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NIC'S PICS AND NIX
by Nicolas Juzda
What do you do to follow the greatest cosmic end-of-the-world story in comics history?
You tell a personal tale on the nature of heroism, and make it one of the most touching the super-hero genre has ever produced.
Yes, the JUSTICE LEAGUE creative teams had a hard act to follow in
"Judgment Day", but with the Triumph storyline, they...
Kidding! KIDDING!
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were pretty much at the creative high points of both their careers by the time they co-created "The Galactus Trilogy"
(soon to get its own page, courtesy of this site's proprietor, as part of
its well-deserved spot on The Fifty Coolest Marvel Stories list). And hot
on its heels, they gave us "This Man... This Monster!", in FANTASTIC FOUR #51. It's been reprinted in MARVEL'S GREATEST COMICS #38; MARVEL TREASURY EDITION #11; and the book MARVEL: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics...
... and: that's not nearly enough.
Our story opens with the Thing standing in the rain, looking
forlourn. Just a nice, simple shot of the Thing, standing with his hands
at his sides in a pose straight out of THE OFFICIAL HANDBOOK OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE, with a bit of rain filling out the shot. Nothing fancy. Completely forgettable, really.
Well... unless you count the fact that it manages, against all odds, to sum Ben's pain and loneliness up in one haunting image. There's that, I suppose. If beautifully poignant splash pages are your thing, I mean.
Ben Grimm, the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Thing, idol o' millions, is
wandering the streets feeling sorry for himself. His normal problem (i.e.,
the fact that he is a freakish pile of orange bricks, forever set apart
from humanity) having been recently been brought home to him by the fact that his girlfriend Alicia Masters seemed to be enjoying the company of the Silver Surfer (i.e., a shiny metallic alien who's about as anatomically correct as a Ken doll, forever set apart from humanity).
Eventually, however, Ben's reverie is interrupted.
"I saw you out there in the rain! Why not come in where it's warm
and dry?" calls a voice from a doorway.
"What is this- - 'Be Nice To Gargoyles' Week or somethin'?" Ben
grumbles.
"I, too, know how it feels to be lonely- - and sad of heart," replies
the mysterious (and, apparently, extraordinarily desperate) gentleman.
As Ben walks into the fellow's home, his host thinks: "He still
suspects nothing! I must be careful... so very careful -- !" and thus
helpfully identifies himself to the reader as a sinister character; possibly even a Jehova's Witness, with a captive audience.
The bald bad guy gives Ben a cup of coffee, and the Thing asks:
"What's your angle,pal? You a talent scout fer a freak show or
somethin'?"
"No... but I, too, have been... rejected!" the nameless nasty replies, apparently still haunted by being turned down by all the girls he asked to the prom. High school traumas scar you for life.
The Things's host turns out to be a scientist; and one with a
pronounced envious streak, where Ben's teammate Reed Richards is concerned.
"Ah, I wish I had Richards' money... and his equipment! With his reputation... his fame... his assets... he can accomplish seeming miracles!"
Finally, the drugs in the coffee (or the endless and repetitive
anti-Reed whining) put Ben fast asleep.
With the Thing thus out of the way, the villain reveals his foul scheme to... uh... himself.
"I've spent a lifetime creating my duplication apparatus! And, it's taken long months of patient planning to lure the Thing into this room, by using my short-range subliminal influencer." See: he may have
spent his entire life making the duplication apparatus, but still had the
odd weekend free (he's not obsessive or anything, after all) to cobble together a short-range subliminal influencer. That hardly took any time at all. It was just a hobby, really.
"He was the perfect choice for my experiment, because of our slight skeletal resemblance," the mad scientist continues. Considering that Ben's skeleton is designed to support a hulking ton of bricks with four digits per limb, you have to wonder just how "slight" a resemblance can get before it ceases to exist at all.
"And now -- let it begin!"
Ooh, cool transformation effect. Of course, if having no one around to actually listen to his self-pitying rants didn't shut him up, there's no way a mere molecular transformation is going to stop this guy from gabbing while it's occurring. That's what marks the really high quality mad scientists, ultimately: they can spout exposition through pretty much anything.
"My apparatus is duplicating the Thing, cell for cell... molecule
for molecule... it's over! I'm an exact replica of him! Now, all his fame... and his power... are mine!" declares the guy who obviously hadn't been reading all that pathos-filled "poor, poor pitiful me" dialogue that Stan Lee had been so helpfully supplying to describe the actual, real-world desirability of being a big orange pile of bricks.
"As for the real Thing, he's got no cause to complain. He returned to his normal form... now I am the monster... and not he!" (Okay, so he IS aware of the slight flaw in his plan for moving up in the world.)
As the faux Thing sets about trying to teach himself to speak like
Ben, we skip forward a few days to the Baxter Building, where domestic
disputes demand our attention. It seems that Reed has been skipping
dinner for several days in a row, and wife Susan Richards is much distraught.
That was Stan Lee's breakthrough idea, remember. Real people, with real world problems. Like your wife getting irritated because -- instead of scarfing down a hot, nutritious and lovingly prepared meal -- you've been trying to devise a weapon to defeat cosmic menaces. Which, incidentally, is what Reed is doing.
(Now, that's dedication for you! He just defeats an all-powerful foe, and -- instead of sitting back with a cold ddrink and a hot babe -- he sets to work thinking of how to fight the next thirty-foot-tall alien that threatens to use the Earth as a toothpick. There's a reason they call this guy "Mr. Fantastic.")
"Do you think... [Galactus]'ll return?" the aforementioned hot
babe, Sue Richards, asks her hubby.
"There's always a chance! And, in this new space age, we must have adequate defenses against any kind of attack!" Reed declares through gritted teeth, in a fairly obvious auctorial reference to the International Communist Menace of public water fluoridation.
"I- I think you know more than you're telling me!" Sue declares, to the man who knows more about quantum physics alone than he could tell
her if he lectured for a month. And gave assigned readings. "You've had
work crews all week building new machines... especially the one in the
locked, lead-lined room!"
"How did you find out?" Reed demands, clearly bewildered by his
wife's ability to spot work crews dragging and hauling stuff about in her living room for days on end.
Before this conversation can get much further, however: in walks the Thing...
... followed shortly by Ben Grimm.
"Watch yourself, stretch! That guy's a fake! He ain't the Thing... I am!" the bona fide Benjamin warns.
"Now, hold on,Mister!" declares Mr. Fantastic. "The Thing isn't an
easy man to imitate!"
(After all, it's not as if the Fantastic Four have ever dealt with an entire alien race of shape shifters, who had already impersonated them, repeatedly; which -- just for the sake of argument, mind -- I'll call the "Skrulls".)
"He's not imitating me... he is me! I mean-- !" a clearly flustered Ben Grimm replies.
"Step aside, egg-head!" the faux Thing declares, picking up a hefty titanium steel bar.
"No, Ben! Have you gone mad? You can't attack him with that
titanium steel bar!" Reed warns from off-panel, while gesturing
meaningfully towards the far less easily traceable tire iron.
"You gotta be kiddin'! If I wanted to clobber 'im, I wouldn't need any bar!" the imposter declares, effortlessly crushing it. "Now, if I ain't really the Thing, then who's doin'- - this?!?"
(It couldn't be the Super Skrull, could it? The shape-shifting alien Skrull whose whole gimmick is his ability to mimic the powers of the FF? Judging from the reactions of Reed and Sue, I guess not. Forget I said anything, then. )
Facing the incredulity of his teammates, the real Ben Grimm marches off in a huff; leaving Reed and Sue to wonder who he could have been.
"If his story weren't so impossible," Sue states, clearly not even
considering that Doctor Doom could orchestrate something like this before breakfast, "he did seem to be Ben Grimm."
But there's little time to ponder such questions. Turning towards the
imposter, Reed announces that "I've got to test a machine I've just
completed, Ben- - and, if anything goes wrong, only you can save me!"
"But if it's that dangerous... why can't I help you -- ?" Sue asks. (Isn't that cute? She's forgotten that she's just a girl.)
"I know you've the heart, darling," Reed somewhat patronizingly
informs his wife, without sparing her a glance. "But you haven't the
strength! Only Ben can do it!"
"Do what, Reed? Tell me -- !" Sue demands, clearly not able to
comprehend that she's supposed to not bother her silly little head with
such important matters.
"There are those who have mastered the space-time principle... the
ability to speed faster than light, to any part of the universe," Reed
explains. "Galactus... the Watcher... the Silver Surfer... they can all
do it!"
"But... how does that affect us?" Sue asks, oddly unable to remember that two of the aforementioned beings, just last issue,were in the
process of conspiring to destroy the entire planet. Cosmic ray exposure does play merry hob with the short term memory, I hear.
"There can be no defense against a faster-than-light attack! And so, for the safety of the Earth -- the sake of the human race -- Man, too, must break that same barrier!" Reed declares, being (apparently) very keen, indeed, on the notion of humankind being able to launch attacks against which there can be no defense. He's already got his eye on a little sector of the Kree galaxy to call his own, is my bet.
You'll note, by the way, that even Reed doesn't imply that man being able to move faster-than-light would give us a workable defense against otherbeings that could (there's NO defense against it, after all). And, quite frankly, I'm not even sure it would give a defense against some beings that couldn't.
Because, really: is it the blinding speed at which Galactus moves which makes him a credible threat? Personally, I think even a really slow moving all-powerful cosmic devourer of worlds would be able to take the Earth, two falls out of any given three.
And, I don't know about you, but -- if Galactus is bearing down on my
planet; no matter what the speed -- the only real tactical advantage of
faster than light travel that occurs to me is getting the holy heck out of
there all the sooner. Which, come to think, seems a mighty good plan
after all.
"This huge, radical cube," Reed explains, as a splash page shows a
giant machine that indeed requires a pretty darn radical definition of the
word "cube" to encompass it, "is designed to create a dimensional entrance into sub-space, which is the area I must explore!"
Then, Reed carefully explains that "Ben's" assigned part is to hold a reel of wire, and pull Reed back when he tugs on it. Sue's part, Reed adds, is to wait there and provide something for him to come back for. Oh well; so long as she makes a contribution of some sort, I guess this story isn't sexist.
Meanwhile, at The Kozy Kampus Koffee Shop (and personally, I would
guess that sharing an acronym with a well-known racist organization would be a bad business practice, and make for some really... interesting public response to your signs; but, what do I know... ?), Metro College football star Whitey Mullins (First the "Kozy Kampus Koffe", and now "Whitey"? Okay, this is getting to be downright disturbing) is getting into a fight with Johnny Storm, the Human Torch.
Since this segment is essentially irrelevant, I'll just supply the Reader's Digest version: macho posturing from Johnny and Whitey; Johnny's muscular friend Wyatt Wingfoot tries to break it up; the college's football coach actually does break it up; the coach sizes Wyatt up, and offers him a place on the team; and Wyatt refuses, for unspecified reasons.
After Wyatt and Johnny leave, the Coach's lunchmate tries to calm
him down; assuring him that there will be other players.
"No, not like him! Don't you see, Belle? His father and I... we
were teammates! We were great together!" (*cough*cough*) "And now... fate has sent Wyatt to me! It's my big chance... to coach the greatest team of all, before I retire! I've got to make him play!" the coach delivers in breathless soliloquy, desperately hoping that using enough of the patented Stan Lee Portentous Dialogue the fans so adore will get him his own, long-sought ongoing solo series.
... and -- with that wholly regrettable incidentt (thankfully) behind us -- we return to the real focus of the story: Sue Richards acting like a wussy girl.
"Reed... my darling... don't do it! I- I have a premonition... of disaster! Or, at least... let me come with you -- !"
"It's impossible, Sue!" Reed replies. "Sub-space must be explored... and conquered," he adds, practically foaming at the mouth at the prospect of annexing yet another dimension against its will. "For the good of mankind," of course.
(First he wants to get his hands on the attack against which there
can be no defense, and now,he's trying to conquer sub-space? And they say Doc Doom's the power-mad lunatic with expansionist tendencies.)
"Remember, Ben, don't let go of that line! My life is in your hands!" Reed repeats, making sure that even the very youngest of readers has picked up on this crucial plot point. Then, he pushes the lever that activates the mechanism, and awaaaaay he goes; shredding the space time barrier with nary a thought as to whether or not it might just be a good idea to leave the blamed thing reasonably intact.
All kidding aside for a second, this is one of the things I love about the Lee/Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR: that tendency to leap headlong into the unknown, simply because it was there.
As Reed tumbles through various special effects, describing what he's seeing and doing to himself aloud (it's a mad scientist thing, I guess), Stan and Jack both get their respective shots in. And then --
It's the third (collect them all!) of this issue's magnificent Kirby splash pages; this one showcasing one of the King's occasional forays into the world of photo collages, as an integrated part of comic book storytelling.
"I've done it!! I'm drifting into a world of limitless dimensions!! It's the crossroads of infinity... the junction to everywhere!"
"But I still can't control my movements! I'm being buffeted helplessly through the void," Reed complains; having (apparently) neglected to spend more than three minutes, tops, on the actual working mechanics of moving around sub-space; which he (again, apparently) didn't feel to be all that big a prerequisite to actually conquering it.
"Ahead of me!! It's the one thing I feared! The one thing there can be no defense against!" Reed declares, clearly forgetting (I told you, those cosmic rays just plain old gobble up that short term memory) that he had also pronounced faster-than-light attacks as submitting to no possible defense, just a few pages earlier.
"The elements of sub-space are being irresistibly drawn back towards Earth... but, here in sub-space, all matter is negative... while Earth is positive!! Therefore, whatever strikes the atmosphere of Earth must instantly explode!"
So, the positive matter Earth is also in sub-space, where it draws towards it all the surrounding negative matter; the latter of which is destroyed without the Earth being hurt in the slightest. And Reed is now negativematter. Okay. Sure. Whatever.
"My only chance for escape is the line -- !" Reed declares, pulling for all he's worth. "Ben!! Where are you?? Ben!! BEN!!"
Meanwhile, back in the real world: our still unidentified villain
feels Reed's frantic tuggings, and realizes that he holds in his hands
(literally) the chance to destroy his foe... or redeem himself.
And it's the latter choice, ultimately; a historic redemption which Stan Lee delivers in just six thought balloons.
Today, you'd be hard pressed to find such introspection and character growth in three issues, let alone three panels. Say what you will about "the Man", but: he was a damn fine writer,when the storytelling chips were down.
But just as the imposter decides that he will, indeed, pull Mr.
Fantastic to safety: the line snaps. (It's those cheap foreign safety lines Reed was always buying. It's like I've always said: "spend a penny, save a dollar; save a penny, lose your life in a cosmic accident.")
"I've got to go to him!! He can't be left alone in there!! He needs me!! HE NEEDS ME!!" Sue shrieks hysterically, as she heroically (albeit suicidally) attempts to dart after her boneheaded hubby.
"Stay back, do y'hear?? Stay back!! There's nothin' you can do!" the faux Thing informs her; once more giving voice to the dramatic motif of the issue: "Sue is just useless eye candy."
So: it is the nameless former bad guy who leaps and manages to grab
the rapidly receding wire, with a triumphant cry of "I got it!"
... and the man with the face of the Thing is drawn through sub-space
to the small piece of debris on which a forlorn Reed is standing; the small chunk of space rock that is slowly (but steadily) falling towards the looming Earth, below.
"Ben!! You fool!! You shouldn't have come after me!! Now we're
both doomed!" Reed scolds. "Ben... old friend... I- I didn't want this
to happen to you!! In a few seconds... we'll reach the Earth's atmosphere,
below us, and it'll mean instant death!! If only you hadn't come -- !"
(Reed Richards was a man of many talents... but: looking on the bright side was never one of them.)
"Brace yourself, Ben! We did the best we could... one can do no
more! You... you were the greatest partner a man ever had -- !" Reed
continues to ladle it on thicker'n marmalade as he shakes his companion's hand.
... and yet: Reed's melodramatic farewell touches something deep
inside his would-be rescuer; the latter whom promptly picks up a (doubtless) startled Mr. Fantastic, and shotputs him through the void -- back the way they came -- with a pinpoint accuracy that would have surely earned him a place as a top-of-the-line major league pitcher or CIA assassin, if only the mad scientist bug hadn't cruelly bitten him.
"So long, Richards! I hope you make it!" shouts the usurper, after
the rapidly receding and hysterically gibbering form of Reed Richards.
Then, the Never-Named (Not-So-) Nasty sits down and waits to die.
"As for me, I'm not gonna feel sorry for myself," he declares. "Not many
men get a second chance... to make up for the rotten things they've done in their lifetime. I guess I'm luckier than most -- ! I got that chance! For I finally learned... what it means to have... a friend!"
And that's the last we see of him, as he shrinks from our sight towards his doom waiting below; a pathetic, yet noble, figure.
No final battle; no easy good-versus-evil, with the sides clearly marked by the colour of their hats. The "villain" dies a hero's death, and the man he saves never even found out about the impersonation that took place. Nothing turns out the way it's supposed to.
God, but I love the Lee/Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR.
Back in the real world once again, Reed Richards has indeed arrived intact; but is disheartened by the (apparent) death of his partner and friend. "It's my fault, Sue! The line I told him to hold... it... it must have pulled him into sub space -- !"
"No, darling... no! He didn't do as you said! He waited too long... until the line snapped! I saw him!" Sue tattles. The little snitch.
"Don't try to spare my feelings, dear! You know how I felt about Ben! He was more than just a friend! I'd have given my life for him... a thousand times!" Reed replies, to a somewhat disconcerted Sue.
Rallying gamely in the face of this unexpected passion, Mrs. Richards once again tries to refocus Reed on Ben's numerous and readily apparent failings. "If only we knew why he didn't pull the line in time -- !"
"What does it matter now... with him gone -- ?" Reed moans. But the genuine Benjamin J. Grimm -- now orange and rocky, once more -- makes his presence knows at this point, before Reed can get any further along in his weird "a world without Ben isn't a world worth living in" routine.
"It is the real Ben! I can sense it, Reed!" announces Sue, carefully ignoring the fact that, to date, her ability to "sense the real Ben" is batting an anemic .500, at best.
As Sue cuddles up to the real Thing, declaring in a passionate voice "Oh, Ben... Ben dearest" (oh, come on; we all knew that Sue had to be doing something during those long nights her hubby spent in the lab),
the object of her affection demands to know what has become of his replicant replacement.
"It's too late for that now, old friend! We'll never know what
monstrous things he had done in the past... or what monstrous plans he had made! But, one thing is certain... he paid the full price... and he paidit... like a man!"
And so our story draws to a close.
(For those of you who are wondering, incidentally, what you do to follow a personal tale on the nature of heroism that counts as one of the most touching ever produced within the super-hero genre: you introduce the first ever black super-hero, the Black Panther, in FANTASTIC FOUR #52.)
No, sir. It just doesn't get any better than the Lee/Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR.
Nicolas can be reached at nicolas.juzda@utoronto.ca, where he is
presently scrutinizing the complexities of the Green Lantern/Star Sapphire
relationship, re: a future article. You heard it
here first. 
NIC'S PIX AND NIX: Page One
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