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.        

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...

NULLMYTHS: "THE TORCH GOES WILD" (STRANGE TALES #119. 1964)

I'm hardly going out on a limb by asserting that the "Human Torch" series that began in STRANGE TALES #101 (1962) was one of the weakest features to appear during the era of "Classic Marvel." While editor Stan Lee seemed to have a firm grasp on the direction for most of the Marvel productions, the Torch feature consistently suffered from weak, inconsistent stories all the way to the feature's final appearance in ST #134, after which it was replaced by the NICK FURY strip. Even the issues drawn by Jack Kirby, while nice to look at, are generally tepid as stories.

I suspect that one problem was that Stan Lee had been around back when the original Human Torch was a best-seller in the Golden Age, so that he was trying to see if the character's name and power could garner similar success-- while at the same time, drawing upon the successful associations of the FANTASTIC FOUR title. But because Johnny Storm was so thoroughly tied into the FF-continuity, all the various raconteurs on the series-- whether they were "fan-favorites" like Lee and Kirby, or less heralded laborers like Larry Leiber and Dick Ayers-- were equally straight-jacketed in their approach to the adventures of this "flaming youth." Only one story in the Torch's 33 solo exploits turned out above-average, and that tale-- the first one-on-one combat between the teen hero and the new version of the Sub-Mariner (ST #107, 1963)-- may have excelled because of it hearkened back to the Golden Age duels between the original Torch and his seagoing opponent.

Most of the Torch-stories are merely mediocre, but "The Torch Goes Wild" is interesting in a symbolic sense because it reproduces a sociological theme not unlike this week's mythcomic. The excellence of the early DOCTOR STRANGE feature, which shared space in the "split-book" title of STRANGE TALES, often pointed out the puerility of many Torch stories-- and never more than in issue #119.

Aside from the formal failings of "Wild"-- with drab and awkward art by Ayers, and a lacklustre concept from Stan Lee-- "Wild" is also essentially a recycling of a better Lee-Kirby story from FANTASTIC FOUR #21, published the previous year. In that story the creators introduced the Hate-Monger, who came to New York, inflamed a few crowds into unreasoning prejudice with his hate-ray, and then fled to a Caribbean island to facilitate a Communist revolution. Not only does the main villain of "Wild" borrow the Hate-Monger's hostility-motif and Commie sympathies, the Rouser even uses a subterranean mole-machine explicitly derived from the earlier villain's vehicle. Lee might not have written a good story here, but at least he has more or less admitted that he was "one-offing" an earlier story in the Marvel canon.

The Rabble Rouser's ethnicity is not stated, though his garments seem to have a quasi-Hispanic look, as does his prominent mustache. In his words, he chooses to pose as a "street corner soap box fanatic"
while using a "mesmerizer wand" to sway any crowds who listen to fall in with his evil scheme-- to get the Human Torch's fiery power outlawed by law.

What makes this a significant "null-myth" is not the silliness of the villain's plan, which includes kidnapping a foreign dignitary simply to cause an "international incident." Rather, it's the idea that a disreputable-looking individual-- who even uses "rabble rouser" as his only name-- could somehow come to influence right-thinking Americans with a combination of ranting rhetoric and hypnotic technology. The Torch-- repeatedly portrayed as a good-hearted but bad-tempered adolescent, and not much more-- is the picture of the misunderstood teen. Early Marvel stories often managed to do a fair job of playing on young readers' fears of not being taken seriously, but in "Wild" the motif is used in a tedious and transparent fashion.

Naturally, by story's end, the illicit law against the Torch's fiery flights has been rescinded, and Lee has the very minor joke of putting the villain under his own spell, forcing him to say that he loves America. But it's a pretty paltry role-reversal.

Oddly, though the villain is made to state that "the Rabble Rouser is no more," other Marvel creators actually found some reason to bring this oddball back in some altered form. I haven't read these revival stories, but I tend to think that this is one early Marvel character who should have been left to gather dust on the shelves.