Thursday, November 16, 2023

Comics Review: Fantastic Four-Penguin Classics Marvel Collection


I don’t want to do this.  I don’t want to write this.  Shoot, I didn’t even really want to finish reading this book.  This may finally be the end of my reviews of superhero comic books.  (Though I did buy an Archie comic after this.)  Was this presentation of all-time classic Fantastic Four stories really that bad?  No, but it was disappointing and a culmination of an almost unending series of disappointments in reviewing comics.  Just click on the “Comics Review” tag and read any of them.  I think there’s only a handful of positive ones.

 

I was reasonably upbeat about Penguin’s Captain America volume.  I even finished it eagerly awaiting the release of a Fantastic Four one.  In truth, the Captain America book had issues (pardon the pun).  I really liked some of the material, but it was all kind of hokey even the really good stuff.  I feel about the same about this FF book, except it doesn’t have any really good stuff in it and the hokey stuff is even worse.   

 

The Fantastic Four was a very innovative superhero comic for its time.  The four characters were not exemplary heroes, unlike the DC superheroes.  They’ve all got personal hang ups and issues with one another.  In the case of Ben Grimm becoming the Thing, he directly blames Reed Richards for his condition (correctly).  Reed is also a lousy boyfriend/husband for Sue Storm, who acts way too needy at times herself.  (And her fidelity to Reed is in doubt until their marriage.)  Johnny Storm is a literal and figurative hothead and causes a lot of needless strife with Ben.  In spite of their personalities, they come together as heroes against incredible threats to the world.

 

Regrettably, the stories in here are pretty goofball and ridiculous.  “What do you expect from a superhero comic?”  Obviously, I expecting something a little less silly.  I can suspend a lot of disbelief, but I need some basic logic in any story.  If a story is going to border on pure whimsy, I’d actually prefer not having a pseudoscience veneer and characters showing serious emotions. 

 

All of this is easy to critique on in retrospect.  Like I said, the character work was a revelation at the time it was created.  The “soap opera” elements of the Fantastic Four would become standard in other comics like the X-Men in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.  One wonders what if Stan Lee and Jack Kirby weren’t so overworked at the time when they created these seminal tales.  If only the stories weren’t so hyperbolic and absurd.  You could even keep the basic plots just give them some internal logic and stories that don’t rely on outrageous coincidence to progress.

 

I’m being really harsh on this classic material.  I was expecting more.  I do not feel cheated, though.  These Penguin books are very well formatted.  For $28, you’re getting 350 pages.  There’s a bunch of fluff and filler and some questionable commentary, but it’s still plenty of comic book material.  You might be better off with a Marvel reprint trade paperback of some sort, but it probably won’t be as nice.  Actually, there’s much better FF stories later on.  Buy a trade of issues from the late 70’s or later for better entertainment.     

 

Let’s get to some specifics about the book.  This first half features the earliest issues with the FF.  They face off against the Mole Man in their first issue.  It’s kind of like the standard monster comic of the time, but with some interesting protagonists.  Next, there’s the Skrulls.  I hate the Skrulls and always have.  Shapeshifting races in general irritate me.  Then they face Miracle Man, who is an outright loser.  The first two issues were at least iconic, but this one could have been dropped for another issue surely.  

 


The FF then meet the Submariner.  Namor is an intriguing character introduced in the most contrived way possible.  You do get the above dramatic scene with the Thing attempting to take out a giant monster with an A-bomb strapped to his back.  Next up is the introduction of the iconic Dr. Doom.  The story features the guys going back in time to get Blackbeard’s treasure and the Thing might have actually be Blackbeard.  Oooookay.  That’s not the most auspicious beginning for the great villain.  The collection does not include the Submariner/Dr. Doom team up issue.  I know that story.  It’s weird.



Breaking . . . no . . . shattering . . . no . . . vaporizing the fourth wall, Stan and Jack appear in the return of Dr. Doom as he forces them to lead Reed into a trap involving the old mind switcheroo.  Hijinks ensue.  In another meta-contextual story, the FF read their fan mail.  The boys find themselves defending Sue from some readers calling her basically useless.  She’s genuinely hurt.  Reed offers a forceful, but ineffectual defense of the Invisible Girl being on the team.  After she later developed telekinetic powers, Sue was much more useful.  (I don’t know when that happened.)




Well, I eventually got to what I came for and what would hopefully save the volume for me: Galactus’ first appearance.  There he is in all of his glory with that big “G” on his chest to let everyone know who he is.  He was also sporting his “summer” ensemble for these issues.  Perhaps he was planning on hitting the beach on some other planet after absorbing the earth’s biosphere.      

 


Actually, this trilogy of issues is pretty good.  Galactus, the Watcher, and the Silver Surfer are in full Shakespearian voice.  Galactus might look a little dippy, but he is fully formed in character.  There’s some contrivance, but it plays out as a cosmic drama.  It is a bit curious that basically only the Watcher, the Surfer, and the FF stand against Galactus and nobody else or any other superheroes are involved in this apocalyptic story.  The characters are what really make this fairly straight forward premise work, otherwise it works out a bit like a play on a stage rather than an epic.

 

Stan and Jack must have been a bit dissatisfied with the story, as well.  They redid it with only the Silver Surfer as the opposition in a 70’s graphic novel.  I read that a long time ago and still have the book.  It has a much stronger narrative.  By no means are the FF and the Watcher deadweight in the original, but it’s more dramatic with just the Surfer.  (Stan and Moebius teamed up to do something of a sequel to the graphic novel in the 80’s.  It’s also pretty cool.)  My first exposure to the original story was a podcast radio play revision/deconstruction of it focusing on a throwaway line in the story where J. Jonah Jameson thought the whole thing was a hoax.  It’s awful.  Avoid it.          

       


This story leads directly into Johnny Storm enrolling in college and the Thing deserting the team in This Man . . . This Monster.  It’s another body-switch story, but this time featuring the Thing.  The main story is okay, if heavy-handed. 

 

The Johnny Storm college subplot, continued from the end of the Galactus saga, I found a bit more interesting.  Johnny is a public figure as an unmasked superhero, so he has a celebrity life.  That has plusses and minuses, but is definitely interesting.  The character was popular enough to have his own side title for a while.  For that matter, the Thing used to be a very popular character.  He once had a team up and then a solo title.  Heck, Dr. Doom used to be the main Marvel villain.  What happened?  (The X-Men became the main characters at Marvel in the 80’s and up until the MCU films.)

 



Finally, the FF stories close with an annual and a long form story.  It’s a lot closer to a modern comic than the rest of the book.  While the story of going into the Negative Zone and fighting Annihilus to get a cure for Sue, who is giving birth, is exciting and visually impressive, it does rely on some questionable story logic. 

 


In an appendix, the Submariner’s origin story from the 30’s is reprinted.  Boy, is he a homicidal prick in this.  Okay, here’s where I got a beef with Penguin.  The editor’s notes were genuinely excited that Namor’s fight was against “White men.”  The term is used a couple of times in the story, so it wasn’t an accident.  The editor felt this was an early stab against colonialism more than social justice.  I’m not sure why the character’s creator, Bill Everett, put this in.  Namor is shown with alternating blue and green skin underwater, but is White when he’s on the surface, along with his cousin, Dorma.  It’s a mystery.

 

Overall, the book has lots of imagination and was ground-breaking when it was made, but it’s too rough in execution for me to recommend.  The second half of the volume does have some great, and at times, trippy artwork by Jack Kirby.  You’re better off getting a trade of the Fantastic Four from the 70’s or 80’s, where the writers took the material a little more seriously.  (I know it’s a superhero comic, but if you don’t treat it seriously, it’s a costumed farce.)         

 

I think I should have bought the Spider-Man volume to begin with.  I didn’t because I figured I’d already read the material, which I don’t think I actually have.  Whatever.  I’m done.  I was seriously thinking about getting the Avengers volume that was released with this wave, along with the X-Men.  Simply, these nascent 60’s versions of the Marvel superheroes are maybe worth reading, but not worth owning. 

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