MYTHCOMICS: THE RECKONING WAR (FF: RECKONING WAR ALPHA, FF VOL. 6, #40-46)

 

Everyone who ever worked on the FANTASTIC FOUR, from the best to the worst, has usually prated about how the starring characters are a "family," as opposed super-groups that functioned as loose affiliations of super-policemen. But saying this doesn't mean much if one doesn't have insight into the sort of tensions that are unique to familial groups-- and that includes groups that officially or unofficially adopt unrelated members into the matrix. In comic books, there had been two notable examples of familial adventures before the FF, and both of them-- DC's TIME MASTER and SEA DEVILS-- come closer than the oft-mentioned CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN to the makeup of the FF: smart leader, strong sidekick, leader's girlfriend, girlfriend's kid brother. Stan Lee or Jack Kirby may have seen one or both DC-features and subconsciously imitated the template of the character-types. But they added something more than one could find in any of the aforementioned DC titles, and that was a sense of the gender-dynamics around which primeval families coalesced: the female's need to "nest" and the male's need to "hunt."

Juvenile sci-fi comics were all about the prospect of "hunting" down the next adventure, so there wasn't a lot of attention to the problems that came up with members of the quasi-families all shared the same "nest." But that was what the FF was about from issue one, with Reed and Sue playing "mommy and daddy" to a fractious couple of "brothers." The female member of THE SEA DEVILS was a tomboy who wanted adventure as much as her male compatriots; before the FF, there was no sense that the "Girl Sea Devil" might be in any way opposed to the male hunting-priorities. Sue Storm, though, not only fretted when the rambunctious siblings quarreled, but dropped some hints that she might be willing to drop the whole superhero thing for a royal gig in Atlantis.

I don't want to suggest that Stan and Jack were more than loosely aware of the molds they were breaking: clearly, they were flying by the seats of their respective pantalones. But over time, all the latter-day raconteurs on the FANTASTIC FOUR gave such matters a lot of thought-- and that brings me to Dan Slott. In tandem with assorted collaborators, Slott has done to logically extend What Stan and Jack Wrought, at least in terms of gender-dynamics.

There's a lot of backstory stuff Slott works into RECKONING WAR that one has to find out from other features. An advance ad for the arc claimed that WAR was "fifteen years in the making." Well, what that meant was that Dan Slott introduced the idea of the war back in a 2005 issue of his SHE-HULK run and then sat on the idea for all those years, possibly with the hope of being able to develop it in a plum series like FANTASTIC FOUR. I don't say this in disparagement: I like the fact that everything he did in his FF run, from volume 6 #1 to volume 6 #46, was meant to culminate in the Reckoning. (There's also some romance-stuff between She-Hulk and Jack of Hearts to which I was not privy, but I found it easy enough to roll with.) But Slott also builds his new epic on a foundation laid by Stan Lee and Larry Leiber, in the origin of The Watcher from TALES OF SUSPENSE #53.

                         

Of course this simple cautionary tale about the perils of arming rude savages had to get a more "cosmic" treatment by Slott, which is more or less what fans expect these days from FANTASTIC FOUR and similar Marvel titles. In the new narrative, the benighted Prosilicans don't just get atomic power, but some Watcher super-technology that dwarfs anything that even the most advanced Marvel-aliens can come up with. 

The Prosilicans launch a war of dominion, and when their opponents retaliate, nine-tenths of the then-known universe is destroyed. Only the power of the Watchers can preserve what's left, sealing the corrupted parts of the universe into a veritable "outer darkness" called The Barrens. So in this iteration, the Watchers swear their oath of non-interference not because they harmed one world with their act of Promethean generosity, but because the entire universe was almost expunged. But millions of years later, the Watchers' original hubris will come back to bite the universe in the ass again.

       

One Prosilican, name of Lord Wrath, apparently survives all those millennia in the Barrens and finally decides to annihilate the protected one-tenth of the cosmos the Watchers saved. He somehow rustles up three super-powered henchmen with the euphonious names of Ruin, Rapture, and Reject, collectively called "The Reckoning." They start disseminating Watcher-tech throughout the galaxies to foment in what might be called (after David Brin) "Negative Uplift." Everywhere various alien empires go to war, and of course one group of aliens just has to hassle Earth, home of the Fantastic Four and that premiere alien-fighter, Reed Richards. Reed gathers intelligence first from She-Hulk, who informs him of her experiences with various time-guardians and the Reckoning prophecy, and then from Nick Fury, who became an aide to Uatu the Watcher in a very involved subplot. Uatu is out of the picture for a bit, but Fury brings a gift to the party; a device with which super-genius Reed can perform a "Positive Uplift" on himself. Or maybe it's not so positive, according to worried Mrs. Richards (and anyone who ever saw FORBIDDEN PLANET).

On the plus side, with this intelligence-boost, Reed instantly figures out that all the galactic brush-wars are "smokescreens" for Lord Wrath's real purpose: to get hold of a handy reality-nexus with which to end reality. On the minus side, Super-Big Brain becomes so clinical that he disregards Johnny Storm's plea to cure his affliction (yet another earlier subplot) -- and that's just for starters. Both the Torch and the Invisible Woman pursue other avenues against Wrath, and so do independent actors like Doc Doom and The Silver Surfer. But following a foray against Wrath's henchmen, Reed does something to his old friend Ben that makes turning him into a rock-monster look like small potatoes.

  

Even Reed using a coma-gun to shut down his son's mind (way back in FF volume one, #141) doesn't beat Slott's depiction of Reed as suffering his own type of hubris. Reed hoaxes his best friend Ben Grimm into thinking that his wife and his kids have been destroyed, just to snap the big guy out of a tendency to get freaked out by Rapture for Reasons. The sequence is not strictly necessary for the plot, and I choose to believe that Slott intimates that this is the natural progression of a desire for knowledge without concomitant emotional investment in the world of family. That world alone can ground human beings, especially super-geniuses always on the hunt for abstract knowledge.   

 In other news, the Silver Surfer brings Galactus back from the dead (I didn't even know he was sick), and the Watcher tries to persuade his fellows to go to war against the Reckoning. The other Watchers respond by putting Uatu in a chair and making him read old WHAT IF comics. Not really, they're not that inhuman. Uatu is just forced to watch so many scenarios of alternate realities that they jumble his ability to know right from wrong. Fury and the Invisible Woman liberate Uatu, and for good measure, they all learn that the narrative about how the Barrens were created is not accurate, and that there was a Watcher-thumb on the scales.

The Richards and the Grimm kids don't get a whole lot to do in most issues, but they do manage to neutralize some of the henchmen. When Reed and Sue are finally reunited, Sue rightfully busts his chops for his manipulations and secret-keeping, and in contrast to most of the Lee-Kirby oeuvre, the excuse of saving the universe doesn't quite suffice.

  

And now it's time for the big showdown: Thing vs. warrior-bitch Rapture, while everyone else atacks Wrath. And it's a big confession time for Reed too, as he admits that all the knowledge he's gained from the Watcher-uplift means nothing next to all the little things of their relationship. Then Reed faces off against Wrath with the Ultimate Nullifier, which should kill both of them.

 But after all this heavy stuff, it's time for a little eucatastrophe. Reed learns one thing he didn't know: using the Watcher-made Nullifier kills the Watcher who uses it, and that has the effect of removing the Watcher-boost from Reed's brain. The Surfer shows up with the revivified Galactus and they save the universe from destruction. And Uatu goes from being one of a race of god-like aliens to being the Only God in Town, able to repair all the problems and to change the Barrens into the Borderlands, "a canvas of infinite possibilities." (Uatu does miss the little detail of curing the Torch's flame-problems, but Slott had to leave something for #46, the wrap-up issue.) 

  The last Slott issue doesn't technically involve the thwarting of the Reckoning's vengeance, but it is a last summing-up of the family-dynamic. In this finale, Mister Fantastic reaches out to a sister he never knew, as well as introducing her to two other half-siblings, all the creations of their irresponsible paternal unit. Yes, there's a minor kerfuffle with Psycho-Man. But this time the "nesting" takes precedence over the "hunting," and I have to tip my hat to Dan Slott for "reckoning" the best way to resolve the tensions between action-adventure and family drama.