of Sigmund Freud's psychology on human art-- something that also impacts upon this week's mythcomic, Grant Morrison's 2001 mini-series FANTASTIC FOUR 1234.

Here's Morrison's original statement on the subject of how the topic of Freudian incest influenced his mini-series:

I’ve worked out this whole Freudian shit. The incest thing in The Fantastic Four. What you’ve got is a family. There’s Reed and Sue, the Mom and Dad. Johnny’s the big brother and Ben’s the little crazy baby. But in that situation you’ve got Johnny and Sue — brother and sister! So there’s an incest thing that the Fantastic Four hides.I looked at it and said, okay, Sue actually wants to fuck Johnny and Johnny wants to fuck Sue. So how do you do that? They make Namor, the Sub-Mariner who is always a linked pair with Johnny. The Human Torch and the Sub Mariner have always been together since the ’40s. Namor is the dark, seedy, watery, wet, dirty side of it. And Johnny’s bright, mercurial. So he doesn’t fuck his sister — but Namor does.

To be sure, he doesn't state that he intends to follow Freud as the royal road to truth, only that he uses such a concept to generate his story.

All I’m doing is using that as the basis, then I make a story out of it. The story suddenly has this incredible power because underneath it are these terrible incestuous tensions.

It should also be noted that not everything an author says about a project is absolute truth; often authors make statements calculated to "tease" readers into buying the item in question. Still, even before addressing how Freudianism affected the actual story, Morrison's remarks require a little sussing out, both in minor and major respects.

The least problematic portion of Morrison's statement, as it bears on the classic Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR from 1961-1970, is that the characters of Reed "Mister Fantastic" Richards and Sue ("Invisible Girl") Storm function as the "mom and dad" of this ersatz family, even before the two of them get married in 1965. Usually Reed and Sue fill the role of parents controlling unruly children.

Indeed, Stan Lee occasionally has Sue Storm, or other characters, refer to her as the group's "den mother," and while Reed Richards doesn't get nearly as many paternal references, he's almost always the de facto authoritarian of the "family."

However, I find odd Morrison's statement that "Johnny's the big brother and Ben's the little crazy baby," not least due to the actual discrepancy between the ages of the characters; i.e., Ben "The Thing" Grimm is a veteran of World War II, while Johnny "Human Torch" Storm is a teenager in high school. Ben is extremely loud and obstreperous, and he is the only one in the group clad only in a pair of trunks, occasionally mocked as a "diaper." But in every Lee-Kirby story I've ever seen, the Torch comes off as the attention-hungry younger brother constantly needling an older brother who has little sense of humor and doesn't want to be messed with.

Morrison's quasi-Freudian summation is also odd in that he fails to note that though Johnny Storm never displays any *overt* erotic interest in his sister, Ben "the crazy little baby" openly expresses such forbidden sentiments three times, in issues #1, #3, and #5.

I don't think either Lee or Kirby seriously thought about having Ben pursue Sue as an ongoing subplot. But the basic storytelling trope, that of "best friends fighting over the same woman," must have appealed to the artists enough to work it into three separate stories. Finally, Lee and Kirby solved Ben's romance-problem by introducing in issue #8 his new girlfriend Alicia, who, as I mentioned here, just happens to look almost exactly like Sue Storm. In contrast, the FF feature is so taken up with the conflicts of the Torch and the Thing, or of Reed and Sue, that Sue and Johnny barely interact with one another, aside from basic melodramatic stuff like, "Nobody does that to my sister/brother," etc. Lee and Kirby were simply not that interested in such interactions, though, to be sure, Stan Lee did devote much more space to the siblings' chemistry in the 1962-65 run of the "Human Torch" feature in STRANGE TALES. But even in that series, wherein Sue and Johnny lived together and she often functioned like a bossy mother to the teenager, there were still no *overt* intimations of erotic interest.

Now, I've intentionally emphasized the word *overt* twice here, in order to segue to the standard Freudian argument that repressed desires, particularly involving incestuous impulses, appear not in overt but in *covert* forms. If I were going to pick an example where Johnny manifests some covert consciousness of his sister's charms, I'd probably go with the sequence in FF #43 (1965). Here, for the space of one issue, Johnny becomes slightly enamored of the then-villainous Medusa, who's portrayed as being roughly the same age as Sue Storm, to say nothing of Medusa being the heroine's "evil counterpart" in the Frightful Four.

Grant Morrison, though, rests his case on the idea that the Sub-Mariner is an inverted double of the Torch, the "dark" shadow of the "bright and mercurial" Johnny Storm. Morrison loosely references the interlinked symbolism of the Torch and Sub-Mariner characters in the 1940s, though that doesn't really say anything about the creative propensities of Lee and Kirby in the 1960s. The most one can say is that Stan Lee was aware that the two Golden Age characters had enjoyed great sales in the forties, and that he was trying to find some way to make reworked versions of those characters sell well in the sixties. This included having the new version of the Torch bring the new/old version of the Sub-Mariner into the Marvel Universe.

Morrison does not reference FANTASTIC FOUR #4, but it would be fair to surmise that the Torch's act of unleashing Prince Namor on the world *could,* in Freudian terms, be viewed as a projection of Johnny's hidden urges, given that one of the first things Namor does after his rebirth is to mack on Johnny's sister. During subsequent issues, Johnny doesn't manifest any jealousy of his sister's attraction to the "fish-man," though once or twice he does show some animus...

...though, to be sure, he never shows nearly as much anger toward the sea-prince as do Reed or Ben.

So, how well does the actual Morrison take on the Lee-Kirby "first family" integrate all these Freudian formulations?

To be continued...

MYTHCOMICS: "ORIGIN OF THE SILVER SURFER" (SILVER SURFER #1, 1968)

Following the Silver Surfer's 1966 debut in The Galactus Trilogy, the character became a peripatetic guest-star in assorted Marvel features, with the exception of his one starring role in the backup tale of FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #5. As I noted in my essay on the Trilogy, the SF-trope of menacing Earth or some comparable planet with a world-destroying being had been done before, The Trilogy, however, succeeds in infusing the story of Galactus and his rebellious herald with a dense level of symbolism, largely drawn from Judeo-Christian mythology. However, the Trilogy also offers a more mundane point of interest for fans of Silver Age Marvel, given that it's the one time in the history of the Lee-Kirby collaboration that Lee unequivocably credited Kirby with inventing one of the characters totally on his own, repeatedly asserting that the Silver Surfer appeared in the story sans any input from Stan Lee.

Without rehashing the many facets of the Lee-Kirby history, suffice to say that when the Surfer appeared, he had no explicit origin. He's consistently portrayed by Lee and Kirby as an alien humanoid, who, much like Galactus, is beyond human comprehension, and who shares none of the emotions known to Earth-people. From a "Skrull's-eye" view given to the reader, it appears that the Surfer has existed for some time as Galactus's herald, and it seems implicit that in the past the silver-hued, surfboard-riding extraterrestrial has guided his gargantuan master to devour planets that may have been inhabited. Certainly the Surfer evinces no initial compunction about drawing Galactus to the Earth, and only within the course of the narrative does he develop a conscience against killing, which brings about his opposition to his master and the Surfer's concomitant exile to the Planet Earth.

Reportedly Jack Kirby had conceived an origin for the Surfer, and he was not pleased when Stan Lee, working with John Buscema, presented his own origin for the hero in SILVER SURFER #1. To my knowledge, Kirby never spelled out exactly what his intended origin would have looked like, but clearly it would have proceeded from the initial idea that the Surfer was distinctly not human. Lee must have been on the same page with this conception back in the day, for in FANTASTIC FOUR #55, the Thing picks a fight with the Surfer out of jealousy over Alicia Masters, and Mister Fantastic tries to tell his partner that the Surfer doesn't even understand human modes of expression because "he isn't even human." I've theorized that some of Kirby's original concept was possibly recycled into 1978's SILVER SURFER graphic novel, the last collaboration of Lee and Kirby. Although the dialogue establishes that the story is "in continuity" with the origin given by Lee in the 1968 tale, there are suggestions that the Surfer may be, like other characters in the GN, an emanation from Galactus's own being, not unlike the stories of angels being directly manifested by the Will of God.

But in 1968, Lee distances himself from Kirby's 'science-fiction angel." It appears that Lee wanted to humanize the Surfer, probably to make the character more relatable to the average comics-buyer. At the same time, clearly Lee wanted the Surfer's debut to be perceived as an event, since the story premiered in a 25-cent "book-length" format to start, though by issue #8 the feature was retooled for the 15-cent market and kept that status until cancellation at issue *18. Lee had received approbation from his fans for the philosophical musings of the Surfer and other Marvel characters, so it's likely he thought that the SURFER title was a chance to see if the audience would support a continuing character with an extremely heavy philosophical attitude.

For the first six pages of SILVER SURFER #1, the protagonist evinces the same speechifyin' tendencies seen in his earlier appearances. He rails against the "unforgivable insanity" of the human race with whom he's been consigned to dwell, and speaks of humans' "hatred, fear, and unreasoning hostility." He's met with animus even when he rescues astronaut John Jameson from a watery death, which is certainly a patent reference to one of the earliest feats of Lee's most popular martyr-hero, Spider-Man. Then on page seven, the Surfer begins recollecting what his life was like before he was the Surfer-- and this remembrance of things past, though occasionally interrupted by present-day interludes, forms the bulk of the story.

Lee's retconned Surfer is still an alien, but one with an entirely mortal nature. In that life, the Surfer was Norrin Radd, a native of Zenn-La. Despite the resemblance of the planet's name to that of James Hilton's pacifistic paradise Shangri-La, Zenn-La is drawn from the science-fiction trope of the overcivilized civilization, one whose inhabitants are supported by such glorious technology that they need do nothing but live in sybaritic stagnation. But here Lee reverses the formula of the Surfer inveighing against the savagery of Earth-people, for the mortal Norrin is discontent with the complacence of his people, observing that "those to whom no distant horizons beckon-- for whom no challenges remain-- though they have inherited a universe, they possess only empty sand." His girlfriend Shalla Bal, also introduced for the first time here, is as happy as any other Zenn-Lavian with their unchanging status. Norrin alone mourns the loss of real history: of his ancestors' renunciation of warfare, of the dawning of an Age of Reason, and, most relevant to Norrin, the culture's era of space-exploration. 

However, an invader appears to menace the peaceful world. Since the locals have forgotten how to practice eternal vigilance, they fall back on their sole defense: a great super-weapon. The use of the weapon wrecks half the planet, but the invader's craft takes no harm at all. Norrin, though he has no method of retaliation, chooses to confront the invader in a spacecraft, if only to learn what menaces his world. He gets more than he bargains for.

Galactus, possibly impressed by Norrin's courage, deigns to justify his planet-devouring proclivities with one of Lee's best lines: "If your own life depended upon stepping on an ant hill-- you would not hesitate." When Norrin continues to plead for the lives of his people, Galactus happens to mention that he would be willing to spare living  beings if he had a herald capable of searching out worlds that could nourish a world-destroyer's appetite, but without intelligent life. Norrin responds by offering his services to the planet-eater, even though it means cutting all ties with his mortal existence. 

At the same time, though Norrin gives up his beloved to become the Silver Surfer, cutting ties with Zenn-La doesn't seem to affect him much. In this quasi-Faustian bargain, the hero loses the girl but he pursues a higher passion: the exploration of the universe's ceaseless wonders. However, though in this iteration the compassionate Surfer is able to guide his master away from some planets with intelligent life, he's unable to keep Galactus from imperiling Earth because the master just happens to be really hungry. In other words, Lee exonerates the Surfer from the deeds of his earlier, indifferent-alien persona, and ends the story by having the depressed alien state to the reader that "my destiny still lies before me."

I've omitted the interludes, though one of them is interesting because it shows the Surfer musing in "Ozymandias" fashion on a long-dead civilization. To be sure, Lee isn't interested in cosmic relativism. In this story at least, Lee celebrates the period of civilization in which people are still young and vital, yet wise enough to renounce war and pursue the goal of enlightened exploration. It's  not a particularly deep proposition, but there's a germ of a good idea in it that could be given more sophisticated treatment. The biggest problem with Lee's retcon of the Surfer is that the character's constant jeremiads against violence were not likely to prove popular with an audience that wanted to enjoy spectacles of violence. Most Marvel heroes in those days showed some reluctance to fight, but once they were pressed to do so, they were usually allowed to feel moments of triumph for overcoming a powerful opponent. The Surfer, awash in his ongoing Christ-complex, could never take satisfaction in his victories, and this-- perhaps more than the feature's almost total lack of humor-- may have spelled doom to the first outing of the silver-hued sky-rider.