So, I’ve been reading some of the TPBs that I own (and I’ve actually stopped now because it was taking a lot of time and other works were calling me) and that gave me a rare opportunity: the ability to read across a few different eras of a team in a short amount of time. As you could probably tell from the title, that team is the Fantastic Four.
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I got into reading comics from a collection that my mother had bought from one of her friends, as her son was giving them up. One of the series that I got — and, as I’ve kept those comics, still have — was the Fantastic Four, which I quite liked. But that was limited to a specific era, with a few other works — mostly the Fantastic Four vs the X-Men limited series — coming in a bit later, as when I was buying my own I focused my limited money on Transformers and X-Men. And one of the eras that I read was, indeed, one from that era.
Basically, the three TPBs I have covered from issue 19 – 32 (1963 – 1964), 151 – 163 (1974ish) and 579-588 (1998) plus a bit from 2011. The era that I was reading was closer to the 151 time frame, and I suspect that mine were in the 200 – 300 range (although I haven’t checked). That also makes sense, because it’s only in the 1974 time frame that I feel that the Fantastic Four had those elements that made me really enjoy the comics and like the team.
In the 1963 works, the Fantastic Four are just coming together. They have long been noted as being the “First Family” of Marvel, but these comics pretty much would make them a completely dysfunctional family. Reed is attempting to lead the team, but comes across as a jerk most of the time. There’s even a mini-revolt but since the others couldn’t agree on a replacement leader (they all voted for themselves) Reed had to take over again and he’s not exactly modest about it. Sue is frivolous and plays a lot on female stereotypes of the time, which make her uninteresting. Johnny and the Thing are complete hotheads, fighting with each other and everyone else, and doing so in a way that makes it seem like they absolutely hate each other, or at least have no respect for each other. The team spends more time sniping at each other than actually fighting their enemies, which made for rather uninteresting reading.
By the 1974 era, they’ve developed into the team that I knew and loved. Reed, while still often detached, is indeed a proper leader, and we can see that he leads because of his leadership skills and not just because he, I don’t know, was cast in the patriarch role? It’s not really clear why Reed leads in the first issues other than that he’s the smartest and was the leader in the rocket experiment. Here, he is the smartest and is spending lots of time figuring out how things should work. While in the first issues Sue was just getting her force fields she’s had the time to experiment with them and to realize just how powerful they are, but for the most part their power is still tied to how creative she is, and the others are also shown to be able to be powerful if they use their powers creatively as well. And even though she’s sidelined for a bit of these issues — and replaced with Medusa — she shows that she fits into the “Team Mother” role by being stern at times, but also by caring for them, which was rarely shown in the 1963 issues I read. Ben and Johnny also clearly care about each other and are friends, and their clashes come from either extreme stress or, more usually, one of them — usually Johnny — being bored and deciding to try to rile the other up to relieve the boredom. It’s at this point that the “First Family” really is a family.
Fast forward to 1998, and one of the things that often annoys me about comics. Reed is altered to being far more obsessive and even incompetent at most things — including family issues — than he was in the beginning. Not only does Sue have her uber-powerful force fields, she’s even negotiating complex diplomatic functions and forcing major factions to follow her dictates. They also have made Franklin a mostly “normal” boy — despite earlier being someone with immense power that he needs to control — and instead have made Veleria, their daughter, a super-genius who can even negotiate with Dr. Doom and be in the right. And she’s all of 10. It’s the rather common mistake of trying to make female characters that aren’t simply stereotypes or weak but instead making them so unbelievably powerful and competent that they become boring, while at the same time reducing the male characters so that they don’t overshadow them. But in the 1974 books, and the later books that I’ve read, they didn’t need to undercut Reed to raise up Sue or any other character. He had his strengths and flaws, and he worked when he could play to his strengths and relied on the others when he couldn’t. In the aforementioned Fantastic Four vs X-Men, Sue has a strong presence and even gets to put one over on Doom while still leaving Reed a strong character arc where he has to overcome his own doubts. A team relies on each other to do what the others can’t do, but in the 1998 version they aren’t a team anymore, and are barely a family.
Johnny has matured, though, which is good for him, and he’s done that without losing his sense of fun, which makes him someone who can play well off of Franklin and Leech, who are more normal kids. Ben was always good with kids, so the two of them together with the kids is fun and heartwarming.
What this has done is make me quite aware of what parts of Fantastic Four I like and dislike, which is good because it will let me seek them out when I look for TPBs again. I still consider the 1974 era to be the FF’s Golden Era, and so will look for things in that range. Others, of course, may disagree.
Thoughts on “Fantastic Four” by Dan Slott
August 31, 2021So I’ve picked up some graphic novels and comics collections over the past few months, and one of them was a collection of Dan Slott’s run on Fantastic Four. Now, I’ve discussed my impressions of the Fantastic Four eras before, and said how much I prefer the earlier eras to the modern ones. This is obviously from the modern era (2018) and my impression still holds, but I like this one better than the 1998 version that I had read there.
The reason is that Dan Slott did a couple of things. First, he ultimately got rid of the group of super-geniuses that was prominent in some of the modern works that I had been reading. While some of the characters were a bit interesting, the entire concept simply focused things too much on super-genius Valeria and made the stories too much a conflict of ideas and technology, which left the other members out and lost the feel of this being a super-family. By getting rid of it, Slott is free to return this to being a super-family story and work with the relationships that way. He also manages to return a fun sense of banter to the series, and sense of fun, which is quite welcome, and is something that he does really well. He also does a bachelor party/bachelorette party for Ben and Alicia in a similar way that X-Men at one point did competing girl’s/boy’s nights out that of course end up with superpower related complications, and while the X-Men version was better this one is also pretty funny and entertaining, on top of the banter. So it at least has being entertaining through being funny going for it.
However, where Slott fails here is in the drama, which is really weak. For example, there’s a thread with Franklin losing his superpowers — or, at least, it’s the case that if he uses them he’ll lose them — and then feeling inferior to Valeria whose abilities are in her intelligence, but it doesn’t really come across as that and we don’t really care that much about the conflict because it wasn’t built up enough. In general, the drama in Slott’s comics here fail because he doesn’t have enough time to develop the drama around the humour he brings to the work.
I enjoyed it more than the 1998 version, and it is a bit more entertaining than the 1963 version (mostly because the writing is a lot better) but I still prefer the overall dynamics of the 1974 version. Still, it’s something that I could re-read at some point, which gets it bonus points from me.
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