Despite the movie reboot, the Fantastic Four's place in the Marvel Universe has dropped in importance behind the Avengers, the X-Men, Spider-Man, the Hulk and even Iron Man. But they are important to the MU, as we all should know. They were the standard bearings of Marvel's Silver Age greatness and one of the most imaginative. Fantastic Four #40-60 is one of the most historic and critically acclaimed runs of all time.
I was wondering about the inner dynamics and the motivations of these four pioneers. And how much we really know about them and came up with some questions.
However, before we begin, I must lay down one ground rule. I do NOT want this to become another "Stan Lee Versus Jack Kirby" debate. In my mind, they BOTH created the Fantastic Four and are equally responsible for its success. If anyone wants to rehash past arguments, please start your own thread!
My questions:
- Was there ever any in-story reason why Susan and Johnny Storm were on that rocket? Sue was an aspiring actress and Johnny was in high school. Reed had no right to risk their lives as they were not qualified to go into space.
- Speaking about Reed Richards, why couldn't he have waited for the radiation shielding? They gave lip-service to "beating the Commies" into space but, if the shielding was so important, why wasn't it there in the first place?
- Was it really Reed's rocket? How rich was he? Was he always planning to go on the spaceflight? Perhaps that's why he stole his own ship. The government might have refused to jeopardize him and he wanted to go!
- Was Ben Grimm insane after his transformation into the Thing? He was rightfully bitter and always on the edge. Reed said that they had the duty to keep him under control. Was his cartoonish and comical later persona a defense mechanism to keep his sanity? If he hadn't met Alicia Masters, could he have become a threat to humanity?
- Was the teenage Human Torch potentially a greater menace? Every time he took flight, there was the chance that he could have caused conflagrations anywhere in New York City.
- More to the point, why would anyone want to live/work in the Baxter Building, especially after the events of Fantastic Four #6?
- Even more to the point, why would the City government allow the FF to remain in the middle of Manhattan, with the attacks by super villains, alien invasions, the Negative Zone, etc.? I'd be petitioning them to move to Death Valley, or at least New Jersey! (I'm joking!)
- Was Reed originally supposed to be the "HERO" of the book? He was the brains and he created their technology. Reed became stodgier as the Thing became funnier. At what point did the Thing become the star? My guess is FF #25, his second battle with the Hulk.
- Was Ben really in love with Sue? Or was it just an infatuation? Or did Ben want to prove himself better than Reed by stealing his girl? Remember, it was Sue who goaded Ben into going along.
- Did Johnny like Reed? The two had NOTHING in common except that they both loved Sue. Was Reed the interloper? Johnny loved being the Human Torch, but taking Reed's orders...not so much. Has Johnny been merely tolerating Reed all these years? And vice versa naturally!
I look forward to your comments on the next wave of cosmic rays!
Replies
My impression from the early issues is they thought Johnny was going to be the breakout character. Incidentally, note that in the early issues he can't throw his flame. I think he first throws a fireball in #9.
I've read something somewhere about Kirby wondering why the Torch didn't make people standing near him sweat. Imagine what he'd be like in a small room. The Baxter Building must have fantastic air conditioning.
Come to think of it, since unstable molecules conform to the Torch's flame when he flames on, they might conform to people's sweat when they sweat. So costumes made of them might cool those wearing them, the same way being sprinkled with water does. But there'd be a danger they might wear thin in places like armpits.
No-one noticed it was gone? The FF have terrific insurance? Or, you can pick Reed's brains when you catch him in the lobby and misdirect bill collectors to the Thing?
Wait, I've got it! People patronise your business in the hope of catching chance glimpses of the FF.
The heat Johnny put off must have been strong, especially when he was flying. We've seen him extinguish his hands to catch someone as he flew but the heat had to still be terrific.
btw, did he have to flame on his entire body to fly? Could he have just done his legs?
You could do a story where he broke his arm, couldn't flame on while it was healing because it would wreck the cast, and had to find ways to deal with a problem using his other powers, such as his flame control one.
He did modify (or replace, as Roy Thomas had it in the 70s) the Fantasticar, so he might have a common interest with Reed in engineering.
Presumably, Reed made fortunes and lost them just like that. It's been suggested over the years that he has patents on top of patents on top of the things he's been paid not to patent. So it's likely that he had some money. Enough to build a rocket? Well, given that your average superhero/supervillain had equipment that would have cost the US millions if not billions I don't find a rocket to be that outlandish.
I think as the comic began, it was going to be a very traditional team, and Reed was meant to be the unquestioned leader. I'm not sure at what point his character changed--it's a completely different man who goes to Atlantis to fight Namor for Sue than the one who's constantly inventing this or that gizmo--still the leader, but no longer with an iron fist.
Ben and Sue? I've heard this suggested in the past, but I can't recall anything suggesting this in the Silver Age.
I think Johnny liked Reed just fine. He got nifty superpowers, worldwide fame and the opportunity to do stuff that no one else would. At the same time, Reed treated him as an equal member of the team. I can't imagine Johnny not liking Reed.
I don't think Ben was ever insane except for those times he was mind-controlled. Angry? Yes, lots of anger. Bitter? Yes. Insane? No. While he raged sometimes at the others, I never really got the feeling that he wanted to do anyone harm.
Sue was on the rocket because she was Reed's girlfriend and there was no way he was going into space without her. Johnny was there because "I'm gonna tell momma". Reed allowed them on either because a) he'd run all the equations and thought it would be completely safe or b) he intentionally wanted to expose them to the cosmic rays. I'd go with the former.
Was there ever any in-story reason why Susan and Johnny Storm were on that rocket? Sue was an aspiring actress and Johnny was in high school. Reed had no right to risk their lives as they were not qualified to go into space.
In a couple of throw-away lines while driving to the rocket pad, Sue says she’s going because she’s Reed’s fiancée. Johnny says he’s going because his sister’s going. Apparently Reed was a wet noodle before the cosmic rays got to him.
Speaking about Reed Richards, why couldn't he have waited for the radiation shielding? They gave lip-service to "beating the Commies" into space but, if the shielding was so important, why wasn't it there in the first place?
In the flashback in FF#1 Ben tells Reed they haven’t done enough research on cosmic rays, which might kill them. It’s interesting that they present Ben as more prudent and Reed and more reckless (and arrogant). When they are already in space the comment is made that the shielding isn’t strong enough. They weren’t waiting for shielding , they just underestimated the cosmic rays. As for beating the Russians into space, the first man to orbit Earth was Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. Fantastic Four #1 (NOV61) went on sale in August 1961. The horse was already out of the barn.
Was it really Reed's rocket? How rich was he? Was he always planning to go on the spaceflight? Perhaps that's why he stole his own ship. The government might have refused to jeopardize him and he wanted to go!
They say that Reed spent years constructing the rocket. They don’t actually say it belongs to him and he says he was supposed to get “official clearance .” Maybe the officials would have stopped Sue and Johnny, at least.
Was the teenage Human Torch potentially a greater menace? Every time he took flight, there was the chance that he could have caused conflagrations anywhere in New York City.
IIRC, the public was always afraid of Ben but seldom afraid of Johnny. If you think about it the Torch should have been at least as scary as Ben.
More to the point, why would anyone want to live/work in the Baxter Building, especially after the events of Fantastic Four #6?
Some people would like the bragging rights of having their business or apartment in the notorious Baxter Building. I don’t think any of the other tenants were ever killed or seriously injured over the years.
Even more to the point, why would the City government allow the FF to remain in the middle of Manhattan, with the attacks by super villains, alien invasions, the Negative Zone, etc.? I'd be petitioning them to move to Death Valley, or at least New Jersey! (I'm joking!)
I don’t know about the City, but it does illustrate why most heroes have secret identities. If all the bad guys, known and yet-to-be-known, can find you in the middle of the night it makes the “uncool” secret identities seem a lot cooler.
Was Reed originally supposed to be the "HERO" of the book? He was the brains and he created their technology. Reed became stodgier as the Thing became funnier. At what point did the Thing become the star? My guess is FF #25, his second battle with the Hulk.
I think the original intent was to make them all equal stars, except for Sue, of course. In FF #5, however, an under-estimated Sue does covertly blow up Doom’s oxygen-sucking machine, saving the rest of the team. To me Ben’s stardom began with his hopeless, heroic battle against the Hulk in FF #25. It was locked in when Ben beat Doctor Doom face-to-face and hand-to-hand in FF #40.
Was Ben really in love with Sue? Or was it just an infatuation? Or did Ben want to prove himself better than Reed by stealing his girl? Remember, it was Sue who goaded Ben into going along.
When did they introduce the concept of Ben loving Sue? Leading up his meeting Alicia in FF #8 I can’t find any indication of this. In FF #8, however, it is pointed out that Alicia resembles Sue, so maybe he loved her secretly. Ben pining for Sue, if he ever did, sounds like Stan’s shtick of having Professor X pining for Jean Grey, Don Blake pining for Jane Foster, and Matt Murdock pining for Karen Page, etc.
Randy Jackson said:
Johnny was there because "I'm gonna tell momma".
This comment made me wonder if they ever talked about Sue and Johnny's mother?
They introduced Sue and Johnny's father, Doctor Franklin Storm in FF #31. We learn that their mother Mary was killed in a car accident long before the rocket trip. Her death led to Dr. Storm's decline into gambling where he was forced to take the blame for a crime he did not commit. He was sentenced to a long term and cut off ties with his children, to spare them the shame.
He was vindicated in FF #32 when he sacrificed himself to save them from a Skrull bomb.
Of course, Sue named her son Franklin after him.
I remember the story of their father but had forgotten about his wife's death.
Philip Portelli said:
My questions:
I think Randy pretty accurately addressed that one.
Back during Marv Wolfman's run on the book, somewhere around issues circa #194-#200, they rehashed the origin, and Reed noted that that particular night wasn't an ordinary night -- there was increased sunspot activity, high radiation from the Van Allen Belt, and the cosmic rays also in play. Now that I remember that story, that seems to have made a better case for them NOT going up.
Beats me.
Was Ben "insane"? I don't doubt that his cartoonish and comical later persona is a defense mechanism to keep his sanity, but I don't get what's being asked here. We can be fortunate that Ben keeps his rage in check so he isn't another Hulk.
I think thinking too hard about the Human Torch and how his powers work only leads you to the conclusion that he must be locked up for everyone else's good, if not his own. Or, as someone around here is wont to say, "Whenever someone speaks of making comics 'realistic,' more often than not they mean doing something that takes all fun out of them."
Ibid.
Likewise.
I can't say I'm such a longtime Fantastic Four reader that I could pinpoint when The Thing became the star, but I commend Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for realizing things were going that way and allowing it to happen.
Somehow, I think it was "all of the above."
I chalk Johnny's not listening to Reed's orders to immaturity, not a dislike of Reed. Conversely, I chalk Reed's frustration with Johnny not listening to him to the frustration any one would feel over a person who keeps making dumb mistakes that wouldn't have happened if he had listened to the wiser, experienced person who could forsee the bad result.
It was Sue who voiced the fear of the communist making it into space before anyone else, a fear that I think was quite common back then as was not liking the communist party. After all the "We will bury you" phrase from Kruschev was still floating around and even though America was at the height of her power the fear was still there. I think she pushed Reed and went along because she couldn't stand loosing him and Johnny went with them for the same reason. At the time no one could make it into Earth orbit and there was no treaty on space based weapons. Space was wide open and if you wanted to drop something on a city gravity was on your side. No icbm could match that and the communist leadership didn't seem all that stable.
The rocket -I think it was called the pocket rocket- later on was I think a prototype and must have been government run, they had to sneak on the base after all. Reed was probably head designer or project manager.
Ben wasn't insane but I think he came close, especially with Johnny teasing him all of the time. Except for Reed and Sue there wasn't a lot of overt love in those early years.
I think at first they were too small to really worry people, after all when the FF first started out the virtual armies of super powered people weren't there. You had the FF, Avengers, X-men (neither of witch was a big group at the time) Spiderman and a few others. The FF at first were an oddity with occasional dangerous incidents. Also back then being a super being didn't automatically mean you were a menace that the government had to spy on/attack, you could actually help someone in New York and not get yelled at or cursed for it.
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