You know, I was going to write a piece today that held up some old comics from the first half of the 20th century, showing blatantly racist caricatures of different types of people. They're sadly easy to find. I was going to show each of the major types of people being caricatured and say, "Look, here's how comic artists used to depict Black people" and "Look, here's how writers used to script Chinese accents" and "Look, here's how gay men were portrayed in comics" and so on. And each one would be so absurdly offensive that you'd have difficulty even understanding that someone would be willing to commit something like that to paper.

After I'd gone through a bunch of those, then I was going to point out that they all look/sound absurd now because we, collectively, have gotten a better understanding of those cultures. We understand where the stereotypes came from, why we white people created them, and how (deliberately) insulting they were. You'd be glad that most people don't think of those groups like that any more anyway, and you might have a little better understanding of the climate grandpa was raised in and why he still thinks it's okay to use offensive slang terms in casual conversation.

And then I was going to say make the comparison to today's comics, showing "Look, here's how comic artists depict Black people now" and "Look, here's how writers script Chinese accents now" and "Look, here's how gay men are portrayed in comics now" and so on. But this time -- since the examples would be more contemporary -- with some color commentary about how they're relying on different stereotypes, but stereotypes nonetheless. And how do you suppose those stereotypes will look in fifty years' time? Probably just as absurd as the 1940s' caricatures look to us today.

I was going to write all that up to make the point that you don't want to be remembered for some really bad representations of different minorities. Especially since, by many estimates, the United States will see Caucasians become a minority around the middle of the century with what are currently minorities rising to around 56% of the population.

I was going to write all that.

But then I wondered, "For who?"

I mean, if I hear/see something racist/misogynistic/ablest/homophobic/transphobic, I will usually call the person on it. I've called out co-workers, friends, and even relatives (both mine and my wife's). It's as often as not unintentional, and I try to point out how/why something they said is wrong. Sometimes they listen, sometimes not. But that's a response to action, usually done within a very short time of the incident. Basically, it's immediate behavioral modeling based on whatever the current situation is.

But that whole bit I outline above? That's a little different. It's more long-term and requires at the very least an acknowledgment that social demographics are changing and will continue to change. And the reason that's significant here is that the people who need to hear that message are already refusing to acknowledge those changes and, strangely concurrently, are actively fighting against them. That's partly what's fueling the rise of all these hate groups -- people who think things are better with less diversity and more homogeneity. As they see it, they are going to be viewed as martyrs for trying to revert the country to a status quo from before anyone besides cishetero white men had rights. And they're so committed to that belief that they will never see themselves as being on the wrong side of history; rather, they think they are right and if they're not acknowledged thusly, then it's history who is wrong.

And frankly, I do not have the energy for that discussion this week.

Suffice it to say that all those socially ugly comics from the 1940s that make you cringe when you realize it was a favorite artist or writer who caricatured some group so badly? Fifty years from now, readers are going to cringe at the socially ugly comics you're making today. So step up to the plate now, and make your work more progressive in terms of representation. Not only is it the right thing to do for today, but it's the right thing to do in the future.

As something of an epilogue to last week's Fantastic Four 'celebration' here, I thought I'd revisit this. In Fantastic Four #11, we first learned that Ben was an accomplished pilot before their fateful starship ride. Later stories would expand on the adventures he had in the Air Force and/or Marines (both have been cited at various times, although I think Marvel officially settled on the Air Force at some point) and we've seen a pre-cosmic-rays Ben fighting alongside Logan, Carol Danvers, Nick Fury, and Capt. Savage at various points. By pretty much all accounts, Ben was a very talented and famous pilot. His adventures with Capt. Savage came about because he was specifically targeted and captured for his skill in shooting down enemy aircraft. So that Reed would come back to his friend years after college to fly this starship makes sense.

But there's a weird little wrinkle that was added back in 1983. In Thing #1, they elaborate on Ben's backstory considerably, going into detail about seeing his older brother killed and his time in the Yancy Street Gang before eventually getting to college. It then covers Reed and Ben's first meeting and, as they're introducing themselves to one another, we get this exchange...So, I got to thinking: why suggest that he'd fly it? Of all the ways to respond that would provide some level of snark, why specifically "I'll fly your rocket ship"?

If someone tells you something you deem far-fetched, it's not uncommon to respond with something you might consider equally implausible. And typically, you'd want to keep your comeback thematically similar...

"I'm a Saudi prince."
"Yeah, well, I'm the queen of England."

"I'm dating Chris Hemsworth."
"And my wife is Scarlett Johansson."

You keep the same idea in your retort. Whatever it is that you claim to do or be should follow the same line of thinking as the original statement. So if Reed says, "I'm going to build a rocket," a typical retort might be "And I'm going to build a Mars rover" or "I'm going to build a space station." (Bear in mind that both of these were still science fiction in 1983.)

The other likely response is to extrapolate and exaggerate your own self to the same extent that you think the other speaker is. If someone claimed they were going to be a first round draft pick in the NFL next season because they play high school football now, you might come back with the claim that you're going to win the Nobel prize for literature because you got an "A" on that short story you wrote for Mr. Reynolds' English class last semester. Or if someone says they're going to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because they play in a shitty bar band, your response might be that you're going to win an Olympic gold medal for figure skating because you're a pretty good player on the local ice hockey team.

It's the second concept that seems to be where Ben is coming from since he certainly isn't mimicking Reed's basic structure. But if Ben's suggestion that he fly a starship is an extrapolation/exaggeration of his current abilities, he must have some flying ability at this point, right? If you had zero experience flying anything at all, you wouldn't make that joke. Being a football player, he might've gone with, "You build that rocket an' I'll punt it into space myself!" Or maybe going back to his Yancy Street days, "You build that rocket an' I'll cut anyone who keeps ya from launchin' it!"

But, no, he went with the notion of piloting it. This would suggest Ben already knows how to fly a plane at this point. Perhaps he didn't have his actual pilot's license, but at least the basic knowledge and skill with only some additional flight time and/or a written test remaining.

Although Reed is later identified as being 18 when he met Ben, Ben's age is never expressly noted. Presumably, he's around that age as well, but given his problematic days as a youngster, he may have been held back a year or two in school. (It's also possible that he took some time off between high school and college, but given that he had a football scholarship, this strikes me as unlikely.) Ben's expressly noted as having a layabout father who didn't bring much money in, so flying lessons seem out of the question before his parents died and he was taken in by his Uncle Jake.

So was that something his Uncle Jake did for him then? Give him or pay for him to take flying lessons? Did Ben actually have a pilot's license as a teenager? Did years of experience flying before even getting into the armed forces help propel him up the ranks faster than others that entered around the same time?

It's an absurdly minor character point, and based off one line of dialogue that was probably written with more foreshadowing in mind than anything else, but an interesting notion to think about nonetheless. Well, interesting to me at any rate!

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Celebrating the Fantastic Four
https://ift.tt/wfA9cO6

Kleefeld on Comics: Fantastic Four Life Story Review
https://ift.tt/7RTaAGv

Kleefeld on Comics: Recontextualizing FF #1
https://ift.tt/ken23WT

Kleefeld on Comics: The Importance of Alyssa Moy
https://ift.tt/09YA2PX

Kleefeld on Comics: The FF Toy That Exists Nowhere Else!
https://ift.tt/tBsM1nm

At the start of the week, I said that I'd managed to "fan a spark of curiosity" that I think has helped get back into reading comics more actively, Fantastic Four in particular. That started last year as I kept seeing more and more disparate supply chain issues pop up seemingly at random. My wife and I are pretty good planners when it comes to our own supplies and such, so we never had anything we ourselves ran out of, but there were more than a few instances of our own stockpiles running very low as we had trouble finding some items. Everything from coffee and soda to a home furnace. In light of that, it occurred to me that if I had a 3D printer, I would be able to simply make many of the items that might prove difficult to find and/or might be cost-prohibitive because of low supples.

Despite sounding super high-tech and expensive, it turns out that you can get any of several 3D printers for under $200 now. Which isn't nothing, of course, but that's not unreasonable either, I don't think. After putting in a fair amount of research, I picked an inexpensive one up last fall and started learning how make my own stuff. My intent with was largely practical. Again, what can I print myself now that would otherwise be problematic to purchase? The first thing I printed were small clips to hold the valences up on our bedroom blinds -- I couldn't find any in stores or online that matched the old ones well enough that I was confident they'd be suitable replacements for the broken ones. Next was a wall mount I designed for our shower brush and its various heads, which had previously just been kind of laying about in various corners because it didn't really fit anywhere. I had the printer running virtually 24/7 for the first two months while I was churning out a backlist of items for minor fixes and improvements throughout the house.

I've kept the printer running pretty heavily since then as well with sporadic breaks as I might take a few days to sort out some problem, or finish a new design, or wait for a new spool of filament to arrive. But I've by and large used it exactly as I hoped it would be able to. When the wheel mount for the vacuum cleaner broke, I was able to find someone had already posted a design for one online and I had it downloaded, printed, and installed in about two hours -- a fair bit quicker than the 30-45 days it would've taken if I had ordered an official replacement to be shipped from China. Even the cap on my X-Acto knife was replaced in 30 minutes -- it would've taken me at least that long to drive out anywhere where I might be able to pick one up, and then drive back home.

But, of course, you can print more fun stuff as well and I would from time to time set aside some time to make something a little more frivolous. I found designs online for Twiki (from Buck Rogers), B-9 (from Lost in Space), and K-9 (from Doctor Who) that I scaled for 6" action figures and printed out. Which is (finally) where I circle back to the Fantastic Four!

I've had a variety of Fantastic Four action figures over the years, going back to the Mego ones I had as a kid in the 1970s. However, there was never much in the way of accessories. The "Marvel World" playset from Amsco did include a Baxter Building, but that only worked for the smallest figures. ToyBiz produced a Fantasticar in conjunction with the late '90s cartoon, but it alwys felt cheaply made and I didn't care much for the design anyway. The only other one I can think of was the Fantasicar they made in conjunction with the 2007 movie, but that was a godawful design! And we did get part of model 1 Fantasticar with one of the Mr. Fantastic figures, but they never made any of the other sections.

In 1997 or '98, I did make a Four Freedoms Plaza playset for myself. It was mostly cardboard, with one room basically just a re-purposed Star Trek: The Next Generation engineering playset. As that was mostly cardboard, though, that died when my basement flooded in 2010. Since then, I've moved to a place where I don't have room for an action figure metropolis anyways, so I've never bothered to rebuild it.

Ah, but with a 3D printer, I could make something smaller than an entire playset but still larger than a figure, more detailed and durable than cardboard. Something that's never been commerically produced before but with virtually the same quality level. Perhaps most importantly, I can make it to my specifications. So now that I've gotten (at least for now) all my practical printing done, I've been putting my efforts towards the Fantastic Four's first Fantasticar, colloquially named the Flying Bathtub!

I had actually looked online to see if anyone had made one already. And while there do seem to be a handful of 3D designs for them out there, none were in a format I could use. So in going about designing my own, what were the criteria I put in place? Well, first -- and seemingly most obvious -- it needed to be scaled so that it could house Marvel Legends Fantastic Four figures. They have the widest range in body sizes/types, and it would be easy enough from there to scale up to 8" Megos or down to 2" Mini-Mates or whatever. Second, it should be built as a toy. Meaning that it's less about being 100% accurate to the comic book (which, given that no one ever drew it consistently, would be impossible anyway) and more about having just enough believability in detail that a kid could look at it as a toy and come up with plausible enough explanations for any buttons, lights, etc. that might be on it, but not so many that it becomes visual noise. Third, it should match the "functionality" of the Flying Bathtub in that all four cabs should be able to separate and come back together in a reasonable manner without a lot of connectors and hookups that might significantly alter the asthetic. Basically, I didn't want this ugly tab/slot or peg/hole system visible when the four cabs were separated.

For design purposes, I use a free, online program called Tinkercad. It mostly only allows basic shapes -- which is fine for creating some kind of mounting bracket, but not so great for designing toys -- but I was able to borrow a few elements from others' 3D models to add some detail. Many of the controls, for example, were literally copy/pasted from a model of the captain's chair from Star Trek. The headlamps were a cosplay prop someone had made for their kid, and the turbines on the underside were just from a turbine model someone made. Pretty much everything else are just boxes and cylanders joined in a variety of ways.

I wanted to use magnets to hold the four cabs together and, although you can't really see them in any of these pictures, I carved out spaces for them in the backs of the seats. The idea was that by using magnets, I could just stick the pieces up next to each other and they'd hold in place, satisfying my requirement of not have external connection points visible when the cabs are separated. My initial tests with them seemed to work well, but with all four cabs and the weights of the figures, I couldn't get strong enough magnets to keep the whole thing together by itself. Each connection point currently has a magnet with an 8lb pull. But because I've got six millimeters of plastic between them, they lose just enough strength that they can't hold an entire cab in place. That's acually where the "bumper" idea came from. Coupled with the magnets, a single band around the top is enough to hold everything together pretty securely. I'd prefer not to deal with having to put this bumper around the whole thing every time I keep them together, but it does add a nice bit of color/detail to an otherwise pretty bland exterior.

The photos you're seeing here show the piece incomplete. I've been having a lot of difficulty with the dark blue printing properly (the filament is from a different company than I normally use; they have some great colors but their filaments can be very finicky) so the seat cushions are actually in really bad shape and all need to be re-printed. I've actually been wrestling with that most of this week. Because of that, I haven't glued most of the pieces in place yet, and they're prone to flopping around and falling out. (The control panels are only being held in with double-sided tape right now!) I really wanted to have everything completed by the end of this week, but it's not quite there yet. Once I'm sure everything is perfectly spot-on, I'll upload my files so that anyone can make their own. If anyone's curious about the design process I went through, I did a Twitter thread where I've posted a short background and a number of my progress shots.

I'm really proud of the design and basic functionality, moreso that it's been less than two weeks since I first started this and many of my prototypes took a full day or longer to print. I was especially pleased I was able to do some clever problem-solving around the various design issues that came up. I know I'm going to be thrilled with this once I get everything finalized and completely assembled. I can't imagine how stoked I would've been if I'd had this capability when I was a kid!

But yeah, learning 3D printing over the past several months has been very energizing and envigorating. At first being able to make tools that had practical applications around the house, and now being able to create full-on toys that I would've loved to have as a kid! It's that kind of curiosity and (mental) exploration that helped draw me to the Fantastic Four, and I think being able to tie the actual learning process back to the characters has been very satisfying.

Alyssa Moy is a comparitively minor character in the Fantastic Four mythos. A creation of Chris Claremont and Salvador Larroca, she was introduced in 1998 (nearly forty years after the FF first appeared) as an old acquaintence of Mr. Fantastic's. In the 20-some years since then, she's made only about 30 appearances or so. That's not nothing, obviously, but she's not exactly a main player in the book either.

The backstory that she was given was that she and Reed knew each other in college. (Bit of continuity issue there, though. I'll talk to that in a bit.) She's presented very much as a (pre-Crystal Dynamics) Lara Croft type. Beyond the basic costume design (seen here) she is an active adventurer often in search of ancient artifacts; acrobatic, almost recklessly daring, intelligent, flirtatious, independent, and somewhat unconcerned with whatever the local laws might prevent her from doing. All of the pre-FF #1 stories they've shown so far has the pair galavanting around the globe, conducting themselves very much like a pulpy Indiana Jones/Lara Croft team-up. The intent, I suspect, was to then put Reed in a decidedly more active role for some pre-FF period of his life, where he would've gained experiences beyond the classroom. He had been established as having earned four college degrees by the time he was 18. That doesn't happen unless you're spending most of your time with your nose buried in books. Having Alyssa there is essentially the impetus for Reed doing something beyond pure research.

That seems to be a decent enough reason for Alyssa to be added to the story. I mean, we've got this dedicated genius bookworm and he suddenly develops the chutzpah to steal a rocket out from under the military and launch into space himself with his best friend, his fiancée, and her kid brother? And then, once they land, he immediately thinks, "Let's be super-powered adventurers!" It works well enough in the original story, but after learning more about Reed over the subsequent years, particularly his childhood and teen years, this seems a bit odd. There was clearly some shift in his character after he first met Ben, but before their famous rocket flight. The addition of Alyssa to that period gives a pretty reasonable explanation of why Reed might have grown out of his bookworm habits a bit.

But that's not why Alyssa Moy is important!

Let me first address a minor continutity problem. Not an insurmountable one, certainly, but there is a bit of wonkiness with the timing that circles around why Alyssa is important.

When Alyssa is first introduced, in Fantastic Four vol. 3 #5, she clearly knows Reed and a glimpse at their pre-FF history is shared. But Ben, who is with Reed at the time, has never met Alyssa before. Reed also notes that the adventure he had with her was after his days in the army. Good so far. A minor problem arises, however, in Before the FF: Reed Richards. The main story itself is fine, but in it, Reed and Alyssa run into (a pre-armored) Victor von Doom. When Doom comes across the pair, he sarcastically refers to it as a "college reunion." While he could theoretically be talking only about himself and Reed, he later refers to Alyssa as "your former college sweetheart," suggesting he was personally aware -- at least nominally -- of Reed's social life in college. Furthermore, when Alyssa hears Doom ranting about how he believes Reed sabotaged the college experiment that ruined his face, she quietly notes, "That's not how I remember it!" This strongly points to Alyssa, Reed, and Doom all attending college together. But if that were the case, why didn't Ben know her? Reed and Ben met on literally their first day, and remained friends throughout. For Reed to have never introduced Alyssa to Ben seems unlikely at best.

In a flashback in Fantastic Four #555, we see Reed and Alyssa on a date, but it's noted to be at the University of Vienna. While Alyssa's dialogue suggests that they have yet to kiss, the summary preface text for the issue cites her as "Reed's old college girlfriend." Though not explicit, this could be easily read as their first date before they went on to many more. Now, assuming Reed attended Vienna after graduating ESU, this would resolve how Reed could've dated Alyssa without Ben having ever met her, but it throws a wrinkle into the indication that Alyssa and Doom had met in college. Because even if you say that Doom himself might have gone to Vienna after getting kicked out of ESU and was already there when Reed started, Alyssa's "not how I remember it" comment doesn't quite work now. Unfortunately, Alyssa's comment would have to be interpretted as "That's not how I remember you telling it to me, Reed!" which does work, although it's not exactly seamless. Although if Doom was indeed at Vienna and he ran into Reed and Alyssa at some point, that would give Reed reason to relay the story of Doom's experiment.

OK, so why does the specific continuity of all this make Alyssa important?

This is important because Reed met Sue Storm while he was at ESU. The woman who was his fiancée in Fantastic Four #1 and is canonically several years Reed's junior. Most historical references put the age difference at around ten years, seemingly without considering the pedopheliac implications that retroactively suggests. Marvel's tried just glossing over the age difference entirely for most of their history, and I've seen some unofficial sources (notably Wikipedia) try to lessen that gap outright, simply claiming Sue was much older than anything in the comics actually states, or even implies for that matter. Regardless, it strongly suggests that Reed as an adult in his 20s had a romantic interest in a minor which, by any social standards we've had in the US since 1961, is creepy and disturbing at best. However, putting Alyssa Moy into the mix removes the... awkwardness of having Reed and Sue as a couple prior to her age of consent.

What we now have is Reed and Ben starting ESU when Reed is 18. They live in the dorms on campus for their first year, where they meet each other and Victor von Doom. In their second year, Reed meets Sue when he rents a room from her aunt. (This is all the same as before so far.) Reed graduates and joins the army. Presumably, given that Reed earned four degrees before he attended ESU, his degree there only took a year and a half to two years, making him 19 or 20. While his original service in the 1940s would've been about three years, the sliding timescale of the Marvel Universe would mean he now served in the late 1990s, so his active duty contract could have been as short as two years. He would have still had military obligations after that, and that could explain how/why he worked with them on a variety of projects prior to FF #1. (See Fantastic Four #271, The Marvels, Conspiracy, etc.) So at 22 or 23, Reed and Alyssa, having met each other either shortly before or during Reed's time in the army, have the 10-week road trip mentioned in FF v3 #5 before enrolling at the University of Vienna, where Doom already happens to be a student. Reed spends another 2-ish years in Vienna before graduating and moving on to Columbia University, where he meets up (canonically) with Sue again. This puts Reed in the 25-year-old range and Sue at either 17 or 18, making her around 10 or 11 when they first met while Reed was at ESU.

(As an aside, John Byrne's original script for Thing #2 came up for auction last year. In it, he expressly notes that Sue was 12 when Reed and Ben were at school together. That specific detail didn't make it into the published comic, and instead only alludes to Sue being a "young girl." The age reference was likely excised from the final because it could be read as promoting pedophelia, but interestingly Byrne's original script does a better job of expressly noting Sue's feelings for Reed are not mutual than what was published. The published comic leaves things quite ambiguous and Reed's reaction could easily be read as embarassment for having romantic feelings for someone that he knows is legally too young for him. This sequence is one of the ones that's ultimately ended up actively fueling questions about how old Reed and Sue were when they started dating.)

Now what's interesting is that this new history with Alyssa doesn't overtly change any of the continuity established before she was introduced. As I said, most of the historical references in the comics put about a ten year gap between Reed and Sue ("about" because they've always been a bit cagey about Sue's actual age in published stories) so this keeps in line with those assertions. But what this does do is put a different spin on previous references to Reed's earlier love life. Take, for instance, this sequence from Fantastic Four #11...

The original implication was that Reed was pining for Sue while he was in the army, and Sue was worried for Reed's safety. But note that Reed only refers to "the girl I left behind" which can now refer to Alyssa, and it would make sense that the two immediately get together after Reed's service. And Sue's comment about those memories being painful can refer to her jealousy over Alyssa being Reed's girlfriend before her. Ben even expressly notes in FF #555 that Sue felt (at least at some point) like she was just a rebound after Alyssa. Reed's follow-up here reassuring Sue that he was talking about her can then be read as something of a cover-up or back-tracking as Reed realizes talking about one of his exes in front of his fiancée is maybe not a great idea.

("Since we were kids" doesn't pose any problems as far as I'm concerned. Sue was obviously a child regardless and, speaking as an adult myself, 18 years old is still very much what I would consider part of my childhood. Lee was forty himself when he wrote that, and likely saw 18 the same way.)

This new reading is obviously not what Stan Lee originally intended when he scripted that back in the day. But, as I said, I don't think he really put any thought into the extended implications of the age difference between Reed and Sue. So while Alyssa's introduction into Reed's backstory is very much a bit of retroactive continuity and was likely just thrown in as a bit of fun (the first two flashbacks with her in them are basically throw-away references with no real story or substance; just "Look! Reed had an adventurous life before the FF!") but creators soon realized that she could be used to clean up some long-standing ugliness in Reed's history. He couldn't having been pining after an 11-year-old girl if he was actively dating (and proposed to, according to FF #513!) a woman his own age.

Mr. Fantastic is the first hero of and, in many ways, considered the elder statesman of the Marvel Universe. While the notion of heroes with feet of clay is part and parcel of the Marvel Universe, having one of its pre-eminent figures even perceived as an unrepentant pedophile is a bridge too far. As I said, for many years, Marvel as a company largely tried to brush this under the rug as as unintetional side-effect of the early fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach Lee took in the early '60s. Why no one ever just flat-out retconned their first meeting to many years later, I don't know. (It's not like the point came up all that often to begin with.) But the introduction of Alyssa Moy does an excellent job of keeping the existing continuity intact, but still serves to remove the suggestion that Reed was in an inappropriate relationship with a pre-adolescent girl while he was in college. I'm fairly sure that's not why Alyssa was introduced to begin with, but kudos to the various creators who've been able to pick up on her potential to sneakily address a problem that no ones's ever really liked talking about to begin with!

I don't recall how long it took bewteen reading my first Fantastic Four comic and when I read their origin. I'm pretty sure it was a reprint of FF #1 in either the 1970s' Fantastic Four Pocket Book that I picked up at a local comic shop or the copy of Fantastic Four: The Secret Story of Marvel's Cosmic Quartet that was at our local library. Probably the latter. Those two reprints are significant because they present very different contextual information about the origin, despite both being ostensibly the same story.

In the case of the Pocket Book, it includes reprints of the first six issues of the series in their entirety. It's a Pocket Book, so the art is obviously much smaller than a standard comic book (roughly half the size) but it was still eminently legible. And of course the origin leads right into their battles with the Mole Man, and then the Skrulls, Miracle Man, Sub-Mariner, and Dr. Doom. We see the team's headquarters and costumes and, while not as fully fleshed out as they'd later become, we get a good sense of who the characters all are for their first year. (The title was bi-monthly until issue #7.)

The Secret Story reprint is different. It doesn't include the Mole Man battle from the first issue, but does include reprints of issues #82 and #203 so we get more established, somewhat more contemporary versions of the characters with art by different artists. (Although only the three issues -- two of which are by Jack Kirby -- are reprinted, there are several spot illustrations throughout the book as well.) Additionally, author David Anthony Kraft provides introductions and codas to each story. Although those texts are still fairly superficial, they do point to some key elements that are note-worthy about the stories. So while the Pocket Book does indeed show that the FF don't get uniforms until issue #3, for example, Kraft relays that a superhero not having a costume right off the bat was unheard of prior that first story.

So which is the better way to read about the FF's origin?

Or what about the next time I read the origin in Thing #1? It's not a reprint, but a new retelling. It includes many additional details about Ben Grimm's life prior to his becoming the Thing. What about the truncated version in Fantastic Four #296 that came out a few years later?

I've noted before that, unless you bought the issue off the newsstand in 1961, you can never really experience the "proper" context for reading it. You've got the additional "baggage" of whatever else you've seen/heard/read/experienced that simply was not available in mid-1961. John F. Kennedy was still in the White House. Star Trek wasn't a thing. Man had not yet set foot on the moon. Home computers weren't available to anyone, much less portable ones, much less ones that are small enough to fit in your pocket and also include a phone, a camera, a GPS, hundreds of hours of music, and access to the largest interconnected network of knowledge mankind has ever created. Even if you get your hands on an original copy of Fantastic Four #1, you can't get the same experience or have the same context as someone who read it in 1961.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, just an statement of fact. But what's interesting now, decades later, is that there are several ways to try to address different types of context to reading FF #1, several particularly interesting versions of which came out last year in conjunction with the anniversary.

First is the Fantastic Four Anniversary Tribute which reprints (sort of) both FF #1 and FF Annual #3. The "sort of" comes into play in that every page has been redrawn by contemporary artists, some who've worked on the book before, some who haven't. While it's technically a retelling since it's not what Jack Kirby put down on paper originally, they're using not only Stan Lee's wording and dialogue but, in most cases, the artists lean very heavily on Kirby's layouts if they don't copy them outright. At both the page and even the panel level. When Lee was breaking in new artists at Marvel, he sometimes would have Kirby do rough layouts for their stories first, until the artist got the feel of the type of staging and pacing they were looking for. This feels much like that in a lot of ways.

Normally, I would think this type of approach -- having a different creative team with their own illustrative styles on literally every page -- would be jarring and hard to read. It might well be if you've never read the original story before, but I'm so familiar with it now that it was more of a visual exercise in seeing how different artists work (or don't work) in the same manner that Kirby did. Particularly with the artists that I'm more familiar with, it was interesting to see how much their style actually jars with what Kirby did. To be fair, I expect Kirby himself would lay out the story differently if he did even just a few years later (or if, as we learn about in the next collection, Lee hadn't mandated any layouts of his own) but this helps highlight how much Kirby's own illustrative style was integral to making that first issue work. These layouts, in many cases, simply don't work with many illstration styles, emphasized further by modern coloring techniques. That's the context to find here -- how much of Kirby's approach to drawing makes the story work, in a way that just doesn't for others.

Fantastic Four No. 1 Panel by Panel from Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear is a compartively massive tome in which they've taken a high-resolution photo of each page of an original copy of FF #1, and blown up each and every panel to a full page. Naturally, most panels don't conform to the exact dimensions of the book itself, so sometimes portions are cropped slightly or, more frequently, show some of the surrounding panels as well. While this does inherently mean that you're not seeing the page layout and the story flow is interrupted with having to turn the page much more frequently, it does afford the reader the ability to study the art in much more detail. At this scale, you can more readily notice irregularities that might indicate corrections or shortcuts that would normally be too small to notice.

Personally, I find this a little hard to go through. If there's an individual panel I want to study for some reason, that can be interesting, but going through the whole issue at this scale at this pace gets tiresome for me real fast. The design approach... well, I see what he was going for, but I think it only works for studying the details of a single panel. If you try to look at much more than that in a sitting, it becomes overbearing. What strikes me as more interesting is Tom Brevoort's page level analysis at the back, where he goes through and speculates on where Lee may have "influenced" page layouts or where someone like Sol Brodsky may have made corrections after Kirby turned the art in. While it is speculation, it's very much informed speculation. I believe he posted this on his blog at one point, but this version has been tightened up a bit and flows more smoothly with the art. Even though I did read this on his blog previously, I found his analysis here the most useful part of the book.

Brevoort also includes notes on the official Marvel house stat of the cover, compared against what was printed, which is an interesting read. Mark Evanier weighs in on how he thinks Lee and Kirby would have collaborated on the issue, before adding some oft-overlooked kudos to letterer Art Simek, colorist Stan Goldberg, and presumed inker Goerge Klein. Both Brevoort and Evanier reference Lee's original script (also reproduced in this volume) and then the entire issue is reprinted "normally" from the same photos. This provides the most 'academic' approach to context for FF #1 that I've seen outside acutal academic journals.

Another volume Marvel put out last year was Marvel: August 1961 which reprints every issue Marvel published in that same month as Fantastic Four #1. Although, unlike the previous book, this one presents all the stories in a "cleaned up" state. Though they use largely the original color palettes, they've all been recolored and had the linework smoothed out so they print nicely. Here again, Brevoort provides a little context in an introduction, summarizing the predicament the company was in at the time, going so far as to say that most of the titles being published then weren't very good. Not that they were outright bad, just pretty forgettable. Reading through this entire volume, you can see very directly how Fantastic Four stood out from everything else Marvel was publishing at the time.

This is actually an approach I tried independently many years ago, but many of the stories simply weren't available in any format. I think this type of context makes a great deal of sense because it shows readers of today essentially what choices a reader of 1961 had. Would the Fantastic Four stand out to you on a news rack that also showcased Orrgo, Sserpo, Kid Colt, and Millie the Model? Certainly your genre preferences would come into play here, but would Giganto breaking through the pavement on Fantastic Four catch your attenton over the giant spider on Journey Into Mystery or the creature from Krogarr on Tales to Astonish? The context here is certainly very company-specific; this is only what Marvel was doing and doesn't speak to any social or cultural reactions any of it may have been in regards to. Nor does it touch on any competitors' work that would likely have shared space on the newsstand. But it's insightful to see how far Lee and Kirby were taking things in Fantastic Four relative to what they themselves were doing at that exact same time!

Any and all of these provide some measure of additional context for reading Fantastic Four #1. Completely different contexts from any other reprintings or retellings. Personally, I find them all very useful to read through. Because I can't replicate that just-purchased-off-the-newsstand-in-1961 reading, I like bringing in as much as I can in as many different ways that I can. Not all of these are meant for everybody, of course. Some will have a context that speaks more specifically to one person over another for whatever reason. But as I'm more interested in the Fantastic Four than any other comic book characters ever created, I find trying to examine them and their origin story from these different vantage points offers me glimpses of how other people see and read them. And that gives me a better appreciation of what they respond to. Which, in turn, gives me a better appreciation of what I respond to!

The idea behind Fantastic Four: Life Story seems straight-forward enough. What if the Fantastic Four aged in real time after they were introduced in 1961? It's not an entirely new concept -- we've seen both the-Fantastic-Four-aged-in-real-time and the-Fantastic-Four-but-they're-old stories before -- but I think this is the first one that's looked at how they would fit in with the culture of the times as those times progressed. Typically, we get suddenly dropped in the middle of whatever their current continuity is and the story is about highlighting the contrasts, whereas Life Story is more about showing that evolution over time. "Here's what the FF looked like in the 1960s, and how they changed in the 1970s and 1980s..." and so on. As each issue of this series covers an entire decade, we're still only getting snippets of the team's adventures, but they act as a sort of condensed long-term study and we don't just see the end results.

I think the first thing that struck me was the timeline. Time is a weird construct in terms of comic book storytelling, particularly within Marvel comics. I believe the current continuity has it that the Fantastic Four's first flight was about twelve years ago, so the Human Torch and Spider-Man are still in their late 20s and "older" heroes like Mr. Fantastic and the Thing are maybe 40-ish. Which means that, if you condense all their adventures down into that timeframe, Galactus would have attacked Earth on pretty much a yearly basis. In Life Story, Galactus does act as the overarching, impending threat but it takes him decades to reach the planet -- Reed has to spend something like 20 years convincing people Galactus is coming and another 20 years getting any government to do something to prepare for it. And once the Silver Surfer makes it to Earth as Galactus' herald, his warning to the planet is "Galactus will arrive ten years from now."

This makes sense from a stroytelling perspective. If the intent is to show the FF change over time, you can't place them in a culture where a potentially world-ending threat is just an everyday occurance. (Seriously, if you map the original stories to the actual times they were published, Galactus shows up about to destroy the Earth every 4-5 years. Basically as often as the US has a presidential election, and you know how blasé Americans are about that!) I think it also nicely reflects the glacial pace at which we see actual progress in the world. That Reed spends decades trying to convince anybody to do anything even after his assertations have been independently corroborated feels not unlike the climate change debate we've been having since the 1970s.

The characters of Sue, Johnny, Ben, and later Franklin generally work well. They're recognizable in their 1960s incarnations, of course, and the changes they undergo as they age make sense. Sue marches in civil rights protests, Franklin struggles with Reed and Sue's breakup/divorce in ways which were largely ignored in the comics, Johnny essentially burns himself out before really reaching old age... that all clicked pretty well for me. I had more trouble following Reed's journey, however. Because he became aware of Galactus' imminent threat early on, he becomes pretty obsessed with protecting the planet, to the point of alienating pretty much everyone. And while the scientist-buried-in-his-work-at-the-expense-of-loved-ones idea has been part of Reed's character since the 1960s, it's always been shown as a back-and-forth struggle not a permanent character trait. Here, Reed effectively hides in his lab for his entire adult life, not really connecting with his loved ones at all until he's in his 60s or 70s. (Reed's age is a bit fuzzy here. If you assume he's 30 at the start of issue #1, that would put him in his 90s at the end of the series. Plausible, certainly, but my point is that it's largely glossed over and he could easily be a few years older or younger throughout the series.) While I know it's not uncommon for people on their deathbeds to note regretting not being closer with certain people, I don't find it that common for people to actually change their behaviors that radically that late in life, so I find Reed comes off pretty aleinating to readers throughout most of the series and his change towards the end feels a bit hollow.

Although not a complaint per se, I did question some of the character references they changed from the primary continuity. The two notable things for me were the prominence give to Ricardo Jones, a character who originally only appeared in a single issue and wasn't even considered significant enough to be given a name until decades later. (Jones was that nameless scientist from Fantastic Four #51, in case you're wondering. Seriously, I've never even been able to find how/when/where he was named because he's never appeared after that one issue. I think maybe it was in one the Handbooks that came out around 2010 or something?) Why make him a big protagonist instead of, say, the Wizard or geez, even The Quiet Man? I mean, Jones serves a decent enough purpose here and is written well, but I find it an odd choice for as minimal an impact he had on the original stories.

The other thing that was a weird question mark was Ben's pre-Alicia-Masters girlfriend Sally. I know Alicia was originally introduced early on and has been a pretty solid mainstay of Ben's life as the Thing, but it makes sense to introduce a pre-space-flight girlfriend to show how Ben cuts off close ties in Life Story. But why create an entirely new character for this when there's already TWO existing in-continuity characters Ben was deeply (to the point of buying an engagement ring) involved with prior to Alicia? Alynn Chambers who he dated in college (first seen in Thing #2) and Dr. Linda McGill who he was dating at the time of the space flight (first seen in Marvel Fanfare #46). Sally isn't really a major or complex character here -- she's mostly absent for the story itself and is more just window dressing for Ben's character -- so why not at least call her Alynn or Linda to provide some additional layering or context for deep cut fans? It would be a bit of a shortcut in lieu of charaterization, but given Sally has no real character anyway, that would provide the illusion of some. This is what I was talking about yesterday when I noted that Marvel has, for a couple decades now, seemed pretty dismissive of characters' history and continuity; yes, it can be a crutch if you rely on it all the time, but you can also leverage it to your advantage when you don't have time within the story to build up an extensive backstory for a side character.

One curious thing I'll mention, something that I might not have noticed if I were reading these issues as they came out. Towards the end of the story, Sue comes across a recording Reed had made previously where he tells her that he loves her and the whole family, and wishes he had more time to spend with them. It mirrors the end-of-life regret notion I alluded to earlier. But what's interesting is that in the FF anniversary issue, where they find a recording from Reed's father, Nathaniel notes that he regrets abandoning his families (not just Reed, but apparently others across multiple worlds) and that he envied the relationships Reed had and the family he built. The messages don't quite parallel one another, but that they touch on the same theme, both noting that Reed's greatest strength is the family he has around him. Also, in the recordings, both Reed and Nathaniel acknowledge that it's a lack of courage that's forced them to record their respective messages rather than tell people in person. The two scenes make for an interesting way to compare and contrast father and son.

Life Story doesn't have the Fantastic Four you know, regardless of what version of the team you're most partial to. That's by design. For as much as your typical monthly comic reflects the times it's created in, it necessarily means adjusting the characters as the move along. This story grounds them very much in their times and doesn't just ebb and flow with contemporary fashion. Particularly as you get farther and farther beyond Marvel's 10-15 year sliding timescale, the characters evolve much faster than the society around them and they wind up in places you've never seen them after only the first two, maybe three issues. The books thus show what the constants of their personalities are, at least as interpretted by Mark Russell and Sean Izaakse, and what's more fluid given the way society moves forward. A set of character studies that showcase the Fantastic Four in a manner I haven't seen before. The final issue came out just last month, and I believe a collected edition will be available in August if you're interested.