I never knew a Fantastic Four existed until I saw the second issue on the Effingham, IL newsstand in September 1961. So I’ll never be sure what I made of that first one.
But at age 7, I was pretty literal-minded, so I doubt I’d have recognized them as superheroes. Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm may have had superpowers and bold epithets — Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Girl, the Human Torch, and the Thing — but they lacked the requisite colorful costumes to be immediately identified as do-gooders.
What they had, at least in potential, was originality and an élan that would eventually transform the comic book industry first, and finally Hollywood.
Few would have suspected that then, though.
Comics historian Mark Engblom observed that the team’s first issue “…seemed to be a hybrid of the Atlas-era weird sci-fi titles and the budding superhero renaissance. Though technically possessing powers, three of the four looked like any other John or Joan Q. Citizen you’d see in a typical Stan (Lee)/Jack (Kirby)/Steve (Ditko) sci-fi eight-pager. Ben was yet another human cursed with a tragic transformation you’d often see in the Atlas horror mags. … Until Stan and Jack fully shook off the trappings of their sci-fi/horror sausage factory phase with issue 3, the FF would appear, at first glance, to be more of the same old song and dance.”
From the beginning, however, the FF was something more than a super-team.
“They were a family,” noted Charles W. Fouquette. “Most who followed (Lee and Kirby) made efforts to break up that family by having members leave or exchange others to fill in. Most people today don’t even know, much less comprehend that the FF was the flagship title of Silver Age Marvel. The Fantastic Four were very much a product of their times.”
Yes, the FF was by far the presiding Marvel title of the 1960s, challenged only eventually by Spider-Man. The Marvel universe radiated from the FF.
The team’s sometimes bitter interactions followed naturally from that family premise. “I wasn’t used to seeing superheroes bickering, and found it a bit disconcerting,” recalled comics historian Johnny Williams. “It’s ironic that years later DC followed suit when the writers made Ollie a curmudgeon in that same ‘gentlemanly’ Justice League.”
“I had picked up Fantastic Four 1 and continued to do so, even though I found the book crude and the characters acting as children, unlike the DC heroes who acted like adults and where the art was slicker and more to my taste,” said Paul Zuckerman. “And, other than the guy who flamed on, I thought the characters’ superpowers were not original. I didn’t know about Plastic Man at the time, but I surely knew that the Elongated Man and Elastic Lad were whizzes at stretching, and even the Legion had an invisible member… The Thing seemed like just another monster. As for the Torch, I didn’t know about the Golden Age version.”
“I stuck with the book, but it took me about two years to begin to appreciate it more.”
Consciously or otherwise, the FF was designed to echo the four classical elements: fire, earth, air (which is invisible like Sue), and water (which is fluid and mutable like Reed). But they were squabbling elements.
“The heroes’ idiosyncrasies often impede their work as a team,” observed Bradford W. Wright in his book Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. “They frequently argue and even fight with each other. The Thing throws destructive temper tantrums and has to be physically restrained by his teammates. The Human Torch briefly quits the group because he resents the three adults bossing him around. The Invisible Girl lets romance cloud her judgment by taking an interest in the Sub-Mariner, a sworn enemy of the Fantastic Four. And Mr. Fantastic blames himself for the failed space mission and the cosmic ray accident that robbed his friend Ben of his human appearance.”
Bob Doncaster said, “The fact that the FF had problems and squabbles with each other is one of the things that set Marvel apart from the competition, and early on the Thing was unpredictable towards his family.”
That unpredictability made the Thing a favorite with readers.
“I loved the original scaly, cruder Ben, the Thing who was not happy with his appearance and let them know it, liked when he would change back to Ben,” Rocco Giorgio wrote.
“I’ve always preferred the Thing’s earlier ‘scaly’ look to his later lumps of stone,” agreed David Cunningham.
Jeffrey Osgood said, “I loved how the Thing evolved into a joke-sprouting wiseass in those early 1960s issues.”
“The personae of the more ‘monstrous’ characters were in a state of flux early on,” Vincent Mariani said. “The Hulk, Thing, and Beast (and the Human Torch and Namor to a lesser degree) whiplashed from one kind of character trait to another from issue to issue. And speech patterns weren’t consistent even within the same story. It took a while to settle into the now-familiar versions. What a contrast with stodgy DC, with jealously guarded images that were drained of almost all personality.”In their first issue, these alienated heroes confronted an even more alienated villain, the Mole Man — an ugly little fellow, rejected by humanity and driven underground, where he was embraced by monsters.
You got the feeling that the FF had an uncomfortable amount in common with him. They, too, were freaks uncertain about the role they should play in society.
“Although the concept was new in comic books, such character types were well grounded in American popular culture, since American audiences had historically shown a marked preference for reluctant heroes who defend the community while maintaining a personal distance from society,” Wright wrote. “The classic archetype, of course, is the western frontier hero, existing on the border between civilization and the wilderness and championing the best qualities of both.
“Embodied in the reluctant hero were the celebrated possibilities of American republicanism: virtuous citizens giving to the community without sacrificing their freedom and individuality. The demands of World War II and the Cold War had subverted whatever individuality superheroes like Superman and Batman had once possessed for the sake of the national consensus. Now the Fantastic Four opened the door for reluctant comic book superheroes to pose an alternative to the consensus.”
“I had been reading comic books for two years and four months when I purchased The Fantastic Four 1 on my 9th birthday on Aug. 10, 1961, and thought it was the greatest comic book I had ever read, so I was already primed to jump on issue 2 immediately!” Todd Tamanend Clark
remembered.
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