★★★★☆ Where it all began again

Fantastic Four

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby (Artist), Ben Saunders (Editor), Jerry Craft (Foreword)

When I was a kid (single-digit age, I think), one of the comics I happened across (at random, because I never had the cash to actually buy the things) was an issue of The Fantastic Four. It interested me strangely for one simple reason: Ben Grimm, AKA the Thing. Before the accident that gave the Four their powers, Ben had been a football star and a decorated fighter pilot. The accident made Ben into a Thing -- a bulgy orange monster who, though strong and tough, looks like nothing human. Ben doesn't see it as a win. He would like nothing better than to become human again, have a face that a girl might love and that doesn't provoke comment on the street.

I did not at the time know the word pathos, but that's what I recognized in Ben.

The publisher we now know as Marvel Comics got its start in the heady (for comics publishers) years of the Second World War. After the war, interest in superhero comics gradually declined until, when the 1960s dawned, Marvel, like every other comic publisher but DC (home of the original Superman), was circling the drain. At this juncture Stan Lee and Jack Kirby pitched a new superhero team to their bosses.

Because Marvel was desperate, Lee and Kirby's proposal was a radical departure from the conventions of the genre. The FF were a family, and like real families, they had conflicts. Although they were all fundamentally good people, they didn't always agree on The Right Thing To Do, and they could at times be short-sighted or even selfish. Even the villains were complex and human. And, as even single-digit me recognized, there was Ben Grimm.

Now, in 2024, none of this sounds terribly radical. It *isn't* radical now. The FF formula of writing comics about real people with real people problems and pathos was so successful that it took over superhero comics. That is why I say that FF is where it all began. Of course, Marvel existed before FF, but the publisher and body of work we now know as Marvel got its real start in 1961 with FF.

There was eventually some controversy about who created the FF. It now seems to be fairly generally agreed that it was mostly the artist Kirby. Because of the interactive "Marvel Mathod" by which Marvel produced their comics, the artist at Marvel had as much to do with the plot and the story as the writer.

Lee and Kirby worked as a team throughout the 1960s and 1970s, originating new series such as Captain America, The Avengers and the X-Men, among others. After a a few (or a bunch) of issues, these were handed off to other creators. Because I read the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection in the order in which Goodreads lists them, I read these before FF. And I acquired a skeptical view of Kirby's abilities -- in those works he is just not very creative. But with FF I think I now know why "King Jack" Kirby is so revered. It is clear that FF was Kirby's baby and his real love. The artwork in this collection (which is all from the Lee and Kirby epoque of FF) is bold and creative.

Having now finished the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection I judge FF and The Amazing Spider-Man as the best. FF is perhaps a little better in that it is a more finished product than the earliest Spider-Man issues.

Fantastic Four on Amazon

Goodreads review

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