It's impossible for me to understand what it must have been like to read Fantastic Four #1. When this new comic hit the newsstands it stirred up the beginning of a new way of telling a tale in comics, a style which for better or worse continues to dominate the field to this day. What is clear upon reading these earliest issues of the series which dabbled out on a bimonthly schedule is that the path to becoming traditional superheroes was a relatively slow one.
In the debut the Fab 4 (Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Girl, Human Torch, and the Thing) are introduced and themselves appear to be the menace as much as the mysterious creatures of Monster Island and their master the Mole Man. The FF are a team of adventurers who journey to a distant territory to investigate and find a menace their powers are instrumental in defeating. They battle a avalanche of differently shaped monsters and creatures who climb, stomp, and slither out of the shadows of the Mole Man's shadowy domain. They are not public heroes by any means and this oddity is something which proves a tension of sorts in the series in its early days.
In the second issue the Fab 4 battle legit aliens, the Skrulls. The deadly Skrulls in this comic are not much different really than the myriad aliens of all kinds which had populated issues of Journey Into Mystery, Strange Tales, and other Atlas monster mags of a few months earlier. In fact Mr. Fantastic uses images from those magazines to scare the incredibly gullible Skrulls into abandoning their invasion. The Fantastic Four in fact grow directly out of that science fiction vibe, collected "heroes" who fight monsters.
By the third issue we have the team battling the Miracle Man and yet another monster, but this guy turns out to be exceedingly underwhelming as a baddie. The power of hypnotism must've seemed much more impressive once upon a time, but here in this story it always came off as a cheat of sorts. That's likely why it took over a decade for Miracle Man to return. The big news in the third issue is that for the very first time, the Fantastic Four ditch their daily duds and put on uniforms befitting superheroes. Not unlike Kirby's earlier creation the Challengers of the Unknown, the uniforms are just that, alike. The team does not use costumes to make themselves distinctive, but to make themselves alike, pointing out that the team is superior to the individual. This is not an unimportant distinction. Later the X-Men would use the same approach.
By the end of this first year the Fantastic Four were fully formed and poised for rich and varied adventures to come. But reading these stories, I'm struck by how unfinished the concept was when it hit the stands. The FF were clearly meant to be somewhat different at the beginning. They were intended to be strange and weird and misfits among regular folks. They were intended to be somewhat scary. While the Thing kept this aspect, the others quickly dispensed with it. They became celebrities akin to movie stars. The book was a hit and proper villains of scale and scope were just around the corner.
More to come next week when the Fab 4 enter their second year.
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It facinates me to study these early issues and try to seperate fact from fiction as far as what was happening Stan says now that he was trying to do something different make the book he always wanted. I think Jack was making the same sort of Monster books he had been making and Stan started putting a new spin on it interjecting more human drama. Making the characters more relatable. Or some people think Jack started doing it and Stan found a way to market it sucessfully. One thing is for sure. They made one heck of a team!
ReplyDeleteLooking at both the FF and the Challs, it's easy to see correlations between the two titles. If anything, the early FF is more primitive in its storytelling in some ways, certainly in regards the look of Kirby's art. But quickly the series finds its footing.
DeleteI'm not going to get into the Stan and Jack debate much, just because I don't know and I have little to add. But it's telling to me what Lee did without Kirby and what Kirby did without Lee. Remarkable differences.
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