"You've turned into monsters... both of you! It's those rays! Those terrible cosmic rays!"
Simply put, I've had a temporary but rather unpleasant medical condition for the last year and a bit, meaning physical discomfort . This is making it increasingly hard to concentrate on TV and film, the main focus of this blog. The good news is that I should be right as rain after surgery next month, followed by a few weeks to recover, and I'll be watching and blogging all the usual stuff.
But what to do in the meantime? Well, I can still read well enough, and will still be blogging novels. I will try to keep blogging TV and film as much as I can. But I could do with something that will allow me to blog with relative frequency... so I'll be reading all Marvel comics, online, according to the Complete Marvel Reading Order (fellow Brits, you may need a VPN), starting with this issue! I may not go beyond the early '90s but... we'll see.
So... it's August 1961. The same time period as Season One as Mad Men. The Sixties won't start swinging for a while yet. It's still very much the Atomic Age, the Cold War is in full swing, between the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both the USSR and the USA put a man in space earlier this year.
And, in terms of comics, it's the Silver Age. And... well, we'll say "Marvel" for clarity, but this is really Timely Comics, known for its pulp-style stories of monsters, aliens and mad scientists- certainly not superheroes for the most part, not since they went out of fashion just over a decade ago. Captain America, the original Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner have, it seems, had their day.
Yet a certain Distinguished Competition has had great success, after years of retreating to just Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, of expanding its roster of superhero titles... and Marvel needs to do something. Things are not going great.
Enter two men in their forties, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Much has been said over the years over how Kirby's contribution to the plots has been underappreciated, but we must be careful not to dismiss Lee as a mere hype merchant, either. This thread I will, I'm sure, keep returning to, but Lee is very much on record of saying that, at this point, he was thinking of leaving the comics industry and this was a last throw of the dice, him finally doing a comic exactly the way he wanted. And, well, that clearly worked.
I'm very much aware that the Fantastic Four, being essentially explorers, owe much to Challengers of the Unknown, which Kirby had recently done at DC. Indeed... this issue in many ways seems and feels more like an Atomic Age monster comic than a superhero comic- there are, for example, no costumes at this point. And this is very much baby steps for Marvel- Kirby's art, while very good for what this is, is by no means anywhere close to being as sublime as it will eventually become, great though the cover is. And the dialogue is... melodramatic, and also wordy. The narration, while poetic at times, is surprisingly foregrounded: there's certainly an authorial voice to this.
The narrative, perhaps reflecting the pre-existing style, is split into four. The first is... odd, with Reed Richards summoning the others with some weird signal thing. Sue Storm is with "society friends" when she hears the signal, reacting to her "vow" and leading to some hi-jinks with a taxi. Ben Grimm, at this point, looks much less rocky, and is far more grumpy and anti-social, saying "bah" a lot. The events seem to take place in "Central City", a DC-esque fictional location, not New York. And... the FF are very much treated as hostile by those in authority, with the US government trying to get Johnny. This sequence showcases the characters' powers, but... it's odd, it's uneven, it feels experimental, and the characters are far from fleshed out at this point.
The second part of the narrative is the familiar origin story, with the cosmic rays. Even this has some unexpectedly fascinating little details, though. Reed was rushing the rocket and cutting corners on safety in order to beat "the Commies"- you can really feel the sudden urgency of the space race in 1961, the year the US quickly rushed Alan Shephard into space in order to keep up with the Soviets. And Sue goads Ben by calling him "a coward" despite his very reasonable safety concerns. The love triangle over Sue between Reed and Ben is surprisingly raw.
Part three gives us actual plot, with atomic plants (this being the Atomic Age) being targeted from underground, including in French Equatorial Africa, reminding us how long ago this is! "Monster Island" is from right out of pulp and B-movies, the monsters (one with three heads!) being pure Ray Harryhausen. Mole Man is... well, not the most classic of villains, basically an incel who flounces, self-pityingly, to the centre of the earth, losing much of his sight... and then gaining supernatural senses and mastery over the monsters for reasons which are in no way explained. And yes, he explains his rather rubbish plan to the FF "before I slay you".
This is by no means the finished article. It certainly doesn't feel like Marvel at this point. And yet... the fundamentals of the key characters have real potential, and I can see why this was such a success.
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