#superfluous atomic weaponry count: 0->1

[hautsreadsmarvel]

"The Fantastic Four" (1961, issue 1)

Not every issue deserves its own post, but I think the very first one does. It's a goldmine of insight into this age of comics.

Lookit that, our very first comic book cover! I dig it, except for the part where I didn’t realize where the Human Torch was in this image immediately and so it briefly looked like the monster was speaking. And also the part where the Invisible Girl turning invisible doesn't seem like it will help her. And also also the part where the depicted scene doesn't happen in the story.

Going into this, I should probably clarify that I know next to nothing about the F4. I do know their names and powers:

Reed Richards, under the alias "Mister Fantastic", is the leader who can stretch any aspect of his body to incredible lengths. He's also a really smart inventor, to the point that the Reed Richards Is Useless trope is named after him

Sue Storm, alias "the Invisible Girl", can... turn invisible. And get captured a lot.

Ben Grimm, aka "the Thing", is super strong and super tough.

Johnny Storm, aka "the Human Torch", is Sue's brother and can burst into flame for a limited duration, gaining flight and pyrokinesis.

Also, Sue and Reed will be married and have two kids (one of whom is nigh-omnipotent?), the Thing is divinely mandated to never return to human form, in the multiverse there’s a “Council of Reeds” and also an evil Reed called the Maker who can elongate his brain to get smarter, and the F4 used to be the most popular Marvel heroes. All that out of the way, let’s dive in!

Huh, you could buy this for 10 cents. I wonder how expensive that is in today money…? $1.03. Wow. Also, does anyone know what that M C label between the CCA stamp of approval and “10c” means? Is that just an abbreviation for Marvel Comics?

Love the artwork, including the way that the mysterious guy who totally isn't Reed Richards is colored in the bottom right. That flare gun is pretty cool too, what with its ability to form words. Could you imagine having a flare gun to signal your friends like that? Damn.

On the other hand... the cops. Le sigh. I get a feeling we'll be seeing a lot of cops for a long while as symbolic shorthand for justice and goodness. Blech.

First part of this story is the F4 all heading to the flare's location while demonstrating their powers. Basically all of them cause some trouble for the unsuspecting citizens of New York - Sue bowls people over running invisibly thru a crowd, speaks and frightens someone into thinking there's a ghost, and causes a taxi driver to flee for his life after attempting to pay him while invisible; the Thing busts out of a clothing store and wrecks the door, scaring the passerby and causing the cops to shoot him (w/o resulting in harm); and the Torch slags a car on his way over... we'll talk more about the Torch's intro in a bit.

There's no way doors keep being unwieldy for the Thing. It begs the question of how he got into the shop in the first place (possibly he squeezed thru carefully or used a larger entrance, but in his haste just plowed thru the wall), and it's not a particularly interesting antic to show whenever we want to show the F4 unintentionally causing havoc. The whole Thing intro is a pretty effective introduction to his character - actually, they kind of all are. This intro sequence showcases their potential to be menaces and positions them as fantastic oddities within the hustle and bustle of New York; Sue is a little careless, the Thing is grumpy about hiding himself from the world but also doesn't enjoy his strange body drawing attention from the public, and while the Torch may love working on hot rods, he's also a hothead so excited by the prospect of the first F4 mission that he bursts into flame INSIDE the car and melts parts of it into slag before taking flight. A promising start for characterization, I suppose.

Also, again, the flare gun is SO COOL. You can pre-program it to form sequential messages? Fuck having powers, I want one of those.

Back to the Torch's intro. His appearance in the skies is so disturbing that the government sics fighter planes on the "unknown flaming object over Central City", and here begins the silliness in earnest.

You know how fighter aircraft engage their targets by swooping in like a pack of orcas, to savage their foes in melee combat? Yeah, me neither. Why are they getting close enough that he can saw straight thru them, when he wasn't even able to melt more than a torso-size hole thru a car he was in? It’s that shit in action movies where it feels like the jet pilots are trained to try and bull rush their targets, and it never ceases to irritate me*. That's just the appetizer though. The real silliness is...

You know how governments LOVE firing nuclear warheads at hostile targets? You know how they LOVE firing nuclear warheads at targets directly above ONE OF THEIR OWN CITIES? Look, I get it was the ‘60s. Of course everyone had nukes on the mind. Of course if you want to shorthand “really powerful kablooey” you just say “nuke”. But what immeasurable stupidity this is! Why, they oughta sack the officers that gave that order! Now the obvious fix would be to just... not call it a nuke. But our task is not to control, but to see, and so we bear witness to the first of many terrors running rampant in the Marvelverse - nuclear weapons getting used all the damn time.

…And then Reed stretches his arms up, catches the warhead, and flings it into the sea to explode. Thus starts the long trend of “safely” disposing of nuclear ordinance by lobbing it into the water. Thus also appears an unstated but consistent property of Reed’s super-stretchiness: he can arrest the momentum of things much stronger and faster than he by grabbing or grappling them, and then throw them the fuck away despite lacking the apparent necessary leverage to do so. Unlike my prior umbrage re: jet fighters and nuking one's own cities, I actually have no problems with this - as long as it’s internally consistent, I don’t really give a shit that a superhero-verse has different physics than ours, and I find the insistence that their physics MUST match ours to be nonsensical. If that really upsets you, I got bad news about basically every superpower.

After that follows a flashback to the origin story of the F4 - they stole aboard a rocket and piloted it to space so that AMERICA (THE BEAUTIFUL, GOD SHED HIS GRACE ON THEE) could defeat the vile commies (better DEAD than RED!) and make it to space first... but they hit some sort of radiation zone... crashland back to Earth... and discover they've all mutated in some way. After that comes their actual first adventure: Reed has discovered that nuclear powerplants across the world are being claimed by sinkholes, they fly to the mythical "Monster Isle" to track down the perpetrator, fight some random monsters that aren't really worth writing about (and Reed again demonstrates that he can lift really large objects and throw them into the sea), they fall into the center of the Earth and meet "the Moleman"... the Moleman, who I vaguely recall is going to reappear in some future Marvel comics, is apparently a hideous-looking guy who was shunned by society, fell into the Hollow Earth and became the blind leader of its monstrous creatures, and now plots to overthrow the surface world by first depriving them of their powerplants. He also has a "radar sense" that makes him an exceptional hand-to-hand combatant - basically spider-sense. Yeah, not a great villain, and not a particularly compelling adventure if you're looking for anything more than cheap thrills.

Nevertheless, the story is a fun read, and justifies its price (which is admittedly 'free', in my case...). It's pulp for kids, OJ optional. It makes for a great introduction into the Marvelverse, and if this was your first superhero story ever I think it would be pretty neat, but the actual adventure is bleh (weren't threats from the Hollow Earth already getting stale by the 60s?), and Sue and Reed don't have much character beyond "heroic do-gooders".

*What bothers me is not a lack of fidelity to actual military operations. What gets my goat is the lack of conception of distance that this particular cliché indicates. It’s why I also get pissy when fiction treats different celestial bodies as practically next door, trivializes what travel distances are like for people who don’t have cars or commercial jets at their beck and call, etc. Distance matters! It's an important factor influencing human history and our individual lives, and it can greatly enhance the texture and stakes of a story! Don’t just foo-foo it!