NEAR MYTHS: THE THING VS. THE IMMORTAL HULK (2019)

 

Though "TTVTIH" (FF vol 6 #12) doesn't have the symbolic discourse of a mythcomic, it does ring in one of the best takes on that near-mythic question dear to the hearts of Marvelites: "who's stronger, the Hulk or the Thing?"

 

Now, in a technical sense the real question wasn't "who was stronger." If Lee and Kirby had been in any way ambivalent when the two characters first met in FF #12, "The Hulk vs. the Thing" in FF #25 made it abundantly clear that the larger Hulk had the strength advantage. The real question was "what can the Thing, the FF's heavy hitter, do to beat an unbeatable adversary?" Issue #25, which focuses mostly on the Thing and the Hulk, and its second part in #26, which brings in the Avengers as well, is practically a masterclass from Jack Kirby in the depiction of dynamic combat-scenes (even despite the ham-fisted inks of George Bell). During the same period, the Thing often had battles with other powerhouses, such as the Sub-Mariner and the Silver Surfer, and some of these battles were repeated. But without checking I'd guess about 10-15 later artists attempted to exploit the suspense of a Thing-Hulk battle once again. Some of these latter-day battles were adequate, and others mediocre, but none of them even came close to the high standard of Lee and Kirby-- until 2019.

The great cover by Esad Ribic presages what turns out to be an exceptional story built around yet another contest between Orange Guy and Green Guy, drawn by Sean Izaakse and scripted by Dan Slott. And, almost unbelievably, Slott makes a silk purse out of one of Marvel's hoariest "sow-ear" plots: the one where the villainous Puppet Master uses one of his radioactive puppets to force one hero to attack another hero.

 Now, unlike many writers who resorted to the "Puppet Master plot," Slott set up a special connotation to the villain's actions. The Puppet Master, currently in prison, has become aware that his stepdaughter Alicia intends to marry Ben Grimm, one of the evildoer's worst enemies. So the irate puppet-maker takes control of the Hulk and sics the behemoth on the Thing when the hero is beginning his honeymoon with his new bride. Thus, the villain's motives are much more personal than usual. In addition, in contrast to every other such story I've read, this time the Hulk is aware of being controlled, but he has such a long-standing grudge against the Thing that he somewhat cooperates with Puppet Master. Slott does this, I believe, because when he comes up with a unique way for Ben Grimm to win his battle, the writer wants readers to feel like the hero finally beat his green-skinned nemesis "fair and square"-- that is, with the Hulk largely in control of his faculties, even while being controlled.

And how does Ben win? Well, even though I don't have a large readership, I won't say, on the chance it might compel even one person to check out THE THING VS THE IMMORTAL HULK. And "not revealing the ending" is a courtesy I almost never extend to any other thing I've ever reviewed.

TTVTIH doesn't top THVTT. But it's now a close second.                   

SLOTT RACING

 

I haven't been a fan, in the "fanatic" sense of the word, of hardly any comics-creator since the 1990s, which is pretty close to when I stopped buying new American comics. (I have continued to collect a handful of new manga.) And even in the 80s and 90s, I often resorted to quarter boxes to fill issues of magazines I was only mildly interested in following. But by the 2000s, I had so many comics I even stopped getting many used comics either. By then, TPBs had become profitable enough that public libraries carried a lot of them, and so I could sample newer books at no expense. And that's how I found Dan Slott's FANTASTIC FOUR, which began with "Volume 6, Number One" in 2018 to issue #46 in 2022. (Two issues later, the title rebooted for a new sheriff in town.)

I had already read a smattering of Slott's comics in titles like SPIDER-MAN and SHE-HULK. I thought those stories okay but nothing that compelled me to read everything he wrote for those features. I wouldn't have thought he would be the first writer I ever liked on FANTASTIC FOUR almost as much as I like Stan and Jack.

The last FF stories I read with any frequency was the Tom deFalco run, ending in 1995, and of course I'd read everything up to that point. Some contributors to the FF legend were extremely mediocre, like Thomas, Conway, and Byrne. Others, like Wein and Englehart, were able to work in a few interesting ideas. But as far as I could tell, none of the writers got the "voices" of the characters that only Stan Lee conveyed, and only a few artists, like George Perez, communicated some of the verve of Kirby. That said, I might have missed a lot of great stuff in the 2000s, when I only picked up a very small handful of secondhand books. I did see the introduction of Valeria Richards, whom John Byrne created as a stillborn infant and whom Chris Claremont retconned into a living teen girl, who eventually got retconned again into the legitimate daughter of Reed and Sue. Other characters, who would become important in Slott's run, debuted in the runs of earlier raconteurs, such as an intelligent version of the android Dragon Man. And of course, DeFalco deserves credit for undoing the whole "Johnny Storm marries his best friend's girl" thing from Byrne's run.

             

 Yet, despite my having hopped over a decade of continuity, I feel like Slott went in new directions. The above-seen "wedding of Ben and Alicia" was a welcome development, but far more incisive was Slott's reading of Johnny Storm as a "player," which he arguably was in some of his first appearances. First, he begins dating Sky, an alien female with wings, who believes that the two of them were born as soulmates. But in a few issues, Johnny manages to inveigle the affections of Zora Victorious, a Latverian soldier who idolizes her armor-clad monarch. Naturally, when Doom persuades the young woman to become his queen, this sets up a situation that will make Doom despise Johnny almost as much as he does Reed Richards. I also like Slott's handling of Reed, Sue and Ben as well, but over the years they've received quite a bit of character-buildup from various authors, while the Torch usually gets short shrift.

 

Now, though almost every writer who worked on FF had emphasized that the group was "a family," the only literal addition to that familial group in the 20th century had been Franklin Richards. Claremont's Valeria, after substantial tweaking, was brought into the title as a regular at some point in the 2000s, but I can't speak to how good the book might have been thanks to the original addition. But I can say that Slott captures the "teen-voices" of Franklin and Valeria quite well, and arguably he does even better by bringing in two younger kids, who provide considerable contrast when they're adopted by the newly married Ben and Alicia. This was a clever way of bringing in the ongoing history of the Kree and Skrull Empires, for one child, Jo-venn, is Kree while the other, N'Kalla, is Skrull. The heroes stumble across a space casino where these two pre-teens have been trained to fight one another for the entertainment of onlookers, a faux extension of the famous "Kree-Skrull War." Slott skillfully shows that even though the two kids have been trained to fight for the entertainment of audiences, they actually have a grudging respect for one another and become annoyed when the Thing and the Torch seek to liberate the two kids from the only life they've ever known. Once the Baxter Building has four kids on the premises, it seems more like a "family affair" than anything since Stan and Jack-- and one could even argue that the two creators might have done better on that score.

Not everything is golden. There are a few too many trips to outer space and/or alien dimensions where the inhabitants aren't all that interesting, and that includes the planet from which Sky hails. However, I'll deal with two other stories-- one a mythcomic and one a near-myth-- that should show why Slott's tenure deserves more attention.        

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 being 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.