Following the respective departures of first Jack Kirby and then Stan Lee from the FANTASTIC FOUR title, almost every later raconteur said something or other about how the starring characters needed special treatment because they were a “family,” as opposed to super-groups that functioned like loose affiliations of super-policemen. But saying this doesn’t mean anything if a creator doesn’t have any insight into what sort of conflicts and tensions are unique to families.
FANTASTIC FOUR certainly wasn’t the first adventure-series organized around a familial matrix. In the Silver Age of Comics, there had been two notable predecessors, and both of them– DC’s TIME MASTER and SEA DEVILS– came closer than the oft-mentioned CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN to the makeup of the FF: smart leader, strong sidekick, leader’s girlfriend, girlfriend’s kid brother. Stan Lee or Jack Kirby may have seen one or both DC-features and subconsciously imitated the template of the character-types. But they added elements one would never find in those strictly juvenile DC titles.
Maybe their success stemmed, as some have argued, from combining Lee’s penchant for soap-operatic drama with Kirby’s passion for sci-fi tropes. But whatever “origin story” fans might choose to write about the creative success of FANTASTIC FOUR, Lee and Kirby arguably produced the first adventure-series built around a family where the female characters had some agency opposed to the will of the males. In fact, I see in the Lee-Kirby oeuvre a gender-dynamic reminiscent of what little we know about the sex-roles of primeval families, which coalesced around the female’s need to “nest” and the male’s need to “hunt.”
In juvenile sci-fi comics, “hunting” doesn’t connote tracking down savage beasts. Rather, it means that the heroes are always seeking the next adventure to please a dominantly male audience. When a familial ensemble included girls/women, the females’ function was often to worry about how the group could possibly overcome the Peril of the Polka-Dot Gorilla. Alternately, the girl might be a tomboy who was as enthusiastic as the guys at seeking the next adventure and so didn’t challenge the male priorities, like the girl-member of SEA DEVILS. Family conflicts showed up in crime melodramas or even in teen humor titles, but not appreciably in adventure-comics.
Yet almost from the start, FANTASTIC FOUR showed the tense dynamic of a family cooped up in the same “nest,” often depicting Reed and Sue playing “mommy and daddy” to a fractious couple of “siblings.” Sue Storm, though, not only fretted when the Thing and Torch quarreled, but apparently considered at one point chucking the “den mother” gig for a seat on the throne of Atlantis.
I don’t want to suggest that Stan and Jack were more than loosely aware of the molds they were breaking. Clearly, they were mostly flying by the seats of their respective pantalones. But over time, many of the latter-day raconteurs on the FANTASTIC FOUR gave such matters as “female vs. male” agency a lot of thought– and that brings me to Dan Slott. I believe that in tandem with assorted collaborators, Slott’s run on the FF title, from issues #1-46 (2018-2022), has done the most to logically extend What Stan and Jack Wrought, at least in terms of gender-dynamics, culminating in the arc called “The Reckoning War.”
There’s a lot of backstory stuff Slott works into “War” that one has to track down in other features. Fantastic Four: Reckoning War was a major Marvel Comics cosmic event written by Slott, covering issues of the Fantastic Four (2018) series and many other tie-ins, and featured a multiversal war that reignited an ancient conflict predating the Kree, Skrulls, and Galactus, forcing the Fantastic Four and the rest of the Marvel Universe, including Doctor Doom, to confront oblivion.
An advance ad for the arc claimed that WAR was “fifteen years in the making.” Well, what that really meant was that Dan Slott introduced the idea of the war back in a 2005 issue of his SHE-HULK run and then sat on the idea for fifteen years, possibly with the hope of being able to develop his concept in a plum series like FANTASTIC FOUR. I don’t say this in disparagement. I like the fact that Slott’s FF run culminates in the ambitious Reckoning project. (There’s some romance-stuff between She-Hulk and Jack of Hearts that also comes from the SHE-HULK title, but I found it easy to roll with.) But Slott’s main foundation for his new epic was in a 1964 story told by Stan Lee and Larry Leiber, the origin of The Watcher from TALES OF SUSPENSE #53.
Of course this simple cautionary tale about the perils of arming rude savages had to get a more “cosmic” treatment by Slott, which is more or less what fans expect these days from FANTASTIC FOUR and similar Marvel titles. In the new narrative, the benighted Prosilicans don’t just get atomic power, but some Watcher super-technology that dwarfs anything that even the most advanced Marvel-aliens can come up with.
The Prosilicans launch a war of dominion, and when their opponents retaliate, nine-tenths of the then-known universe is destroyed. Only the power of the Watchers can preserve what’s left, by sealing the corrupted parts of the universe into a veritable “outer darkness” called The Barrens. So in this iteration, the Watchers swear their oath of non-interference not because they harmed one world with their act of Promethean generosity, but because the entire universe was almost expunged. But millions of years later, the Watchers’ original hubris will come back to bite the universe in the ass again.
One Prosilican, name of Lord Wrath, apparently survives all those millennia in the Barrens and finally decides to annihilate the protected one-tenth of the cosmos the Watchers saved. He rustles up three henchmen, similarly immortal Prosilicans who also sport super-powers and the euphonious names of Ruin, Rapture, and Reject. Together they are “the Reckoning,” and they start disseminating Watcher-tech throughout the galaxies to foment in what might be called (after David Brin) “Negative Uplift.”
Everywhere various alien empires go to war, and of course one group of aliens just has to hassle Earth, home of the Fantastic Four and that premiere alien-fighter, Reed Richards. First Reed gathers intelligence from She-Hulk, who informs him of her experiences with various time-guardians and the Reckoning prophecy. Then the FF stumbles across Nick Fury, who became an aide to Uatu the Watcher in a very involved subplot. Uatu is out of the picture for a bit, but Fury brings a gift to the party; a device with which super-genius Reed can perform a “Positive Uplift” on himself. Or maybe it’s not so positive, according to worried Mrs. Richards (and anyone who ever saw FORBIDDEN PLANET).
On the plus side, with this intelligence-boost, Reed instantly figures out that all the galactic brush-wars are “smokescreens” for Lord Wrath’s real purpose: to get hold of a handy reality-nexus with which to end reality. On the minus side, Super-Big Brain becomes so clinical that he disregards Johnny Storm’s plea to cure his affliction (yet another earlier subplot) — and that’s just for starters. Both the Torch and the Invisible Woman pursue other avenues against Wrath, and so do independent actors like Doc Doom and The Silver Surfer. But following a foray against Wrath’s henchmen, Reed does something to his old friend Ben that makes turning him into a rock-monster look like small potatoes.
Even Reed using a coma-gun to shut down his son’s mind (way back in FF volume one, #141) can’t equal this act of cold-blooded intellectual hubris. Reed deceives his best friend Ben Grimm into thinking that his wife and his kids have been destroyed, just to snap the big guy out of a tendency to get freaked out in combat with Rapture, For Reasons. The “fake death” sequence is not strictly necessary for the plot, so Slott may be saying that even a well-intentioned desire for boundless knowledge– in other words, endless “hunting”– holds peril for the “nest” of the family.
In other news, the Silver Surfer brings Galactus back from the dead (I didn’t even know he was sick), and the Watcher tries to persuade his fellows to go to war against the Reckoning. The other Watchers respond by putting Uatu in a chair and making him read old WHAT IF comics. Not really, they’re not that inhuman. Uatu is just forced to watch so many scenarios of alternate realities that they jumble his ability to know right from wrong. Fury and the Invisible Woman liberate Uatu, and for good measure, they all learn that the narrative about how the Barrens were created is not accurate, and that there was a Watcher-thumb on the scales.
The Richards and the Grimm kids don’t get a whole lot to do in most issues, but they do manage to neutralize one of the henchmen. When Reed and Sue are finally reunited, Sue rightfully busts Reed’s chops for his manipulations and secret-keeping, and in contrast to most of the Lee-Kirby oeuvre, the excuse of saving the universe doesn’t quite suffice.
And now it’s time for the big showdown: Thing vs. warrior-bitch Rapture, while everyone else piles on Wrath. And it’s a big confession time for Reed too, as he admits that all the knowledge he’s gained from the Watcher-uplift means nothing next to all the little things of their relationship. Then Reed faces off against Wrath with the Ultimate Nullifier, which should kill both of them.
But after all this heavy stuff, it’s time for a little eucatastrophe. Reed learns one thing he didn’t know: using the Watcher-made Nullifier kills the Watcher who uses it, and that has the effect of removing the Watcher-boost from Reed’s brain. The Surfer shows up with the revivified Galactus and they save the universe from destruction. And Uatu goes from being one of a race of godlike aliens to being the Only God in Town, able to repair all the problems and to change the Barrens into the Borderlands, “a canvas of infinite possibilities.” (Uatu does miss the little detail of curing the Torch’s flame-problems, but Slott had to leave something for #46, the wrap-up issue.)
The last Slott issue has nothing to do with the Reckoning War, but, but it does sum up the FF’s family dynamic. In this finale, Mister Fantastic reaches out to a sister he never knew, as well as introducing her to two other half-siblings, all creations of their mutual and utterly irresponsible paternal unit. Yes, there’s a minor kerfuffle with Psycho-Man. But this time the “nesting” takes precedence over the “hunting,” and I have to tip my hat to Dan Slott for “reckoning” the best way to resolve the tensions between action-adventure and family drama.
Check the back-issue bins, or Amazon to check it out for yourself.
***
English (US) · 