COSMIC FLIGHT, SPIDER BITE

 I'm currently working on an extensive FANTASTIC FOUR critical evaluation that will encompass the two mythcomics posts I have planned for this month, respectively posts #399 and #400. (Since the first time my posts reached 100, I have endeavored to make each hundredth-post something special, as do many comics-serials.) Since I'm planning to eschew my critical jargon where possible, I decided to get at least some of that out of my system by expanding on the following remarks from last year's DUELING DUALITIES PT. 3:

I should qualify this, though, by stating that the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR still had a very strong ontocosm with respect to developing the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, in comparison with even the best of the other contemporary Marvel offerings from the Silver Age... In fact, the kinetic qualities of the Lee-Kirby FF are at least equal to those of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN. However, with respect to the dramatic potentialities, the L/D SPIDER-MAN is more fully devoted to the soap opera model, generating a superior level of melodramatic intensity with what must have been comics' largest-ever ensemble of regular support-characters. By comparison. the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR concentrated most of its energies on the four principals, and the most-used group of support-characters in the series-- The Inhumans -- didn't so much mesh with the four principals as randomly bounce off them.

Here, then, are some demonstrations of my perceptions re: the four potentialities in each Silver Age serial.

 The kinetic potentiality in fiction concerns anything that's an analogue to physical sensation. Often I've referenced this potentiality with respect to those immortal selling-points, "sex and violence," but it also includes all sympathetic and antipathetic affects linked to sensation. Within the sphere of the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR, Jack Kirby designed an almost unparalleled rogues' gallery of unattractive villains to engage in combat with the generally attractive heroes (and yes, over time the Thing becomes cute than horrifying). This cover to FF #100-- which I for one wish could have been Kirby's last contribution to the series-- shows a good cross-section of the heroes and their opponents.

Ditko's run on SPIDER-MAN was not as long as Kirby's on FF, and he never showed a literal assemblage of all his best villains. (To be sure, both artists produced a handful of loser-foes, whom no one would particularly want to see again.) The closest thing to a Ditko "greatest hits" would be the "Sinister Six" tale in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1.

Despite how long each artist worked on each series, they're both in the same domain as far as how well they exploited the kinetic potentialities for repulsion and attraction. However, as I said above, the ways in which each writer/artist combo approached the dramatic potentiality took very different forms.

In the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR, melodramatic tragedy arose every once in a while, as in the story "This Man, This Monster." Yet I believe editor Lee chose most of the time to soft-pedal such emotional tumult, if only because he was always writing about four characters in an ensemble that had to remain together for the series' sake, no matter how often they talked about breaking up. Thus I'd argue that comedy rather than tragedy tended to rule the FF-realm, as seen in these pages from FF #54:         

In contrast to this series, though, SPIDER-MAN was a loner. Thought the series displayed an ample amount of comedy-- often in the form of playing jokes on J. Jonah Jameson-- there was a marked emphasis upon Peter Parker being caught in a tangled web, woven by some dispassionate god and in which Parker was tormented as for sport. From AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #17:

I'm not in any way devaluing comedy over drama; that's the sort of thinking that makes the Oscar Awards such a drag. But I am saying that because Lee and Ditko focused so much on teen melodrama, with some parallel crime-melodrama content, they often didn't veer into the vertical level of meaning very often.

 All of the famous Spidey villains seen above are just crooks in costumes; they want to steal things, Spider-Man gets in their way, and they want to kill him so that they can go back to stealing with impunity. That's why I've found so few mythopoeic or dramatic complexities in the L/D SPIDER-MAN, or, for that matter, in later iterations of the franchise. A couple of Spider-foes have world-conquering ambitions, like Doc Ock and the Lizard, but arguably Lee and Ditko devoted less space to their abstract motivations. 

The Red Ghost, in his first (and only good) story, wants to dominate Earth's moon for the glory of Communism. The Puppet Master has more interest in controlling other people's lives than in interacting with his stepdaughter. Doctor Doom is obsessed with the best at everything and thus wants more than anything to prove that he can beat his detested rival. All of these motivations BEGIN in the dramatic potentiality, but as I've argued in the various mythcomics essays I devoted to each FF-villain, the creators found ways to organically develop the mythopoeic and the didactic OUT of the dramatic motivations.       

And with all that in mind, my next essay will deal with a quick and dirty history of the Fantastic Four after Lee and Kirby.