Oh, how in the world can Fantastic Four be a Forgotten Comic, you ask?
The answer is simple: when it’s Doeg Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz’s run from the early Eighties, that terminated when John Byrne jumped on board and took everything “back to basics”. Not that there was anything wrong with Byrne’s intentions! Indeed, for a little while his FF made for absolutely excellent superhero fare, and more importantly for Very Good FF.
However, one also wonders what might’ve been…
And yet also…one doesn’t. I don’t know, wistful nostalgia for this run is a fun thing to play with, but if you were dissatisfied with Moon Knight you’ll probably hate this…! Because it’s a rather strange book; here, just halfway through their MK run, just as Marvel readers at large are starting to suspect that damn, something really special may be happening here (and if you keep reading through ’til MK #25 you’ll finally get to see it — but more on that later!), away go Moench and Sienkiewicz to do much more restrained work on the company’s flagship title, just now truly beginning to run out of steam for real…
And you have to understand (well, actually you don’t, but let’s pretend) that at this point, even to a guy like me, the FF book was looking more than a little bit moribund: it seemed as though almost everything that could’ve been done with the basic set of FF conventions left behind by Lee and Kirby, had been done…to the point where writers flailed, trying to find new places to grab at old loose ends. What to do, after Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway and Marv Wolfman had gone over the business so thoroughly? All kinds of crazy things had gone down in FF by the time the non-Lee/Kirby stuff started to count as the majority of the series’ total run, and progress had been made; things had been changed around, more than a few times. That, in some sense, was the problem. In retrospect, Byrne’s solution to it all seems pretty obvious. Start consciously repeating the Lee/Kirby stuff. Hmm, or maybe “revisiting” is a less loaded term, and I should use that since (as mentioned) I’m not going to call it a bad idea? Well, how could I, when Byrne’s run started to go to pieces right around about the time his FF stopped looking like a straight-up homage…
And a dandy homage it was, too…
But as obvious as the “homage solution” looks to us now, at the time it was on nobody’s mind — nobody was interested in doing it, nobody thought it was the right thing to do, even though in a sense it was all anybody really wanted from the book, it was all anybody was asking for. The FF comic, like all Marvel’s comics, was still operating in an environment where new and forward-pushing stuff was expected, where characters and situations and relationships were expected to change over time as the reader watched. You couldn’t really go back. And that’s probably why Byrne’s run ended up looking fresh instead of stale: a lot of the new stuff was unsatisfying, readers wanted something really “new”, but they weren’t getting it, except in places. Conway had done a lot of “growing-up” stories that eventually needed to be reversed, restored to a status quo instead of being allowed to spin off into the atmosphere; Thomas had done a lot of distinctly Thomasian things that explored and explained the FF’s universe, which were hard acts to follow in part because they were just so darn silly; Wolfman had taken sturdy old FF tropes and defamiliarized them, in order to do them again and really get done with them, clear the decks for those coming after. But these were the good stories. There was also a lot of slush, a lot of flailing, a lot of things that seemed very “un-FF”, because somehow “new” needed a strong component of “old” to work, and vice versa; “forward” in some sense needed “backward” in order to maintain itself, and backward without forward (like forward without backward) started to creak pretty badly…sort of like the Star Wars Special Edition.
And so there was a certain feeling that focus was being lost, on occasion. And I should be sure to say, it wasn’t necessarily because of any specific perceived flubs made by any specific writer or artist, regardless of how easy it is for a fan like me to make those judgements! Rather, it was something endemic to the whole FF exercise: something each writer and artist had to find a way to address, and deal with. And sometimes they did, even quite effectively, but overall the trend seemed a downward one. Reader interest was really seeping away, perhaps for the first time. And always there was the sense that it didn’t have to be this way — that at any moment it could get not just better, but all the way better. The FF book could be cured, if you will…and if you look at the post-Lee/Kirby issues, I think you’ll see a concentration on finding cures growing more and more pronounced as time goes on. Not that “curing” wasn’t always on display in FF, pretty much from the beginning — in fact all the Marvel books spent a suspicious amount of time dwelling on the matter, mostly in order to show that every cure has a cost — but eventually all the anxiety about cures had to either come to a climax, or not, both within the books and without…and then, most terribly, somebody had to make up some other kind of story to tell.
And mostly, and not to be unkind, but…this just didn’t work.
Again, from the perspective of comics readers a half-century on from FF #1…it’s not easy to see how it all happened back then. But at the time, when the Fantastic Four had been in existence for only (a letter-writer of the day reminds me) nineteen years, the question “so what happens now?” was a pressing one. And maybe that can’t help but look absurd to us here in 2010, but…I mean, this was at a time when there could still be speculation Kirby might return to the FF one day, you know? It was a whole other audience, and they were far less jaded. If you could read the letters pages, you’d understand…in fact, Marvel, where’re my Essential Letter-Columns TPBs, anyway? Do you even know how much money you could get me to plunk down for those…?!
…But as it is, you’ll just have to take my word for it: that at the time, what the FF book was going to be like in the future was a hanging question that desperately needed an answer. And soon enough Byrne would come along, to let his answer be “no, no…you’re looking at it all wrong.” But, just before Byrne made that particular scene…
There was also the answer of Moench and Sienkiewicz.
As I said, it’s a strange book. It’s written strangely, and it’s drawn strangely. Sienkiewicz’s moodiness flickers in and out, but mostly out…like a weird mimickry of Buscema and Buckler that can’t always maintain its shape, that collapses sometimes into “FF bits” that seem to explicitly test and strain against the very idea of “FF bits”. For one thing, Reed Richards’ neck is always stretching, flaunting the long-held rule of Stan and Jack: the art seems dissatisfied with itself in places, perhaps because it’s dissatisfied with other things it can’t get to as easily as it can get to itself. The line goes incredibly thin, and the panels get incredibly small, and then every once in a while it opens up into a stretched or twisted perspective, some odd colouring, a slight brimming tension…and then it’s back again to the fine lines and the reassuringly pseudo-”classic” FF look, until things overcorrect in the other direction and generate stuff that really does look like Buscema, that seems solid and healthy and full of the genuine promise of novelty, despite its “reassuringly classic” quality. To see it all in 2010 is to be confused about what it’s in aid of, perhaps…
And Moench’s scripts seem similarly distorted, according to the same scheme. These aren’t quite “done-in-ones”, but they’re very, very close: aggressively episodic, but then who the hell ever saw done-in-ones that seemed like they were begging for so many more pages? Byrne would follow the same pattern of loose episode as part of his “back-to-basics” approach, taking quite some time to wind up back in the rush of Continuing Saga that had become such a trademark of Marvel storytelling…ditching the X-Men’s soap-opera style even to the point of giving up the steady, almost metronomic “A” plot, “B” plot, “C” plot cycling that had typified FF stories since Lee and Kirby first really lengthened their stride…but one thing Byrne wouldn’t do is wrestle with the problem of breaking new ground, and that’s just the problem Moench and Sienkiewicz seemed to concern themselves with overall: how to get back to what the fans were clamouring for, the “real” Reed and Sue and Ben and Johnny — and given Byrne’s soft reboot, I think it’s debatable whether or not his versions can count as “real” in this sense, since there are so many reasons to think they aren’t continuously-connected with the previous twenty years’ characters — while at the same time retaining the forward-movingness established by all their predecessors on the title, that momentum that no one yet imagined they could simply discard and restart…in a soft reboot, or any other kind. So it could not be too cozy a business, and indeed it wasn’t: there’s a reason people remember this run as having a “horror vibe” that wasn’t (at least to 2010 eyes) really there…because at the time, the FF needed a push toward relevance, and the great thing about horror is that it’s always relevant. The intrusion of the strange into the familiar, well, that’s what these comics were about from day one…and of course as we know, it was just the business of “horror” itself, monster comics, that got streamed into the stories at the House of Ideas in the first place. Atom-Age stress, happily coincident with the necessity of not being seen to threaten DC’s superheroic monopoly; eventually it made it a duopoly, and the horror got forgotten. Because eventually the superheroes were strange enough on their own.
But by the time 1980 rolled around, the strangeness had been left behind too: the superheroes were as passively, contemptibly familiar as the Hardy Boys, and with Kirby’s cosmos so well-explored as at last it was — as it had to be, since after Kirby left no one could really replace him, in the world-building department! — their characters had nothing to push against anymore, to keep them in close combat with the strange. The characters themselves were still fine; it was just that no one could make them work properly, in a world that had gotten so dull and repetitious. Which is something they themselves could only afford to be, if their world wasn’t. So the horror was what they needed, again, even though it doesn’t look so much like horror to us…but part of the reason it doesn’t look like it, is because the stories are so cramped that the horror can’t work its way out through the characterizations.
However…at the time, that didn’t matter so much as it might’ve. Conditions were such that every FF reader was exceptionally sensitized to the problem, and to the tenor of the problem. Moench in those days was at least as wordy as anyone, what today we would think of as an awful lot of telling, and not very much showing at all…but for the times, it was fairly briskly brought off. Which was a good thing, because it pretty much had to be: by the time Marv Wolfman moved on to greener pastures every issue just sounded like Beowulf, Stan-style sonority with no action in it at all, self-parody that just went on and on and on, begging for a completion of the round. Marv’s written some great comics, even some pretty sterling FF comics, but #200 was probably as far as he was ever meant to go…after that it got palpably Caretakery, if not a little bit worse than that. You can see Moench struggling here, slightly, with the need for compression — he knows he needs more space-and-time control to get things to a suitably “creepy” place, through the reestablishment of just who all these characters really are…but he can’t quite get his hands on it, because there’s too much exposition to do. Nineteen years after FF #1, this book arguably needs more systematic exposition, because the Beowulf-speak and the characterization and the pure plot-point speeches have all gotten so thoroughly mixed-up over such a long time that for all the words in the air there’s no sense of what’s going on, no sense of what’s needful to know: it’s a flock of words, a storm of words, and Moench gamely takes it upon himself to put them in some sort of order…but perhaps it isn’t just his own predilection for wordiness that stops him from just getting rid of half of their useless, prescriptive bulk, but it’s (again) the times too. Sure, it’s back-to-basics stuff, but it isn’t retro, exactly — Byrne’s work will be the reconstructions of a very talented fan, but Moench and Sienkiewicz’s work is trying to visibly shift years and years of FF material around without changing it, to find some new and non-reconstructive storytelling space using basically the same tools they were left. And as I said…it doesn’t quite work. We have a “Namor Declares War” story and we have a “Galactus” story, and in these there are some genuine pleasures to be found, but they come out of a shift in intention more than they come out of a shift in style. Sienkiewicz himself can’t be “looked like” in the same way Byrne could be, or Kirby was, or Buscema…some artists will never be “pace-setters” in this way, after all: no one ever says “make it look like Steranko” or “make it look like Colan”, or even “make it look like Neal Adams”, because there’s no point in that — certain artists take their styles out with them the same way they bring them in, and thus can only be influences, never templates. Well, and you can’t be “Gibbons-esque”, you can’t be “Williams-esque”, either! Because there’s no such thing. So Moench and Sienkiewicz, perhaps surprisingly, aren’t seen attempting anything like a stylistic shift on their FF run — rather, they’re trying to move the furniture around just enough to uncover new expectations for their readers to have from the same old floor-plan, the same old style, of the last hundred or so issues. Which was a really awful mistake, actually: I mean we’re talking about a set of conventions that allow third-person narration to ask the reader a rhetorical question and then reply to them with weird words like “Aye, ’tis true.” We’re talking about stuff that’s horrendously confused, here: disastrous hyperbolic overreach, a real desperation to enlist the reader’s assent to crap, that seems woefully dependent on enforcing the most luridly pathetic kind of “heroic” rhetoric imaginable…and the silliest kind of reading-logic, causation that starts in the caption-box and dribbles onto the panel like rancid mead because there’s nowhere else for it to come from. Moench can give Claremont a run for his money, here, at times: Claremont at his worst, most excessive “and then they all held hands and by the power of love the dragon was defeated, and the Elven village safe” kind of you-know-how-this-tune-goes level of pandering bullshit. Likewise, Sienkiewicz actually manages to turn in ugly, rushed, and boring pictures: how many times do you want to see the FF sitting around watching TV after dinner? Fewer times than this, I think I can safely guarantee…and when the action comes, so much of it is purely programmatic that you wonder how low the bar can possibly have been set in those days, to make this sort of thing not just acceptable, but beloved in retrospect…
…And yet, though all that’s true — aye, ’tis true, yon reader! Hearken thee well! — somehow there is still more to be said about it. Because somehow Moench and Sienkiewicz do manage to find those new expectations for the readership…though at times it’s slow going, and tough slogging. The “horror vibe”: how to reintroduce it, without degrading the all-important superheroic conventions, even the bad ones? The Moon Knight team is ahead of their time here, pop-culturally speaking, even though it looks shockingly fumbly to our latter-day eyes: the FF start losing control of their world quite quickly under this guidance, possibly in a lantern-hanging echo of the desultory Tab A/Slot B business that had led up to the point of their waning relevance. Their “family” dynamics get pulled on a little; a tissue of distance seems to insert itself between them. Sienkiewicz’ moments of distortion become moments of realization, in this reading, that our heroes are necessarily less confident than we’ve thought of them as being up ’til now — though this effect suffers from the cramped narrative probably to a greater degree than it is helped by it — and the agency of others becomes such a constant trial that they can’t help collapsing in on their uncertain core, to try and find resolutions. But of course it’s what’s in the core that makes the uncertainty in the first place — as Gerry Conway’s brilliant stroke of making Franklin the supreme irritant to complacency is finally picked up on after all this time. The FF’s family is sick in its heart, and may not get better: that’s our theme, here, and that’s their challenge. The cure: but first you have to find the disease. And everybody’s running out of time, as some dread psychological Galactus draws nearer. Here in 2010, you’d be forgiven for not noticing that it works…due to, you know, the crapness…
…But to the sensitively-attuned FF fans of the time, it was like a suggestion of rain, finally, after a long drought. Not buckets and buckets of rain! But at least the promise of a light drizzle, anyway. And even today, if you can overlook the cringe-y bits, I think you can notice a heartbeat worth listening to. Even through the expectational gauze laid down over the last thirty years (a surprisingly large amount of it derived from Moench and Sienkiewicz themselves, cliches they invented on the run), perhaps an interesting, protagonistic face can be seen. Here in 2010, we seem to be revoltingly stuck on the idea that the FF are “first and foremost a family”, as the folks at Marvel are wont to put it — which is actually something they’ve hardly ever been (oh how I wish I’d had the foresight to title this post “First Family, Not Family First”!) — thereby overleaping and prematurely truncating all that is interesting about their family dynamic…but way back when that concentration on family began, it answered something, something very important, in the frustrated fan. Maybe it’s part of the reason it so frequently reads a bit blah, now: all that “family” stuff in FF, it really has gotten boring. Contemptibly familiar. But then that’s what these comics do for their readers, now: they pat them on the head with internally-consistent cliches. It’s the same now, as it was when Moench and Sienkiewicz first came along: what can the Fantastic Four possibly be, in the future, that they aren’t already bloated parodies of?
Where else is there to go, but back to this already played-out mine?
Of course, as Morrison saw in his 1234 (oh, how I do keep going on about that!), the mine really isn’t played out at all: in fact that’s practically the whole story in a nutshell, that it isn’t played out. But Moench and Sienkiewicz saw that same thing first, thirty years ago, even though it looks distinctly icky to our eyes today. Still, all that ickiness speaks volumes: because the Fantastic Four are a little bit damaged, you know? They can’t possibly survive all this; they can’t possibly win. We can’t possibly be interested in them at all, I mean for God’s sake just look at them…!
And yet, as all the Very Good FF creative teams have managed to get across to us — as, indeed, all the Caretaker teams have known very well themselves, even if they couldn’t always quite get it across the plate to the reader — in FF stories it’s always the attitude that determines the altitude, and they do win anyway. What would the Moench and Sienkiewicz FF have turned into, if they hadn’t been fated to leave the stage so John Byrne could come on with his crowd-pleasing reconstructions? It’s very hard to imagine it now: so much of the storytelling exigencies and challenges of that time have been forgotten, to the point where it’s alarmingly tempting to believe that those comics would be just as good today, as they were back then. Of course they wouldn’t be — not only were both Moench and Sienkiewicz yet to produce their best work together, this wasn’t even the best work they were producing at the time, and when each did start putting their very best out it wouldn’t even be as a team. But still there remains something there, in those old bide-a-wee issues of theirs. Something suggestive and strange; something lost, perhaps. Paths not taken. The FF as an unhappy family, trying to save themselves from themselves…and we must imagine that if the Moench/Sienkiewicz run had kept on going, that they would’ve succeeded. Because they never can, but then they always do; just as though they suddenly remember that they want to.
Well, forgetting and remembering is half of what these stories were ever about, you know? Recently an online pen-pal of mine asked me where I thought the “original narrative” of various Marvel comics had ended, which I found a very curious question indeed…not least, because I’d never realized before that I actually did think these “original narratives” had once existed, and that I actually did think they had all concluded at some point. I guess predictably, I told him that I figured the original narrative of FF had terminated with #251…because, not that there weren’t good Byrne FF comics after that point, but it was there he entered his decadence phase. Things started unravelling from there. But I now realize that I set this boundary largely according to how faithfully “FF” things seemed in Byrne’s run: tacitly acknowledging his work as pastiche, even as I accepted its nominal authenticity. It could claim to belong to the original narrative of FF comics just as long as it remained an unbroken homage to the Lee/Kirby days…but once it gave that up, I wouldn’t count it anymore.
Which is not really fair, is it? So these days I think I’d set the terminator at Byrne’s first issue: what, suddenly they’re all wearing the old big-collared blue spacesuits, without a word of explanation? It seems like a trifle, at first glance; but when you consider that every other change of attire, not just in Fantastic Four comics but in every Marvel comic since 1961, had warranted at least a quarter-page mini-splash if not an actual cover blurb…I mean, remember: these are superhero comics we’re talking about here, it is literally all about the costuming…once you consider that, I think that you have to find Byrne’s retro-stylings appealing and pleasant exactly in the same proportion that they are arbitrary and jarring. Note that his own eventual new design for the FF’s uniforms came with a whole inter-title crossover’s worth of explanation and backstory to them, and I think the subtextual meaning of that first discontinuous change pops out — we aren’t looking at “real” FF (not to be confused with the one true Real FF that was the work of Lee and Kirby), we’re looking at a “post-Crisis” FF. Only we are never told that’s what it is.
And that means the “original narrative” closed with Moench and Sienkiewicz’s last issue…went out just like “Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow”, only with a squeak and not a fanfare. A tiny trite panel at the bottom of a page, and the word “End”…as our heroes walk off into the sunset, to prepare for another day that will never come. Walking off into the eternal suspension of memory that is the classic “deferred ending” of superhero comics…
…And so it turns out to be interesting after all, especially at so far a remove, to consider how it might’ve been: “The Way It Didn’t Begin”, if you will. With Wolfman’s best out of the way in #200, the last FF story by the last kid to have had Roz Kirby make him a sandwich while he looked over the master’s shoulder, with Doom finally dispatched and the FF back together after their final, ultimate breakup…yes, the question would’ve been whether or not the last thirty issues would see the lights start flashing on and off and the bartender coming out to take people’s drinks away, the rag-end of the evening, the Time You Stayed Too Late…or whether it would just turn out to be the mellowing pause before the next band took the stage. In other words: the question of whether the original narrative was going to terminate or not. From our lofty position today, and looking at the Moench/Sienkiewicz issues that we have in hand, we might be well-inclined to assume the former…
…But maybe we’d be wrong about that. Because by Moon Knight #25, just a year or so later, Sienkiewicz has finally lengthened his stride…and Moench seems to have fused his various influences and interests into something a little more portable, a little less messy and digressive and, well, purple. Of course I can’t know the secret of his changing style, especially since unlike Sienkiewicz he was already a mature writer…but not for nothing does he become such a remarkably dependable shortstop in the next few years, and not for nothing does his FF run start to look peculiarly un-Moench. So maybe it’s not quite radically nuts of me to imagine that a longer FF run by these two might’ve seen a pretty interesting metatextual development in it, as the Franklin problem gets worked through and the FF once again manage to fall together instead of apart…because what if the goofy, cringe-y writing faded away as they did so, getting tougher and more elliptical as the FF get more and more well-salvaged, and what if the pseudo-classic look of Sienkiewicz’s shapeshifting style slowly gave way to his own interpretations all the time? And what if the panels had gotten bigger and less crunched-down, what if the storylines crossed over issues at greater length, and the sprightly cycling of A and B and C plots once again picked up some steam? Morrison and Lee’s work in 1234 might’ve been seen, then, as a conscious nod to the great, classic, Very Good run of Moench and Sienkiewicz in the Eighties: the dark and slightly spooky Fantastic Four that we all remember from our youth, that nevertheless packed such a potent positivistic punch.
And then someone like me would’ve come along at some point and said: “yeah, but don’t you remember how awful it was when it started?”
But of course every judgement like that is made in the context of some fond memory or other. Isn’t it?
And anyway it didn’t happen like that. And so I can’t really do the Moon Knight thing, and recommend picking up these comics if you’ve never read them before…as I surely would if John Byrne’s Very Good FF had never existed, and the MK team had stayed on.
But!
I’m sure glad I have ‘em here on my shelf, because otherwise all I’d have is memory’s rosy afterglow.
Or…do I have that backwards…?
