1
Fantastic 4-Body-ings: Ideal Grotesqueness in the Comic-Book Culture
Christina Dokou
I. Introduction: Comics as a U.S. Cultural Index
A view of America as a culture of images,1 especially metaphors, metonymies, or
mutations of the body, is not complete unless one looks at comic books. With their
gaudily costumed superheroes sporting superpowered bodies and brains, and their
fantastic landscape allegories of America, comics sprang from a rich ancient satirical
tradition2 via cartoon strips to evolve into an independent genre. The genre reflects
pop Americana culture and history,3 aesthetic and even intellectual trends,4 a neomythology,5 and the post-millennial angst about transformations of human identity,
the layperson’s hopes and fears.6 Most comics are still searching for legitimization
because of their “unrealistic” form and theme (a fallacy explored by Thierry
Groensteen),7 their mainstream lapses into literary and artistic infantilism, and
commercial exploitation—since, in the words of Alan Moore, “It doesn’t matter how
sophisticated they are, they’re still about men with their underpants over their
trousers.”8 However, their authentic appeal and their synchronization with the
As seen in, among others, Ruth Vasey’s study on public and media images in America in
“The Media,” Modern American Culture: An Introduction, Mick Gidley, ed. (New York:
Longman, 1994): 213-38.
2 Christos Zachopoulos, “Eisagogi,” Helleniki Politiki Geloiographia [“Introduction,” Greek
Political Cartoons], Prologue by Ioannis Varvitsiotis, Christos Zachopoulos, ed., Lefkomata
series (Athens: The Constantinos Karamanlis Institute for Democracy/ Sideris Publications,
2002): 13-14.
3 See, for example, Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, or The ‘Nam series by veteran Doug Murray,
published by Marvel in 1986.
4 As seen in the inspired combination of Plato and Nietzsche in writer Alan Moore’s and artist
Dave Gibbons’s 1986-87 acclaimed DC mini-series The Watchmen.
5 Lord Raglan’s monomyth and Mircea Eliade’s myth of the eternal return, not to mention
Joseph Campbell’s schema of the heroic cycle, easily apply to such heroes as Marvel’s 1941
Captain America by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, or DC’s 1938 Superman by Jerry Siegel and Joe
Shuster.
6 As in Marvel’s 1963 The X-Men by Chris Claremont, noted for its ongoing allegory on
subjects such as racism (the 80s “Genosha” storyline), anti-Semitism (the first X-Men film), or
homophobia (the “Cassandra Nova” 2002 storyline and the second X-Men film).
7
Thierry Groensteen, “Why are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” Comics and
Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, Shirley Smolderen, trans., Anne
Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen, eds. (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum P./U of
Copenhagen, 2000); 29-41. On the negative view of comics, see: Amy K Nyberg, “Poisoning
Children’s Culture: Comics and Their Critics,” Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and
Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America, Foreword by Madeleine B. Stern, Lydia C.
Schurman and Deidre Johnson, eds. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002): 167-86.
8 Qtd. in: Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction, New Accents series (London and New
York: Routledge, 1993): 98.
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American pop mindset shows in the huge and ongoing success of the comics industry.
Because of its simplicity and use of fantasy, the comics image may be viewed as a
Jungian archetype, a vulgate myth-like (thus immediately communicable)
signification of a basic idea (e.g., heroism) sprung from the collective unconscious. At
the same time, as a conscious artistic effort, it reflects the cultural-political zeitgeist as
perceived within itself since, according to W. J. T. Mitchell: “It should be clear that
representation, even purely ‘aesthetic’ representation of fictional persons and events,
can never be completely divorced from political and ideological questions; one might
argue, in fact, that representation is precisely the point where these questions are most
likely to enter the literary work.”9 As Klaus Kaindl notes, comics are a genre “very
strongly governed by conventions,”10 and that furthermore, as regards their
“multimodal” nature:
[Umberto] Eco, (1972:202) for one, has demonstrated that pictures have a
code which is governed by conventions, and these conventions may be shaped
by cultural constraints. This also means that the visual representation of
objects, gestures, facial expressions, etc. can be interpreted correctly only if
the significance of these elements has been defined in the particular culture
(cf. Eco 1987:65).11
Comics run the gamut from teenage boys’ fantasies of ghastly quality (given
that “90 per-cent of mainstream readers are adolescent males ranging in age from
about twelve to twenty”—12 to thoughtful artistic masterpieces.13 The only thing all
comics seem to have in common is that their particular philosophy, or lack thereof, is
primarily conveyed through a specific code of bodily representation, as often the
illustrational background is immaterial (a tradition probably inherited from the blank
W.J.T. Mitchell, “Representation,” Critical Terms for Literary Study, Frank Lentricchia and
Thomas McLaughlin, eds. (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1999): 15. On the
subject of comics as reflections of culture, see: Joseph Witek, “From Genre to Medium:
Comics and Contemporary American Culture,” Rejuvenating the Humanities, Ray B. Brown
and Marshall Fishwick, eds. (Bowling Green, OH: Popular, 1992): 71-79; also: Thomas M.
Inge, Comics as Culture, (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1980).
10 Klaus Kaindl, “Multimodality in the Translation of Humour in Comics,” Perspectives on
Multimodality, Eija Ventola, Charles Cassidy and Martin Kaltenbacher, eds., Document Design
Companion 6 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004): 183.
11 Kaindl 183.
12 Matthew Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson, NC: U of
Mississippi P, 1999): 13.
13 Examples of the latter are, among others, Astérix (a René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo hit
since 1959-61), Raw’s 1972 Maus by Art Spiegelman and DC’s 1989 The Sandman by Neil
Gaiman.
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squares of early cartoon strips). Still, as Sigmund Freud opined, human truths lurk
especially in bad, “egocentric” art,14 while artistic quality, especially after the 1980s,
is no longer the sole privilege of alternative comics. Some mainstream comics that
have written history in the genre continue to evoke respectful interest even in present
age of savage competition. One of these is the 1961 book that actually “revolutionized
comics...and gave birth to what is now called the Marvel Universe,” creating the
phenomenon of Marvel Comics (today part of the colossal Marvel Entertainment
Group).15 It was the vehicle for the innovative art of two giants in the field:16
creator/author, comic-book icon and Marvel President, Stan Lee, and the man who
“quite simply...is American comics,” celebrated artist Jack Kirby—17and its title was
The Fantastic Four.18 The recent blockbuster film with the same title that premiered
July 8, 2005, as well as its 2007 sequel, have given rise to much talk about aspects of
the book and its adaptation, mostly among aficionados.19 What this essay intends to
show, however, is that the unique value and appeal of the FF lies in that its characters
were the first to present to their audience a new (mainly bodily) heroic form, one that
challenges
prescribed
forms
of
beauty
by
deconstructing
them
with
technoscientifically-generated hyperbole to the point of grotesqueness. Furthermore, it
wants to suggest that this new, mutated heroic model reflects the changing aesthetic
and cultural attitudes of U.S. teens then and now.
II. From the Classical to the Grotesque Heroic Body
The story of The Fantastic Four appears on a certain level artistically naive
and typical of comic books: four friends, attempting to be the first interstellar
Sigmund Freud, (1908) “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” Critical Theory since Plato,
Revised ed., Hazard Adams, ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers,
1992): 714-15.
15 Mark Voger, “Living Legend: A Half-century Later, Jack Kirby Is Still the American Comic
Book,” Comics Scene Yearbook 2 (1993): 36.
16 Will Murray, “Farewell to the King: Friends Remember That King of Comics, the
Legendary Jack Kirby,” Comics Scene 42 (May 1994): 14.
17 Voger 36.
18 Stan Lee, writer, and Jack Kirby, penciller, The Fantastic Four (New York: Marvel
Comics/Marvel Entertainment Group, 1961). All Marvel characters examined in this article
are property of Marvel Comics/Marvel Entertainment Group and are used by license
graciously granted for academic purposes by their copyright owners.
19 The Fantastic Four, Tim Story, dir., starring Kerry Washington, Chris Evans, Jessica Alba,
Ioan Gruffudd, Michael Chiklis, Julian McMahon (Marvel Entertainment Group, 2005); The
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, starring Chris Evans, Jessica Alba, Ioan Gruffudd,
Michael Chiklis, Julian McMahon, Lawrence Fishburne (Marvel Entertainment Group, 2007).
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travellers on a private spaceship, encounter an accidental storm of cosmic rays and are
bodily transformed by the radiation into elemental super-powered beings. Vowing to
use their powers for good as a group called the Fantastic Four, they establish
themselves in New York and become American icons as well as protectors of the
nation, the planet, and the universe.20
The realization of the story has been marked unalterably by the 50s-60s
mentality of its creation time: the heroes wear demure full-body uniforms and their
attitudes and types reflect a conservative W.A.S.P.-ish set. The book clearly promotes
post-War era suburban values such as affluence and complacency, the space-race (as
the Marvel Encyclopedia notes, “The Fantastic Four are not super heroes in the
traditional sense.[....] They are astronauts, envoys, explorers...trailblazers”21),
vigilance against the Communist threat, and the Baby-Boom emphasis on family
values, as, “whatever dangers they face, they face as a family.” 22 However, a
particular infusion of the grotesque in the FF—whose mutated bodies are not the
perfect homo sapiens specimens that Superman’s or Captain American’s are—
combined with the usual comic-book conventions, oddly serves also as a questioning
and caricature of the above values, while engaging in the postmodern anxiety of the
human identity grounded on the body, and issues of species versus technology,
virtuality, and fictions of the self.23 After all, “the grotesque” is defined as:
decorative art in sculpture, painting, and architecture characterized by fantastic
representations of human and animal forms often combined into formal
distortions of the natural to the point of absurdity, ugliness, or caricature.... By
extension, grotesque is applied to anything having the qualities of grotesque
art: bizarre, incongruous, ugly, unnatural, fantastic, abnormal.24
Thus it stands to reason that the combination of human and superhuman, although
intended for appeal, may lead to that effect. This is also supported by Rosi Braidotti’s
discussion on monsters, “human beings who are born with congenital malformations
Matt Brady, Marvel Encyclopedia, Mark Beazley and Jeff Youngquist, eds. (New York:
Marvel Comics, 2002): 68.
21 Brady 68.
22 Brady 68.
23 A methodologically similar, yet admittedly much more negative critique of fantasy-asallegory of the pathology of culture can be seen in Louis Marin’s 1977 “Disneyland: A
Degenerate Utopia,” Contemporary Literary Criticism, 3rd ed., Robert Con Davis and Ronald
Schleifer, eds. (New York and London: Longman, 1994): 283-95.
24 Hugh C. Holman and William Harmon, "Grotesque," A Handbook to Literature, 6th ed. (New
York: Macmillan, 1992): 219.
20
5
of their bodily organism [....] defined in terms of excess, lack, or displacement of
organs,” evoking both fascination and abhorrence.25 In fact the malformed
superheroic may be a particularly American variant of grotesque, if we accept Jean
Baudrillard’s claim that the “American ‘way of life’” is characterized by:
its mythic banality, its dream quality, and its grandeur. That philosophy which
is immanent not only in technological development but also in the exceeding
of technology in its own excessive play...in the apocalyptic forms of
banality...in the hyperreality of that life which, as it is, displays all the
characteristics of fiction.26
In the FF in particular, comic grotesqueness furthermore can be seen as an attempt to
liberate the body from the tyranny of classical form concepts on which comic book
artists had been up to that point attached: the “Greek fold” on the pelvis, the
foreshortened limbs and the powerful upper torso of the 8th century BCE kouroi that is
duplicated in every Batman or Captain Marvel pose well until the 1990s. Given that
the origin of the group lies not in some mysterious magical or divine event, but in a
scientific experiment, the comic raises in the early 60s questions debunking both the
myth of the teleological race of the species to achieve the beautiful, that is, the
rationally-understood self, as well as the transcendental signified of the unalterable
“naturaleness” of the resulting human beings. After all, according to Arthur Kroker,
there is a more-than-symbolic connection between space-travel and the metahuman
(or posthuman) self: “Maybe we are already living in another dimension of space
travel: in a sub-space warp jump, a virtual reality where we can finally recognize that
we are destined to leave this planet because we have already exited this body.”27
Accordingly, one must amend the comic hero representational code as theorized by
Umberto Eco, who, in “The Myth of Superman,” speaks of a heroic-comic prolonged
destiny:
The mythological character of the comic strips finds himself in this singular
situation: he must be an archetype, the totality of certain collective aspirations,
and therefore he must necessarily become immobilized in an emblematic and
Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist
Theory, Carolyn C. Heilbrun and Nancy K. Miller, eds., Gender and Culture series (New York:
Columbia UP, 1994): 7-8.
26 Jean Baudrillard, (1986) America, Chris Turner, trans. (London and New York: Verso, 1995):
95.
25
6
fixed nature which renders him easily recognizable...; but since he is marked
in the sphere of a “romantic” production for a public that consumes
“romances,” he must be subjected to a development which is typical...of
novelistic characters.28
The superhero, then, must “remain ‘inconsumable’ [i.e., fixed, because already
consumed and permanently altered by his heroic difference] and at the same time be
‘consumed’ according to the ways of everyday life” to keep the series going. 29 Eco,
however, oversees the dimension of heroic density in modern comics, where the
fusion of, and tension between, the subversive fantastic and the conforming mimetic
can create a bodily self that is multifaceted, playful, and “into” the metanarrative of its
artificiality. To put it in other words, archetypes are highly complex and compacted
items; allowing the possibility that their “romantic” narrative “unpacking” will lead
not to some heroic resolution, but to an open-ended exacerbation of their latent
bizarreness. Therefore we can speak of an ideal grotesqueness in the sense of a
hyperbolic (i.e., hyper-explored, extended) depiction of classical heroic beauty that,
clashing with altered notions of the body and what is human in the 20th century,
reflects a prevalent existential angst.
III. Mr Fantastic: Science Stretched Too Thin
An examination of the portraits of each of the FF members, with emphasis on
their fantastic bodies will serve to illustrate the above concept, demonstrating also
how the “multimodality” of the “hybrid genre” of comics, according to Kaindl, allows
the critical reader to operate both on the level of “linguistic elements” and that of
“pictographic elements” and “pictorial representations,” as well as via “intertextual
reference.”30 We should note first that the number four is in itself significant. It recalls
the holy number of cosmic order in several (folk) mythologies and Carl Gustav Jung’s
“four functions of consciousness, or the four stages of the anima or animus” that
create the mature, “individuated” self.31 Accordingly, each FF member will be shown
Arthur Kroker, SPASM: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh, Culture Texts Series
(Montréal: New World Perspectives, 1993): 38.
28 Eco, Umberto, “The Myth of Superman.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and
Contemporary Trends. 2nd ed., David H. Richter, ed. (Boston: Bedford, 1998): 867-68.
29 Eco 868-69.
30 Kaindl 173-74.
31 Marie L. von Franz, “The Process of Individuation,” Man and His Symbols, Introduction by
Carl G. Jung, ed. (New York: Dell/Laurel, 1968): 214.
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7
to embody an aspect of the Jungian psychosomatic tangents that synthesize the
holistic self: that is, the Self, the ego, the animus and the anima.
Reed Richards, codenamed Mr. Fantastic, the unquestionable leader of the
group, is prototype of the American man of the 50s-60s. The “consumed” hero in
Eco’s theory32 can be seen as an apt metaphor of the American self, which for
Baudrillard, “Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual
present”—something that would explain the everyday fabulism of American life.33
Reed, accordingly, is already “consumed” as a multimillionaire scientific genius who
creates an interstellar rocket, so his role changes little when his entire body acquires
the ability to stretch like sentient rubber. Mr. Fantastic represents fittingly the Self, or
the overall controlling “mind” of Jung’s fourfold division. As Marie von Franz says:
The organizing center from which the regulatory effect stems seems to
be a sort of “nuclear atom” in our psychic system. One could also call it the
inventor, organizer, and source of dream images. Jung called this center the
“Self” and described it as the totality of the whole psyche, in order to
distinguish it from the “ego,” which constitutes only a small part of the total
psyche.34
In fact, stretching serves as a physical metaphor for American identity since, as
Stephen Fender shows, the immigrants’ journey across the Atlantic and the creation of
the a new national super-imposed identity is a staple of the “American Difference,”
and “exceptionalism.”35 It also stands, however, for American techno-scientific
theories and capacity (a point also made ironically at the beginning of the film). In
this “dreamer’s” stretching are summed the 50s miracle of atomic energy and the 60s
space program optimism about reaching the stars,36 democratically available to all
adventurers, as shown by Marvel’s and “the world’s first ‘imaginauts’”;37 the
expanded limits of knowledge; the blanketing hegemony of reasonable theory which
Reed continuously spouts; the extension of the self through bulky exo-skeletonic
Eco 868.
Baudrillard 76.
34 von Franz 161-62.
35 Stephen Fender, “The American Difference," Modern American Culture: An Introduction,
Mick Gidley, ed. (New York: Longman, 1994): 7-8.
36 Preoccupation with the space-race program, as seen poignantly in Oriana Fallaci’s
journalistic memoir-novel of post-War America, If the Sun Dies (New York: Kingsport, 1966),
had reached the point of national craze among all age groups, and led then to scientific
speculations that appeared much more fantastic than even comic book scenarios.
37 Brady 68.
32
33
8
machines, such as Reed ceaselessly constructs in his lab, and which signal not only
the infantile wish of the brain for rapid maturation of the “premature” body, 38 but also
clearly a penile valorization, where expansion matters. In Jungian terms too, the
controlling-synthesizing principle that Reed Richards represents is often pictured as
the archetype of the “Cosmic Man”: “a gigantic, symbolic human being who
embraces and contains the whole cosmos” and appears in someone’s dreams to herald
a “creative solution to his conflict.”39 Mr. Fantastic fights by wrapping tight around
his foes (or angry friends, in the film) like a giant straightjacket (symbolically
restraining demented evil or rage by good reason). In short, his body is literally the
cliché of the word made flesh—and a phallogocentric cliché at that (as Reed is always
right—in theory!).
Mr. Fantastic is furthermore cast as the group paterfamilias, designating his
sobriquet as a generic name to his “Fantastic” clan. He also has this dignified older
look, always neat and shaven, with a reed-y body, graying temples, and, until the 80s,
a pipe. Reed is duty-obsessed (rarely eats or plays) and painfully sober—the epitome
of the dysfunctional scientist. This nerd quality is exaggerated in the first film to the
point of making him appear constantly victimized: Reed is called “the world’s
dumbest smart guy” by fellow member Torch and the first manifestation of his
stretching powers is characterized as being “gross,” while later he is rubberized to the
point of literally losing bodily coherence and “melting.” In other words, he looks
nothing like the typical twentysomething superhero, with the buff, solid body and the
“gung-ho” attitude, reflecting perhaps an early sign from the turn from the hegemony
of the “quarterback” macho masculine model to that of the 21st century
“metrosexual.” Reed is furthermore responsible to a fault—literally, for the spaceship
fiasco of the group’s genesis. While the typical (super)hero only reacts to the trauma
of some personal or general injustice, Reed is the sole author of his own trauma, and
those of his team-mates (something only seen in recent pop heroic figures, such as
Xena: Warrior Princess). Like the veterans that lived through the trauma of a World
conflict and must exonerate for, and be vigilant about, history, Reed battles foes
allegorical of the World War (read: cosmic ray assault), the Red Scare (as in the FF’s
antithesis, the Soviet team of the Frightful Four), and the H-Bomb (a cosmic
Jacques Lacan, (1949) "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience,” Contemporary Literary Criticism, 3rd ed., Robert Con Davis and
Ronald Schleifer, eds. (New York and London: Longman, 1994): 384.
38
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Destroyer known as Galactus, the villain of the second film) in order to bring about
this new age of prosperity, progress and family values. This hope that all can heal is
known as “comic-book physics,” where freak accidents don’t kill, but grant superpowers, and even an atom bomb explosion can eventually lead to good.40
Nevertheless, the cool dependability of Mr. Fantastic comes at the cost of his own
paranoia, resembling his body that can super-stretch, but in the stretching loses its
human shape and structure, becomes amorphous—and can constrict one to death in
trying to offer a protective techno-enhanced hug. The superphallic quality of Reed’s
body is also mocked by a feminizing penetrability of his faculties: he isolates himself
in his lab experiments, only to be usually the one to detect or create thus the FF’s
newest threat. His technologically-advanced Manhattan skyscraper, which serves as
the FF headquarters and is named “Four Freedoms Plaza”—suggesting the fourfold
basis of the American Dream—is continuously broken into by supervillains, while his
dreamed-of life is always threatened. And all that because his hubristic spaceship was
penetrated by cosmic rays,41 when Mother Nature decided to show the Male Scientific
nous who’s boss by afflicting the male body with a feminized pliancy and softness—
and making him like it, too!
Finally, although Reed is the one to whom all the other teammates relate
immediately, he bungles his social duties, prefering his laboratory sanctum: no matter
how much he can stretch, the brain’s self-referentiality is a limited state of being.
Ironically, Reed’s oldest relation is to the arch-enemy of the FF, the evil genius
Victor Von Doom, or Dr. Doom. Typically the alter Ego of the scientist, Doom stands
for the dark monstrous Other to the mythical hero, with a name that recalls mad
professors like Dr. Strangelove,42 or even J. Robert Oppenheimer.43 Although Dr.
von Franz 211.
An issue most thoroughly and controversially explored in Marvel’s 1962 The Incredible Hulk,
again by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby—whose two film adaptations have joined 2008’s Iron Man,
the three X-Men, and three Spiderman films (so far) as a Marvel screen blockbuster.
41 In the film, in fact, the hubris is lessened by having the space station (this time) belong to
Reed's antagonistic former classmate who now funds Reed’s ambitious project, Victor von
Doom (see more below). While Reed only wants to study the cosmic ray storm for medical
purposes beneficial to humankind, von Doom’s faulty equipment, so to speak, and his
insistence that the experiment go on, despite the danger, are what bring about the
transformation. The change, though serving well the “Good Scientist, Bad Tycoon” motif,
blunts the intricacy and sharpness of the questions posed by the original comic, on whose
thinking this paper is based.
42 The character, a caricature of Henry Kissinger that became a cultural metaphor, comes from
the 1964 offbeat film hit by Stanley Kubrick (who also wrote the screenplay with Terry
39
40
10
Doom’s status from orphaned nomad to monarch of Latveria (a fantastic Balkan
nation)44 contrasts to the democratic, family-oriented U.S. and its 60s fear of Eastern
Communism, the Latverian prosperity suggests a kind of paternalistic enlightened rule
not unlike Reed’s own leadership of his team. Doom was Richards’s college peer and
rival, and it was due to their frenzied competition that Doom conducted an erroneous
experiment that resulted in his disfigurement and subsequent permanent encasement
in full body armor, topped by a medieval (i.e., anti-New World) green cowl and
cape.45 Antithetical to Reed’s stretching, Doom’s containing armor is, nevertheless,
also a technologically-advanced device like a cosmonaut suit, signifying the dark side
of Reed’s self-isolating vision which, for Groensteen, is duplicated by the “‘existential
dream’ that a reader experiences when he plunges into the world of small pictures.”46
After all, for Kroker:
Heidegger was wrong. Technology is not something restless, dynamic and
ever expanding, but just the opposite. The will to technology equals the will to
virtuality. And the will to virtuality is about the recline of western civilization:
a great shutting-down of experience, with a veneer of technological dynamism
over an inner reality of inertia, exhaustion, and disappearances....47
Right from the start, therefore, the comic book questions the purity of its superheroic
model and simultaneously casts a shadow (em-bodied as well as reflected in the
Lacanian mirror-image of “dark-Ages” Doom) over the American obsession with the
Southern), starring Peter Sellers, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
the Bomb.
43 In what has become by now an anecdotal piece of Americana, Oppenheimer, seeing his
plutonium bomb explode at Los Alamos on July 16, 1945, finally realized the ramifications of
his team’s creation and whispered the line from the Hindu epic of the Baghavad Gita: “Behold,
I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.” See: Mark C. Carnes, “About J. Robert
Oppenheimer,” American National Biography (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), May 12, 2003,
Online,
Internet,
available
WWW:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/af/aboutopp.htm .
44 Brady 87.
45 Echoing Alexander Dumas’s 1846 The Man in the Iron Mask--and acknowledgedly
foreshadowing Darth Vader, according to: Donald D. Markstein, “The Fantastic Four,”
Toonopedia,
May
12,
2003,
Online,
Internet,
available
WWW:
http://www.toonopedia.com/fant4.htm. In the film, Doom’s similarity to Reed and the rest
of the group is in fact heightened by having him also be exposed to the cosmic rays and
mutate into an organic metal being with electromagnetic powers. The difference there is that
while Reed views the mutation as “an infection,” Doom enjoys it as a step towards
godhood—reflecting the typical division between humanitarian (usually medicine-related)
aspects of science and industrial technology that corrupts one’s humanity out of them and
turns them into “robots.”
46 Groensteen 40-41.
11
improvement of the body through technoscience (particularly intensified today with
cyborg mechanics and genetic alchemy).
IV. The Invisible=Woman: A Storm and Her Teacup
The early-60s mark of the FF comic is equally evident in Reed’s fiancée and
later wife, Susan Storm-Richards, a.k.a. The Invisible Girl (subsequently, the Invisible
Woman). It is no wonder, therefore, that of all the characters she was the one most
revamped in the 2005 film, played by the best-known actress among those involved,
and upgraded to a fellow top scientist and a prize of contention between Reed and von
Doom. The name alone suggests the textbook case of woman in patriarchy, as
“‘Woman’ is that which is assigned and has no power of self-definition.”48 The
Invisible=Woman is the blank (i.e., penis-less) spot, as “unrepresentable” as death on
which, according to a slew of feminist critics, the phallogocentric empire of the
symbolic sign is inscribed and built.49 Her role as “impressionable” tabula
permanently rasa is heightened by the age-difference between her and Reed: she was
12-year old when she developed a crush on Reed as a graduate student, so in a sense
she is also “consumed” before she is erased.50 Sue is typically “ladylike,” blonde (a
hue next to invisible), and usually penciled as Doris Day or June Cleaver—51 that is,
an “invisible” original self styled as a copy of the ideal 60s housewife. Most
ironically, the sacrifice of her aspirations to movie stardom in order to serve invisibly
her “family”’s greater good,52 and her subsequent high-visibility as team lady only
reinforces the schema of a woman’s erasure-and-reinscription according to the
patriarchal codes of representation. Sue’s auxiliary power to produce invisible forcefields that can briefly envelop and shield the others from trouble makes her the bodily
metonymy for the sheltering home which is a woman’s oyster. Her modus operandi is
Kroker 7-8.
Braidotti 63.
49 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and
Criticism, Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP,
1991): 342.
50 Brady 73.
51 Television’s W.A.S.P. situational comedy idols of the 50s and the 60s, looking practically
identical in their short platinum-blonde coiffs, blue eyes, matching pastel outfits and
perennially sunny, angel-in-the-house disposition, these actresses/typecast TV characters (the
former the star of several films and shows, and the latter the “mother” in the series Leave It to
Beaver) created a slew of female imitators on- and off-screen, cementing the legend of the
impeccable American suburban housewife.
52 Brady 73.
47
48
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to sneak undetected in or, usually, out of the battlefield, fall unconscious or captive
(due to a soft heart and unsound judgment), and then get rescued by the male
members of the FF, worrying all the while whether Reed (who usually ignores her
pleas, thus making her twice invisible)53 has had his dinner, even when the world is
literally coming to an end!54
Sue’s utter devotion and deference to Reed appears to earn her the position of
the anima in the Jungian quadripartite division of the personality, that is, “the female
element in every male,” especially since Jung describes the anima as essentially a
certain inferior kind of relatedness to the surroundings…which is kept carefully
concealed from others as well as from oneself.”55 In addition, “the anima appears in
her proper positive role…as a mediator between the ego and the Self,” 56 a role which
Sue fills by always easing the tension between Reed-the Self and her flamboyant
brother, the Torch, whom we shall see occupies the ego position. Ostensibly the
motivator and “heart” of the team body,57 the Invisible Sue nevertheless also serves
the model of the tainted “Eve” of phallogocentric mythos, by developing an attraction
for another former foe—later superhero—Namor the Submariner, the amphibian
Prince of Atlantis, and thus stands accused of betrayal by her teammates.58 This
excess of primal female desire uncontained by domesticity or Reed’s “stretching” is
the chink in the armor of optimistic technology that characterizes the FF, their antiLacanian “lack” that she makes visible. In another sense, Sue is a domesticated
manifestation of the Medusa archetype, the anxiety-inducing symbol of the
“castrated” female genitals—59 and it is no coincidence that her invisibility is always
depicted as a fading from the waist down.60 Further ironic is the fact that, by necessity
Bowing to the changed mores of the 21st century, this trait is turned to Sue's advantage in
the film, where Reed admits that his ignoring of Sue's (and his own) needs and amorous
feelings was what led to their earlier college breakup and subsequent estrangement.
54 As literally depicted in Stan Lee, writer, and Jack Kirby, penciller, “The Coming of
Galactus!” The Fabulous Fantastic Four: Marvel Treasury Edition 1.2 (December 1974): 59.
55 Carl Gustav Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” Man and His Symbols, Introduction by
Carl G. Jung, ed. (New York: Dell/Laurel, 1968): 17.
56 von Franz 195.
57 Brady 73.
58 Stan Lee, writer, and Jack Kirby, penciller, “Captives of the Deadly Duo,” The Fabulous
Fantastic Four: Marvel Treasury Edition 1.2 (December 1974): 15.
59 David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern
Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 1997): xvi; also Cixous 342.
60 On the discussion of woman as monster, see also Braidotti, esp. 79-83; and Kristevan film
theorist Barbara Creed’s book The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis
(London: Routledge, 1993).
53
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of comic-book semiotics, where everything must be imaged, the Invisible Woman is
never truly invisible! Usually shown as/in a white cutout, or as a dotted-line sketch (a
universal signifier, ironically, for “object missing”), she remains prey to the
patriarchal division of “woman as image, man as bearer of the look,”61 but
simultaneously invites the reader to reconstruct the missing lady by paying enough
attention to her. She is the spectre that haunts observable (ergo, scientific)
epistemology. This suggestion might also be aided by the fact that comics are
considered a “feminine” genre, not only because the image is considered as the
sensory/”seductive” counterpart to masculine logos/text, but additionally because
comics subject respectably macho males to gaudy, even garish costumes.62 The
Invisible Woman’s later 1994 “liberation”—albeit brief—from her demure 60s fullbody costume (with a midriff-less swimsuit featuring a cutout “4” right on her
cleavage) may on the one hand obviously serve to titillate the teen male audience, but
on the other provides her with enough provocative “naughtiness” to gain central
focus: to use Cixous tongue-in-cheek, “women are body. More body, hence more
writing.”63 What in fact the play between in/visible and femininity in the case of
Susan Storm-Richards makes apparent is how, in its commercially- and culturallydriven quest for beautiful visibility (of which Sue is a model, literally), the authentic
image of each woman always suffers, and can be easily erased. What, one wonders, is
worse, being prettily normal, i.e. invisible, or being noticed as ugly? In the film the
monstrous Thing votes first for the former option, but ends up triumphantly trading it
for helpful—i.e, visible—ugliness in the end. Finally, Sue does credit to her surname,
Storm, by providing the unsettling natural force which—like the cosmic ray storm—
upsets the road to a scientific utopia. For Braidotti, the “monstrous” female body has
been the venue of inscription, “progressing from the fantastic dimension of the bodily
organism to a more rationalistic construction of the body-machine,” and
simultaneously of negation of patriarchal scientific thought.64 In the same way, in the
FF Sue produces two children with chaotic potential: her son Franklin, a superLaura Mulvey, (1975) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Contemporary Literary
Criticism, 3rd ed., Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds. (New York and London:
Longman, 1994): 425.
62 For the gendered division of image and word, as well as the impact of technology on those
concepts, see: Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick, eds., Eloquent Images: Word and Image
in the Age of New Media (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2003).
63 Cixous 343.
64 Braidotti 83.
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powerful mutant due to his inherited genetics, is set to become in the future either the
Savior, or the Destroyer of Worlds, verifying on the one hand the myth of woman as
Madonna/Eve, but on the other affirming female (pro)creativity over male technocreation. Her daughter Valeria, in addition, owes her safe birth to Dr. Doom, who
steps in when Reed is unable to help. Susan then lets Doom become the godfather and
guardian of her daughter, leading by a regression to an organic and purely bodily path
toward a reconciliation of magic and science, medievalism and futurism, evil and
good that Mr. Fantastic’s technology, with all its attempts to render woman invisible
and supplant her powers with machines, could not achieve.65
V. The Human Torch: No Man on Fire
That leaves Susan’s younger brother Johnny Storm, a.k.a. the Human Torch,
as the epitome of superheroic bodily parody. Granted by the cosmic rays the power to
light up his whole body in living fire, project flames, and fly, the Torch takes his
former hobby of hotrod car racing to turning his own body into that high-technology
hotrod.66 The obvious representation of not only the torch of Liberty, an American
symbol, but also an idealized Baby-Boomer generation—fast, shining, high-flying,
ever-youthful, good-looking—is overshadowed however by the inability of Johnny to
ever slow down or evolve beyond his shallow sophomoric self. He represents the team
spirit; but the spirit of America’s biotechnological future is ever-racing, and to reign it
in by way of a maturation process that would make the Torch less hot but more
Human mocks the potential for everlasting dynamism that is America. For, “in
America,” Baudrillard observes, “the arrival of night-time or periods of rest cannot be
accepted, nor can the Americans bear to see the technological process halted”—as
seen symbolically in “the obsessive fear of the Americans...that the lights might go
out.”67 In Jungian terms, the Torch represents the ego, the part of the personality that
tends “to follow its own arbitrary impulses” but only so as “to make real the totality—
the whole psyche. It is the ego that serves to light up the entire system, allowing it to
become conscious and thus to be realized” (emphasis mine).68 It is indeed very often
the Torch’s impetuous and reckless actions that mobilize the team to a new adventure,
or start some drama, but only as far as he follows Reed’s leadership to a happy
Brady 88.
Brady 71.
67 Baudrillard 50.
65
66
15
conclusion. In the same way, the ego is said to be productive only when it is “able to
listen attentively and to give itself, without any further design or purpose, to that inner
urge toward growth,”69 a trait stressed in the film too, where Johnny is the first to
embrace, name, and initiate the superhero team identity, but is only useful to it when
he subdues his blatant egoistic immaturity. Since comics require constant action,
however, those spells of human sobriety are soon burnt out, and it has been an
increasing staple of the comic-book to show the Torch “incapable of committing to a
serious, long-term romantic relationship.... Immature and prone to distraction in other
areas.[....] Impetuous and hotheaded.”70 Johnny Storm is further undermined by the
fact that he is not the original Human Torch, but a re-creation of a 40s “Golden Age”
android superhero by the same name. This “passing on the torch” offers Johnny some
legitimacy, but also sets an unsettling comparison between this technologicallymutated human who loses his humanity and the older, more dignified robot that
achieves humanity and heroism by painstaking effort. Johnny’s plight suggests then
that mere bodily evolution without the comparable mental or spiritual ripening leaves
paradoxically one a mere “spirit” indeed—like alcohol, very flammable, but with no
underlying substance.
VI. The Thing: Grotesque Rocks!
Representing the body in the fourfold division of the self, Benjamin Grimm,
a.k.a. “the Thing,” is finally the only member of the team with a nonhuman
codename, not kin to the others, wearing merely a pair of briefs (or, later, tights)
instead of a bodysuit, and so is in every way distanced from the other three. While the
others represent the “giant step” forward, he is like a primeval stone-idol drawn from
the archetypal unconscious (though such idols carried an unusual amount of
animation).71 According to von Franz, “the stone symbolizes what is perhaps the
simplest and deepest experience—the experience of something eternal that man can
have in those moments when he feels immortal and unalterable.”72 Since the cosmic
von Franz 163.
von Franz 164.
70 Brady 71.
71 Aniela Jaffé, “Symbolism in the Visual Arts,” Man and His Symbols, Introduction by Carl G.
Jung, ed. (New York: Dell/Laurel, 1968): 259.
72 von Franz 224. As Baudrillard also says about America, “It is metamorphic forms that are
magical. Not the sylvan, vetrified, mineralized forest.{..} It takes this surreality of the elements
to eliminate nature’s picturesque qualities, just as it takes the metaphysics of sped to
68
69
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rays turn his skin into a hideous orange rock-like growth, trapping him into a superstrong and invulnerable shell, the Thing in one sense resembles more Dr. Doom than
the other team members, who can invoke their beautiful human bodies anytime. Yet
Ben comes across unquestionably (both in the comic book and the film) as the most
human of the FF, perhaps, for one, because, as Jungians say, stones “are especially
apt symbols of the Self because of the ‘just-so-ness’ of their nature”73 that eschews
any alienating super-imposition. For another reason, Ben’s role is the one
comfortingly closest to the average man on the street, as opposed to a genius, a model/
wife, or a pop idol. His name evokes the Franklinean ethic that is the legendary
bedrock of the American marvel, since Ben chanced as Reed’s college room-mate
because of his football star scholarship, became a World War II combat hero, and
used his aviator talents to build his own successful enterprise. Thus Ben serves as the
Jungian animus, the inner masculine principle, both in its earliest manifestation as “a
personification of mere physical power—for instance, as an athletic champion or
‘muscle man’,” and in its more mature subsequent role as a source of creative
“spiritual firmness.”74 But Reed’s insistence that Ben pilot his experimental spaceship
tragically confines Ben into being the mere strongman of the team, exaggerating his
rough Hell’s Kitchen talk and attitude, summarized in the Thing’s battle cry: “It’s
clobberin’ time!”
A deeper still insight about technoscience is therefore intimated here, beyond
the obvious Shelleyan point that careless use of biotechnology can afflict one’s
dearest buddy with Frankensteinitis gravis. Techno-evolution, we are told, can
actually regress the human body, since by transferring skill, dexterity and importance
to the biomechanical aids, the original flesh loses its usefulness, becomes a hulking,
ungainly thing in contrast to its sleek and superfast accoutrements, and might as well
be a Stone Age throwback—a grim fate indeed, as Ben’s surname suggests. In Eco’s
terms, the Thing is the only hero who is really consumed by the accident; yet
ironically, by virtue of his afflicted body, Ben’s tragedy can also provide a reliable
point of contrast and criticism to Mr. Fantastic’s project. In fact, Ben is the only one
with his own philosophy and license to contradict, or make fun of “Stretcho.”
eliminate the natural picturesqueness of travel” (8-9). Therefore the presence of a stone man
draws attention both in primal and futuristic terms.
73 von Franz 221.
74 von Franz 206-07.
17
The Thing is also the only team member to constantly develop outside
relationships, something which designates him as the comic connection to the real
world: Ben Grimm represents the average male teenage comics reader, with his yetrough thinking trying to adjust to a changing, uncomfortable body that sprouts hair
and acne and a gravely voice, and with his attempt to mask the fear of change
underneath an armor of culturally-encrusted manhood and peer affections. In the
avant-garde way of the FF, he may also be an early sign of the fitness craze that has
been a basic trait of western society since the 1980s, and which has led thousands of
people, and especially insecure teens searching for strength and confidence, to “pump
up” their bodies, often monstrously, in gyms and through drugs, often illegal and
dangerous ones. To put it otherwise in Kristevan terms, the Thing is the symbolic
shell of patriarchal masculinity that congeals over the semiotic potential underneath—
and the irreversibility of the process, despite Reed’s frequent attempts to “cure” Ben,
suggests the gradual conditioning of humans to fit their assigned bodies. This speaks
for “Lacan’s description [in his 1953 “Some Reflections on the Ego”] of the formation
of subjectivity in the mirror stage, in which a sense of ‘primordial Discord’ emerges
alongside an image of corporeal totality, creating a fantasy of ‘the body in bits and
pieces’ as a retrospective representation of presymbolic chaos”—75 as pictured
eloquently in the fragmented, cobblestone quality of the Thing’s hide.
It is also through Ben that the comic book tilts this Platonic supertechnological
teleology towards the grotesque by going where Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein
feared to tread, i.e. in the realm of the sexuality of the monstrous body. As we learn
from Anne K. Mellor’s study, what drives Dr. Frankenstein to destroy his female
animant while still at the creation stage76 is fear of:
...female sexuality as such. A woman who is sexually liberated, free to choose
her own life, her own sexual partner (by force, if necessary). And to propagate
at will can appear only monstrously ugly to Victor Frankenstein, for she defies
that sexist aesthetic that insists that women be small, delicate, modest, passive,
and sexually pleasing—but available only to their lawful husbands.77
Hillman and Mazzio xvi.
Mary Shelley, (1818) Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus, Introduction by Diane
Johnson, Bantam Classics (New York and Toronto: Bantam, 1981): 150-51.
77 Anne K. Mellor, “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein,” Romanticism and
Feminism, Anne K. Mellor, ed. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988): 224.
75
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Such a lady appears in 1989, when fellow superheroine Ms. Marvel is accidentally
turned into a female Thing-clone with long eyelashes and breasts and becomes Ben’s
lover. On the one hand, “Ms. Thing” may be a simplistic male conceptualization of
the new 80s assertive woman: one of those Kirby women who, in Voger’s opinion,
“are beautiful in their own way, but they’re powerful and not altogether sexual.”78 The
romance promotes the comic-book soap-opera without transgressing into the
forbidden “contamination” of interspecies/interracial relationships (especially in a
comic-book without a single minority character in it!), and it is never concluded, as
the grotesque Ms. Marvel eventually reverts to pretty Sharon Ventura. Nevertheless, it
is sobering to consider, even briefly, the proliferation of the truly mutated body, the
nonhuman new human race, which might well be the projected foreboding on the
outcome of current cultural and technological tampering with the body.79 In the other
team-members, the reversal into a human bodily form offers the comfort of the
repeated and familiar sign whose recurrence in writing (here drawing), as Derrida
suggests in Of Grammatology, is the basis for a system of meaning;80 but in a world
of Things, what (signifying) value would the body have?
Adjacent to this issue is the deconstruction of the ostensible glorification of
team heroism, science and family values in the FF by the focus on the unpredictable
mutagenic potential of these same values. Alone, the body remains static; it is in its
relation to other bodies that transformation occurs. Although technology can interfere
with, or duplicate partly the process of adaptive mutation, the network of stimuli is so
much larger than a laboratory can hold, or predict. One is then led to wonder if it is
the infamous “bioapparatus” that we truly have to fear,81 or whether we should instead
focus on the transformations happening every day on a non-superheroic level due to
simple interaction. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, “human bodies have the wonderful
ability, while striving for integration and cohesion, organic and psychic wholeness, to
also provide for and indeed produce fragmentations, fracturings, dislocations that
Voger 38.
On the subject of the new conceptualization of the body in technoculture, see: Ollivier
Dyens, Metal and Flesh; The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over, Evan J. Bibbee and
Ollivier Dyens, trans. (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2001).
80 Jacques Derrida, (1967) Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976).
81 Kroker 162.
78
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orient bodies and body parts toward other bodies and body parts.”82 Hence, one
should amend Eco’s observation that the superhero never changes, because s/he never
interacts with “our” reality on anything but a limited “civic” level. 83 The
informational density of the panels on the comic-book page, increasingly less linear in
its unfolding, where the body appears as both human and, in the same sweep of
vision, mutated; the further blending of such action images with word-balloons that
require momentary stasis; and the—often drastic—changes wrought on comic book
heroes by the changing of a penciller, or the re-casting of their origin in a new series
to reflect new mores or fashion trends, all these suggest the potentially transformative
complexity not only of the “su(pe)r-real,” but of the alluded-to real as well. At the
same time, this “constellation of script and image in their material difference, being
juxtaposed and integrated at the same time....parodies precisely that claim for a truth
beyond the signs, and directs our attention to the constellation of signs itself”—84 but
isn’t reality perception precisely such a sign system? Fantasy and reality interact
further as the artists habitually put a bit of themselves into their characters: Kirby
admits that many of his characters resemble him facially,85 while in the 2005 FF film
Stan Lee upholds a private film tradition and makes a cameo appearance as the
character Willie the Postman, who in the book brings to the team members fan mail
from their comic book readers! Adding to that mimetic realism on the page (especially
lately, with computer-assisted artwork), to superhero costumes at Halloween, to cooption of comic-book metaphors into the cliché stockhouse of language and culture,
we see comic escapism constantly returning back to its human source.
VII. Conclusion: A New Bodily Aesthetics?
Still, if the cluster of panels on the page or the relationship of the team
members in the FF is a bit like Foucault’s social web of “power/knowledge”
relations,86 then it must be admitted that there is no way out of that text;87 that “the
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994): 13.
83 Eco 876.
84 Ole Frahm, “Weird Signs. Comics as Means of Parody,” Michael Hein, trans., Comics and
Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum
P./U of Copenhagen, 2000): 180.
85 Voger 36.
86 As seen in all of Michel Foucault’s work, but especially in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of Prison (1975) and Power/Knowledge (1980).
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constellation of typographical and graphical signs....in their heterogeneous
materiality...are already self-referential,”88 or, as Thomas Beebee puts it, the “noise,”
“the non-systemic is simultaneously inside and outside the system.”89 The
“stretching” of the techno-evolutionary vision into the American future is, therefore,
either a chimera, or a metaphor for something else realizable within non-superhuman
parameters. By deconstructing from the inside the tensions inherent in the classical
ideal of the human form—which, if we remember its originating ideology, is itself
based not on the “human measure” of some normalcy but in the effort to transcend the
human and to become (running the risk of hubris all the while) isotheos, equal to the
gods—affirming the “play” of signification,90 the comic-book artist doesn’t simply
deliver a new and improved heroic body model, but also an escape from it. To the
extent, in fact, that comic-book drawing is a kind of caricaturing or parody,91 a
necessary abstraction in representation, this escape is already there—and justifiably
so. The metaphysical aim of physical grotesqueness is inherent, according to Kroker,
within the concept of high-technology or bio-technology utopianist visions:
...just like P.T. Barnum strained through the technological imperative: a
perfect fusion of the traveling carnival show and high technology. With this
difference:... a perfect crystallization of technocracy’s loathing of nature and
human nature [....] That’s the escape theme that pervades the promotional
language...: escaping from earth, escaping from the body, escaping from
America.92
The imperative for physical beauty, the cult of becoming the body has recognizably
become a hysteric concern for Western societies: “This omnipresent cult of the body
is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as
a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern.…”93 Faced with the
impossibility of ever matching screen idols or supermodels, the vulnerable teenager
As is also shown by the whole Derridean endeavor, seminally in his 1967 De la
grammatologie, where there is nothing which is beyond the text and all one can observe is the
“traces” in the text of anomalies, philosophical tensions and the “plurivocity” of writing”
88 Frahm 180.
89 Thomas O. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability
(University Park: Penn State UP, 1994): 17.
90 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,”
Writing and Difference, Introduction and Additional Notes by Alan Bass, trans. (Chicago: The
U. of Chicago P., 1978): 292.
91 Frahm 179.
92 Kroker 17.
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escapes into a fantasy world where this is realizable. On a deeper level, though, the
obfuscation or distortion of the classical heroic form in some mainstream (and most
alternative) comics, the stretching, pumping, twisting, mutating of the body is also an
attempt to inscribe a new set of aesthetic codes for what is desirable, or “super,” one
that liberates us (as seen from fan confessions in Pustz)94 from the tyranny of
prescribed form. It is no coincidence that, with the passage of time and the
exacerbation of youth existential anxieties, superheroes have been cast in ever scarier,
grotesque, traumatized molds, as evident in the comparison of the bodies of the FF in
the 60s with that of the most popular X-Man since the 1980s, the Hobbesian—short,
ugly, hairy and brutish—Wolverine. The FF themselves have also long been replaced
as the flagship of Marvel by the more daring X-Men, the true “homo superior”
mutants divorced from humankind as a species and as “uncanny” bodies (a trait
especially stressed in the teenage mutant characters among them).
In other words, if anorexic air-brushed advertoids are recognizably one form
of constructed fiction, setting standards more and more impossible to follow for the
average person, why not construct and promote an antagonistic one, that reflects the
stress (/stretch?) of perfecting the body? Even better, why not create a form that
transcends the body problem, or at least agonizes over the inability to transcend—the
“freak triumphant,” in Kroker’s words, “not...as a symbol of transgression, but of the
impossibility of transgression”?95 The Romantic (classical, actually) equation “Beauty
is truth” and vice versa is now replaced by Foucault’s more sober realization that truth
(and ergo beauty) “is a thing of this world…produced only by virtue of multiple forms
of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power.”96 If, therefore, the “regime of
truth” is dependent on power, in a world of super-powered beings it is this might that
sets the rules for what is desirable, exacting a small form of revenge, on behalf of
comic book readers (stereotyped as dysfunctional freaks) against what reality
aesthetics dictate. Perhaps we are returning to an age-old staple of heroic myth, as
identified by Northrop Frye, which operates “near or at the conceivable limits of
human desire,” but a desire, nevertheless, non-attainable by even the hero, who must
Baudrillard 35.
Pustz 83.
95 Kroker 127.
96 Michel Foucault, “From Truth and Power,” Colin Gordon, trans., The Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism, Vincent B. Leitch, ed. (New York and London: Norton, 2001): 1668.
93
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suffer—often via metamorphosis—for attempting to transgress those limits.97 As
Erich Auerbach noted, it is the scar that makes Odysseus recognizable by
“foregrounding” his past into an “uninterrupted” flow of present (and, according to
the heroic model, most heroes bear a signifying scar, from Siegfried to Harry
Potter).98 Modern heroes push this idea to its breaking limits and become the scar, a
psychological one this time: Batman is his childhood trauma, Superman is his
loneliness as Krypton’s last son, Xena is her guilt, reflecting a society where a
personal therapist is no longer a dark, shameful secret, but a posh accessory, easily
brought into conversation as a mark of social status, personal distinction, or WoodyAllenesque wit and style. But the FF remove the scar from any purely temporal
signification and imprint it on, and as, the whole body declaring its vulnerability,
while at the same time it signals the body’s healing-transformative potential.
Thus that the grotesqueness of comic-books like the FF (also eulogized at
about the same time in Allen Ginsberg’s groundbreaking 1956 Howl) can be
perceived as ideal, but also as a foreboding of the projection of certain continuing
trends in our Western culture. The beautiful grotesque that, by provoking and
shocking, allows its bearer not to be invisible any more, to stretch above the crowd
and achieve, even momentarily, a shining escape from conformity (a quality much
devalued since the 50s-60s) is perhaps a way to understand such youth culture trends
such as the “grunge” look, extreme tattooing and piercing, the “Bear” movement
among gay men, and even, briefly in the early 90s, cosmetic scarification. After all,
the pluri- and multi- ideologies of the late 20th-early 21st century have made ample
room for the easy coexistence of different physiques, despite the pressures of the
entertainment industry. At the same time, in an era where the human body, compared
to the machine, is losing in importance and superiority and is questioned as the
grounding signifier for “humanity,” deconstructing the body by bringing to surface its
inherent, or latent, potential for deformity—poking at the scar so to speak—is a kind
of cultural pre-emptive strike against the fear of such future mutations (a fear that has
been growing in our culture since the atom bomb effects on human genes first became
known): not only an acceptance of the body’s imperfect status, but also a game of
Northrop Frye, (1957) “Anatomy of Criticism: Mythic Archetypes,” Literature: An Introduction
to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, 6th ed., X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, eds. (New York:
HarperCollins College Publishers, 1995): 1810.
98 Erich Auerbach, “Odysseus' Scar,” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary
Trends, David H. Richter, ed. (Boston: Bedford, 1998): 654-67.
97
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“chicken” with evolution. It is a mentality akin to that which Henri Bergson observes
about the caricaturist:
He makes his models grimace as they would by themselves if they could take
their grimace all the way. He guesses, under the surface harmonies of form,
the deep insurrections of matter. He realizes the imbalances and
distortions...that didn’t manage to reach their completion, since they were
exorcised by a higher power. His art, that partakes somewhat of the diabolical,
raises again the demon that the angel had thrown down.99
This gambit of negative aesthetics became painfully obvious in the 1994 failure of a
then-first FF film, which, in returning the comic bodies to an “angelic” realism sans
medium conventions made their superhero oddity look abysmally inane.100 Only the
Thing looked real because he has never looked real. The grotesque annulment of
classical beauty standards may derive from an overextension of those same ideal
standards that is particularly fit for the comic-book medium, but it ends up one step
beyond. What it aims at is a condition where, because its grotesqueness liberates form
from any secondary significations other than physical utility, body as flesh is
dissolved into the ideal concept of mere (or, rather, utter) capacity (and thus, if we
extend Beebee’s theory, its new “use-value” becomes the foundation of a new
genre—or species, perhaps?),101 and matter does no longer matter. In the grafting of
the unreal onto reality (Baudrillard’s “hyperreality” of American utopianism);102 in an
individuative process that can never be completed because we can never transcend,
even in our most fantastic ventures, the mark of our physicality and our particular era
(be it the 60s or the 2000-somethings); finally, in what it promises to give but always
must withhold from the reader103—a body so unfit, that it fits—does the comic book
establish its never-ending, and utterly fantastic, charm.
Henri Bergson, Laughter, An Essay on the Importance of the Comic, Vassilis Tomanas, trans.
(Athens: Exantas-Nemata, 1998): 27-29. Quote translation mine.
100 The Fantastic Four, Oley Sassone, dir., starring: Alex Hyde-White, Jay Underwood, Rebecca
Staab, Michael Bailey Smith, Joseph Culp (Marvel Entertainment, 1994).
101 Beebee 250.
102 Baudrillard 28.
103 The infamous “dissimulation of the woven texture” (of the text, which “is not a text unless
it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of
its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible.”—63) theorized in: Jacques
Derrida, (1972) Dissemination, Introduction and Additional Notes by Barbara Johnson, trans,.
Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers (London: The Athlone Press, 2000).
99
24
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Filmography
The Fantastic Four. Dir. Tim Story. Marvel Entertainment Group, 2005.
The Fantastic Four. Dir. Oley Sassone. Marvel Entertainment, 1994.