Reviewed by Pindaros

There's a notion that the purpose of reviews is to let the reader know whether they should buy a comic, book, cd, whatever. In case you are only reading this review for this reason, let me take care of this job right now:

You should buy ESSENTIAL FANTASTIC FOUR VOL. 3.

Here are the reasons:

If you like to read Marvel comics, this is probably the best and most important series of stories ever. It includes the first ever appearances of the Inhumans, the Silver Surfer, Galactus, Black Panther, Klaw and the Negative Zone. And the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm. 'Nuff said.

If you don't like Marvel comics, or even superheroes, this collection is still worth getting as one of the pinnacles of American cartoon art in the '60's. For influence and iconicity its only rival is Crumb's ZAP #1. In these stories, artist Jack Kirby virtually transcended style: each panel is simply the meeting of imagination and narrative. And inker Joe Sinnott offered the most powerful defense ever for the division of penciller and inker as he reached for the essence of each image and laid it out in clear black-and-white on the page. These images influenced R. Crumb, Jim Steranko, Moebius, Jim Starlin . . . Mike Mignola, Dan Clowes, Paul Dini - the design of Disney's "Atlantis" and a lot of video games are hard to imagine without them. It's a lot of good comic art for fifteen bucks.

It's quite likely, however, that most of you who are reading this already have this collection, because, like me, you were waiting for it to come out for more than a year. Or you've read the stories in other reprints, or you even own the original issues (lucky bastard!). And if so, everything I just wrote you've known for a while. For you, I want to talk about something a bit different, something that will help us understand a little better why some comics are so totally great. I want to talk about the value of a Universe.

The term "Universe" in comic books can call up all the horrors of the early '90's, when everyone and his brother invented a new universe, even Marvel, who already had one. I even remember one that was called something like "Collector's Universe" or "Speculator's Universe" or some such, presumably to assure us that these comics were just as valuable as some Marvel double-bag key issue like X-MEN GIANT #1 . And in this sense, Universes are the most out-dated, worthless products of mainstream comics. The attempt to create new Universes, however, does give some indication of how powerful the Marvel Universe has been in the imaginations of comics readers. Although there was already plenty of interaction between Marvel characters before this, it is in the stories in ESSENTIAL FANTASTIC FOUR VOL. 3 that Marvel made the leap from being comics where one story affected other stories to being comics that described a Universe.

In itself, the creation of a Universe is a very nice feat of imagination, since it involves filling up enough of the important slots of the "real world" with interesting characters and places to give a reader the sense that he can use his own knowledge of how the world works to make sense of how these things fit together. For comparison, consider the Mort Weisinger-era Superman comics: there are a lot of fictional people and places in those, but you have to just take the details as they come. Bizarro, Luthor and Mxyzptlk are only going to know each other if the writer puts them in the same story, and if Luthor is more dangerous than the omnipotent Mixy, well, that's the way it is. (Hence the appeal of this fictional world to a satirist like Evan Dorkin or a fantasist like Alan Moore.)

There are a number of things in the Fantastic Four stories that give a sense of fullness that makes a mere fictional world into a Universe: the collection of an entire unknown city of superhuman beings in South America; an African kingdom which possesses a strange metal unknown to humanity at large; the oppression and fear that Dr. Doom imposes on his Central European homeland. These things fill the Earth, but Kirby and writer Stan Lee, of course, move well beyond our planet. Aliens were a part of Marvel comics, even superhero comics, from the beginning, but with Galactus and his herald the Silver Surfer, known and feared even by the arrogant Skrulls, opposed by the omniscient and nearly omnipotent Watcher, Marvel depicted an Earth that was merely one planet among many, all facing incomprehensible powers and dangers.

By laying out the shape of its Universe in this way, Marvel opened the possibility that there was an unknown history behind its comics. In previous comic books it might be understood that individuals had a past that had not yet been explained, even that there were places, on Earth or in space, which had existed before stories were told about them. Nevertheless, these places still existed for the characters and stories they appeared in. That Superman or the JLA visited some other world was really the most important thing about that world, and the people of that world could never be more than antagonists or a chorus for the heroes. The Inhumans, Black Panther, and, above all, Galactus, could never be considered merely "friends" or "enemies" of the Fantastic Four. Even if Galactus had never appeared in another Marvel comic, he would still be one of the most important characters in the Marvel Universe, solely because he continued to exist, consuming planets. A fan could only wonder what such characters were doing when they were not appearing in a comic book, and hope that Marvel would elect to tell them more in the future.

Science fiction stories had begun to aim at this sort of fullness as early as the '30's, with E.E. Smith's space operas, and such "future history" works as the "Foundation" trilogy.  Robert Heinlein's novels claimed an actual reality for themselves, in so far as they offered a reasonable account of the experience of humanity in the centuries and millennia to come. But while Lee and Kirby used sf as source of inspiration, the Marvel Universe took shape as something much closer to the worlds depicted in some of the stories of the fantasy pulp "Weird Tales." The travels of Johnny Storm and Wyatt Wingfoot around the world are to some degree the descendent of the career of Conan of Cimmeria, while the arrival of absolute and amoral destruction in the form of Galactus echoes the evils of Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories.

The greatest achievement along these lines is undoubtedly J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," with its poems of an epic past and its appendices full of history, geography and linguistics. Tolkien's work, with its national poetries and invented languages, was in large part an eccentric product of Oxford's great tradition of philological study, but it has influenced Anglo-American fiction far more than has the scholarly practices that spawned it. This power largely results from the richness of its Universe.

It's probably no coincidence that the moment of Tolkien's apotheosis was more or less the same as the invention of the Marvel Universe - the second half of the mid-sixties which also included the birth of the counterculture/Underground. At that time the counterculture/Underground functioned under the assumption that it would eventually become the dominant culture. The mainstream culture of the '50's and '60's was simply too corrupt and dysfunctional to continue.  As everyone realized this emptiness of values we would all adopt the values developing in the Underground. Depending on exactly how this panned out, Universes like the Marvel Universe or Middle-Earth or Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion worlds would not just be like mythology, they would become the actual myths of the new Western culture.

More than the aptness of any single image, the very completeness of a Universe can lend it mythical and moral power. The fullness of the Universe, occupying a much greater range of a reader's models for making sense of his real world, begins to pose the question of whether the Universe actually depicts something very important about the real world; something that most accounts of the real world leave out. The reader may find what is missing from descriptions of the real world are ideals or hopes that he possesses, but it may also be that the Universe encourages him to read between the lines about what he knows about his own world.

Superhero comics are particularly good at the latter sort of inspiration, as they generally rely on notions of justice to provide coherence to their plots. That is to say, when you read a superhero comic, you know the story is getting underway when bad things start happening and that it's over when things are good again. Accordingly, superheroes always imply specific ideas of justice and injustice. The Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco took advantage of this in an essay he wrote about Superman comics in the '60's to claim that superhero comics were really about an American obsession with the preservation of private property. (Eco was only able to do this, of course, by ignoring the populist stories Siegel and Shuster produced in the late '30's.)

Superhero comics are not the only genre of narrative that uses justice in this way.  And as far as Universes go, the two most famous non-comic book Universes, Middle-Earth and the Star Trek Universe, both delineate very specific notions of justice that are extremely significant to fans. Many readers have also noted that from the mid-'70's on, Chris Claremont's X-Men stories very explicitly addressed issues of justice, in the tension between the various virtues of the mutants and their feelings of being ostracized.

The Marvel Universe that takes shape in ESSENTIAL FANTASTIC FOUR VOL. 3 depends highly on notions of justice and morality to make its stories work, however, these concepts are discussed far less often than the personalities of the heroes. It's interesting to reflect on what it could mean in Cold-War America to depict idealized monarchs ruling nations in Africa and South America. In the case of the Inhumans, Gorgon, Karnak and Triton were hardly obvious figures of admiration in a buzz-cut nation where the Rolling Stones were considered signs of the end of Western Civilization.

A lot of comic-book readers were probably getting beat up by jocks and rednecks enough as it was to have some sense that the US was not as ideal as it claimed. By the mid-'60's, a fair number of comic-book readers were in Vietnam, seeing how not-ideal it was. But with the Marvel Universe, Jack and Stan were showing how there were some very different places to look in the world to find the justice that America didn't always provide.

Over the years, the writers and artists who have taken over writing about the Fantastic Four, Dr. Doom and the Silver Surfer have found various ways of negotiating the mix of romance, myth and humor that Lee and Kirby used in creating the characters. Often the passions of the characters and a concern for "fun" in the books has encouraged writers and artists to drift away from the mythic power of the Marvel Universe. But in recent years, the popularity of writers like Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison has led to a return to the myths, although sometimes to communicate quite different messages.

There is a certain irony to this, in that these writers are often seen as being outside the traditional conventions of the genre. Ellis in particular has often expressed a lack of interest in superheroes, but has chosen to make a Fantastic Four manque the antagonists of his wildly popular PLANETARY series. While the stories he tells about "The Four" are rather different from what shows up in Marvel's comics, the relationship of the group to the Wildstorm Universe preserves that of the FF to the Marvel Universe. In this way, Ellis is able to offer a critique of the Cold-War activism that Lee and Kirby celebrated. In the Marvel Universe, America might have problems, but the technological mastery of the FF was inextricably linked to a sense of American decency. By reversing roles, PLANETARY shows how one man's "fair play" is another man's oppression.

At Marvel itself, especially in Joe Quesada's Marvel Knights line, there has been a similar interest in playing with the mythical force of the old MU characters. THE INHUMANS used the familiarity of the title characters to generate reader compassion so that their seeming vulnerability in the story could sensitize readers to post-Cold-War military adventuring. EARTH X considered an equally important question of justice by opposing the sacrifice and ideals of the Marvel heroes over the conformity and immediate gratification made possible by increased technological and psychological power.

Nevertheless, THE INHUMANS and EARTH X visited aspects of the Marvel Universe that others had made attempts on before. The recent series BLACK PANTHER and MARVEL BOY have made the Marvel Universe stand for some quite different values altogether. As a white boy, I may not take in everything that BLACK PANTHER has to say, but I can see enough to know that it offers a powerfully Afrocentric perspective on the US, international politics and human lives. (I certainly appreciated how the series got me to realize that the Hulk is a gentleman of color.)

I'm not sure that "justice" is the appropriate word to describe the moral center of Grant Morrison's MARVEL BOY. Formally, the limited series operates much like the cut-ups developed by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, in the way that icons of the Marvel Universe are redistributed and combined with other late 20th-century archetypes, both well known (surfers/skaters) and more obscure (horsegirls). The protagonist shows a similar debt to Burroughs, most specifically Burrough's notion of the Wild Boy, whose energetic desires serve as a meaningful opponent to any (inherently oppressive) social system. The ultimate significance of MARVEL BOY is likely to remain as controversial as Burrough's work, as fans argue whether it is a post-modern critique of superhero semiotics, magickal operation to transform society or simply a kick-ass story.

In any case, MARVEL BOY demonstrates just how much juice there is in the old Marvel Universe by managing to turn on comics fans nearly as powerfully as did his INVISIBLES, a series drawing on much broader worlds of conspiracy theory, occult history, drug lore and pop culture. Accordingly, MARVEL BOY makes clear just how much relevance the old Lee and Kirby FF stories can have, especially when editors let writers create a future rather than try to preserve a past.

Between the successes of the Marvel Knights series and early indications from the books of the last couple months, we can expect the Quesada years to continue to rejuvenate the Marvel Universe. For the first time since the '60's, the inmates are back in charge of the hospital. Personally, my biggest fear is that in their quest to push the MU to its limits, new writers end up producing a powerful, but irreparable Ragnarok, a sort of THE PUNISHER KILLS THE MARVEL UNIVERSE without plausible deniability.

Of course this may show my own lack of imagination. For the past month or so, my favorite witticism for my comic-store friends about the Joe Quesada editorship is that I'm afraid Warren or Garth will end up doing a YANCY STREET mini-series showing a self-pitying, heroin-addicted Thing picking fights and trying to find cracks in his skin to shoot up through. I told this to Joe Casey last week, thinking I'd get a laugh, only to hear, "It's gonna happen, just wait till you see the FANTASTIC FOUR 1234 that Grant Morrison's doing!"

Pindaros is a regular contributor to PopImage.
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