Why would they cancel the Fantastic Four?

I’ve heard rumors that Marvel is cancelling the Fantastic Four or at the very least, de-emphasizing the team’s status in the Marvel Universe. If true, it would be a damn shame.

Reed Richards, Susan Storm Richards, Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm have been the first family of Marvel since 1961. They’re the reason we even have a Marvel Universe. For 100-odd issues, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created stories of unparalleled imagination and scope. The list of heroes and villains who first appeared in the Fantastic Four is staggering: Doctor Doom, Galactus, the Silver Surfer, Namor the Sub-Mariner (who had been around in the ‘40s but was revitalized by the FF), the Black Panther, the Inhumans, the Watcher, the Mole Man, the Skrulls, Alicia Masters, the Puppet Master, Franklin Richards, etc. It’s endless.

If the comic goes out of print, if the four heroes don’t have a permanent home and just wander from title to title making guest appearances, we’d be losing an important legacy.

I know why the cancellation might happen: Marvel doesn’t have the movie rights to the Fantastic Four so it can’t reap the benefits of the movies. It’s funny how certain flagship books wax and wane in popularity over the years. Sure, there are perpetual high sellers like Spider-Man, who has starred in several books for decades, but other properties fade and strengthen over time.

The Fantastic Four was very prestigious through the ‘60s and I imagine it sold well. It seems like it drifted a little in the ‘70s but then made a big creative comeback in the early ‘80s, when John Byrne brought it back to its roots and revitalized it.

The Avengers have been a big deal for the last few years because of the movies but they weren’t always so popular. They had a crappy period in the ‘90s until Kurt Busiek and George Perez resurrected the comic and made it closer in tune to the glory days of the ‘70s. Now there are innumerable Avengers titles — Avengers, Uncanny Avengers, New Avengers — like ice cream flavors. I don’t know how serious collectors can afford all of them. In the ‘80s, we only had Avengers and later West Coast Avengers, plus some solo books.

The X-Men have been critical and sales darlings since the ‘70s but their title had gone into reprints and then been cancelled altogether for a few years before Giant-Size X-Men #1 changed the whole ballgame. X-titles multiplied in the ‘80s and there were spin-offs galore. In recent years, I get the sense that Marvel is sidelining the mutants a little, maybe because it doesn’t own the film rights.

I wouldn’t count the FF out, though. I’ve been reading comics long enough to know that death is never permanent.

Which age of comic books was the best?

The Bronze Age. End of discussion. My feelings are partially due to the fact that the Bronze Age was the era of comics that I came up in. I had a reminder of that recently when I went to Second and Charles and got some old comics for cheap — ‘80s New Mutants, West Coast Avengers and bunch of other back issues to fill in the gaps in my collection. I think I now own just about every Marvel comic published in 1983.

So there have been four major eras in comics history: The Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age and the Modern Age, which we’re living in now. In hindsight, we’ve been able to demarcate when these periods began and ended.

The Golden Age started in 1938 with the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1. This time period had some innocence but also a bit of darkness. Batman used a gun back then, Superman fought a man who abused his wife and the superheroes fought the Nazis, via the Justice Society of America at DC and the Invaders at Marvel. This period was a little like movies before the Hays Code. There was also racism and sexism that is cringe-worthy now but was casual back then. For example, Wonder Woman, one of the most powerful DC superheroes, was the JSA’s secretary.

The Golden Age, and comics in general, petered out in the ‘50s as Fredric Wertham labeled them a bad influence on kids in his book Seduction of the Innocent. At Marvel, Captain America went into suspended animation. At DC, the JSA disbanded after refusing to reveal their secret identities to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Superman and Batman continued on but the crackdown on violent content rendered their stories toothless and goofy.

In 1956, the creation of Barry Allen, the second Flash, revived superheroes and started the Silver Age. The Flash revealed the existence of the multiverse, specifically that the adventures of Jay Garrick, the first Flash, took place on Earth-2. On the new Earth-1, new characters took up the identities of heroes like Green Lantern and Hawkman. The stories during this time were lighthearted and a little wacky.

At Marvel, the Silver Age started in 1961 with the publication of Fantastic Four #1. This comic ushered in a new era of creativity and the sense that a whole universe was open to exploration. The Marvel Universe spread further with the simultaneous publication of Avengers #1 and X-Men #1 in 1963. So many of the characters who debuted in that era are still cornerstones of comics today.

The Silver Age gave way to the Bronze Age in 1973 when the Green Goblin threw Gwen Stacy off the Brooklyn (or George Washington) Bridge. That little “snap” sound effect of her neck breaking was the symbolic beginning of the new era. Main characters could die, and stories got darker and more complicated with more multi-part stories and pyrrhic victories.

My love of the Bronze Age may be nostalgia talking but that nostalgia speaks for a lot of people because the comics of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s have a good reputation and top-notch creators. You had Frank Miller on Daredevil, John Byrne on Fantastic Four, George Perez on New Teen Titans, Walt Simonson on Thor, Roger Stern on Avengers and Spider-Man, and Bill Sienkiewicz on New Mutants and Moon Knight. Most of all, Chris Claremont resurrected Uncanny X-Men from cancellation and guided it to new heights of creativity and popularity.

The Bronze Age died in 1985 when the landmark series Crisis on Infinite Earths erased the DC multiverse retroactively and folded the parallel Earths into one Earth. Barry Allen, who ushered in the Silver Age, died to save the universe. The Modern Age had some great stories, such as Watchmen, which deconstructed the idea of superheroes. The tone was also “grim and gritty.” Wolverine was absolutely everywhere.

It’s been a mixed bag since for every good, thoughtful story, there’s been a story with characterization sacrificed for x-treeem action and superheroes. A lot of the early ‘90s comics look ridiculous now. Marvel went bankrupt and outsourced its flagship titles for a year, leading to the maligned “Heroes Reborn” era. The comics industry collapsed as speculators entered the market. Retailers ordered too many copies of re-launched #1 issues and couldn’t sell them so they went out of business. By the way, those #1 issues you have from the ‘90s are worthless. Everybody and his mother bought the adjectiveless X-Men #1 so there’s a glut in the market.

The Modern Age is what comic readers are living in now. I guess we’ll only know we left the age in hindsight, finding some epochal event that marked its end. Who knows what’s coming next?

No Sympathy for Terminus or the Freaks

On two of the TV shows I watch, there are some characters that I just cannot find sympathetic. Spoilers ahead.

I loved the season premier of The Walking Dead. The liberation from Terminus was thrilling (OMG Carol) and the reunions at the end were gratifying, especially with Judith. There was also some intrigue with the reappearance of the guy from the pilot and “Clear.”

However, I can’t muster sympathy for the people who ran Terminus. What happened to them in the past at the camp was wrong but they dealt with it in the wrong way. They could have escaped, made sure their captors couldn’t hurt anyone else and gone on with their lives. Instead, they became the new dictators, luring people in with the promise of safety before slitting their throats and eating them. Rick and the gang have killed the living but it was always in self-defense. They never laid a trap for anyone.

The one Terminus woman (Mary?) told Carol “You’re either the butcher or you’re the cattle,” which I guess is this season’s theme. Not having it, Carol busted a cap in the woman’s hip. Mary bragged about the great thing they’d built at Terminus and Carol’s answer (it bears repeating — OMG Carol) was to open the door and let the zombies eat her. It was as if she was saying, “This is how societies like yours end up. This is what you deserve.”

It was a brutal end but the difference between the two groups is that Rick and company will not move into Terminus and take over and do something just as awful. They’ll just want it gone.

We’re either the butcher or the cattle? Maybe I’m just being unusually optimistic but I disagree. Even in that world, I think people would have an obligation to be shrewd enough to survive but also hold onto their humanity. Maybe a more realistic slogan would be “Don’t be a doormat but don’t lure people to their death and cannibalize them.”

I don’t even know if The Walking Dead wants us to have sympathy for the butchers of Terminus. Maybe the flashbacks were just about explaining how those people got to that point, without approving of it. I can’t look at those torsos stripped for meat, and believe they’re anything but the result of an evil act — committed by people who did have a choice.

I’m also not feeling a whole lot of sympathy for the titular freaks of American Horror Story: Freak Show. It’s only one episode (I didn’t see last night’s yet) but I’m not on board with these people yet. The conjoined twins killed their mother because she wouldn’t take them to the movies. When a police officer tried to arrest them for murder, Lobster Boy killed him. So that’s two murders in cold blood. Not a great way to get me on your side.

Yeah, I get it — the people outside the circus are the real freaks and they’ve treated the circus folks terribly and we’re all a little freaky and who are we to judge them. The thing is, most of us never killed a cop or killed our mothers for not taking us to see Singing in the Rain. So we’ve got that going for us.

Ebolarama

I’m hoping that if I lie very quiet and still under my bed, the Ebola virus will pass over me like a merciful angel of death. In the midst of this kind of global pandemic, the only think we can really do is freak out.

I’ve been petrified since I first heard of the outbreak. I don’t even know how many people in the United States have succumbed. Hundreds? Thousands? As tragic as this all is in Africa, it’s even more terrifying here at home since we are all at risk. Clearly, the time for panic is not now; the time for panic was yesterday.

The risk factors for Ebola in the United States have a really low threshold. According to the CDC, you only need to have direct contact with the bodily fluid — vomit, stool, blood, etc. — of someone with the disease to catch it. This means I definitely can’t go to work for the duration. Most of our company just got back from a conference in Liberia and one of them might be infected and vomit in the hallway and then I’d slip and fall face-first into the vomit and catch Ebola.

But what can I do at home to prevent disease? My neighborhood is 90 percent immigrants from Sierra Leone and they’re always back and forth to that country. All it will take is one of those people to spit in my face in the grocery store and it’s Ebolarama for me.

There’s another risk factor for me. I don’t often discuss this but I like to travel around the country, sneak into the quarantine sections of hospitals and just sort of grope the patients. Sometimes I’ll even root through the red trash bags and play around with the needles I find there. I do this so much that I lose track of where I go so I may very well have been to that hospital in Texas.

I blame Obama.

So for now, it’s under the bed for me. At the first sign of a fever or headache, I’m heading straight to the emergency room. The stupidest thing I could do is just assume those symptoms are regular cold or flu. The people at the ER actually want you to come in at the first sign of trouble. They have special people standing around waiting for you. And you will be hailed as an American hero if you take steps to prevent the spread of disease.

It sounds dire but America is a strong country. We survived SARS and we’ll survive this.

Pre-Emptive Panic

I’m pre-emptively panicking over the forecast for this year’s winter. It’s only October but it’s never too early to have a meltdown over what the Farmer’s Almanac predicts. I’d rather just get a jump on it, like Christmas shopping.

I’m hearing that it will be colder and wetter than even our miserable last winter. I believe I even heard something like we will get 10 percent more snow than last year. The Philadelphia area got about 67 inches of snow last winter. So if my math is correct (and it always is), that means next winter we will get …

… that’s 670 inches of snow. Oh my God …

What will we … I mean, how will we live?! That’s the equivalent of over 7 inches of snow every day from Christmas until the first day of spring. Or 11 inches of snow every day for 60 days. Or maybe Mother Nature will be really cruel and just drop all 55 feet of snow in one catastrophic burst on one black (really, white) day. Say, January 10.

Can you imagine? Even if those 670 inches of snow fall gradually, since it will definitely be much colder this year, you know none of that snow will melt. It will stick around, growing taller than the tops of the houses. We won’t be able to see out our windows. The lucky people who drive Hummers will drive them surrounded on either side by high white walls of pure death. I don’t know how we’ll eat … can you live on melted snow for three months? Really, it will be much longer than that. I don’t see that amount of snow melting completely until the Fourth of July.

Well, I’m not going to get caught unprepared this year. There’s plenty we can do to get ready for the guaranteed coming weather apocalypse. This afternoon I’m going to see a man about a cow. I’ll chain her up in our front yard and we’ll have milk all winter so we can survive. Maybe I’ll buy some chickens for eggs and also build a grain silo on our property so we can have an unlimited supply of the only acceptable winter foods.

There is one positive to panicking about the winter: It’s a distraction from my blind terror about catching Ebola from some strangers 1,000 miles away.

Who are the villains of SHIELD?

I’ve only seen a few scattered episodes of Agents of SHIELD but I have seen and read enough about the show to appreciate that it has used some of the Marvel Universe villains thus far in its run. I don’t know the TV show well enough to tell who these people are on TV, but here’s who the villains are in the comics.

The show mentioned Graviton once, although I’m not sure he ever actually appeared. He’s a villain with the power to manipulate local gravity fields, making things lighter or heavier. I mainly remember him from trapping Wonder Man at the bottom of a pool in West Coast Avengers and nearly drowning him.

Lorelei was on a few episodes. She is the younger sister of the Asgardian villain Amora the Enchantress. In the ‘80s, Lorelei disguised herself as an Earthwoman and seduced Thor by feeding him enchanted golden mead that lowered his inhibitions. Amusingly, Odin knew about Lorelei’s deception but did not intervene because she was Asgardian and more suitable for Thor than a regular human. Nothing but the best for the heir to the throne.

Agents of SHIELD has also featured John Garrett, who isn’t quite a villain but was an antagonist in the legendary 1986 miniseries Elektra: Assassin. In that comic, he is a (kind of dirtbag) SHIELD agent whom Elektra mentally seduces into helping her break out of prison. The two fight ninjas underwater and battle the demonic Beast, who has possessed liberal presidential candidate Ken Wind in an attempt to destroy the world with nuclear missiles. Garrett winds up switching his mind with Wind and becomes president, saving the world temporarily but also bringing some dangerous bravado to the office of the president. The inclusion of this character tickles me because this story has more of a cult following and I like knowing that someone out there knows it like I do.

I read that a recent episode showed the Absorbing Man, who is only known in the show as his alter ego, Crusher Creel. He is a longtime villain of Thor and the Avengers, given power by Loki to piss off his brother. He can absorb the properties of anything he touches, making him theoretically indestructible, as he can become living steel. However, he is also dumb as a post so he inevitably ends up in prison.

What (or who) is in the fridge in comics?

“Stuffed into the fridge” is the term used to describe a secondary character who gets killed off mostly as a plot device to show the effect of the death on the main character. Unfortunately, this happens a lot to women in comics, giving rise to the critical term “Women in Refrigerators.” This trope gets its name from an old issue of Green Lantern when a villain brutally murdered the hero’s girlfriend and stuffed her into the refrigerator for him to find.

This phenomenon seems to happen a lot at DC so today I’m going to venture afield and talk about Marvel’s rival publisher. A prime example is what happened to Batgirl in the late ‘80s. In the story The Killing Joke, the Joker showed up at Barbara Gordon’s door and shot her through the spine, mainly as an attempt to mentally torture Commissioner Gordon. I think the writers turned this on its head later by having Gordon bounce back from the injury and become the wheelchair-bound Oracle, a sort of repository of information for heroes behind the scenes. She was just as effective in that role as she was as Batgirl. Of course, in the Nu52 continuity, Gordon is back as Batgirl after recovering fully from her injury and walking again.

The mini-series Identity Crisis had a particularly brutal fridging for Sue Dibny, the wife of the Justice League member the Elongated Man. Jean Loring, wife of JLA member the Atom, shrunk down and walked on Dibny’s brain, causing her death, and then burned the corpse. Dibny was pregnant at the time. Then a retcon revealed that Sue had been raped years past by villain Doctor Light. This is a story that notoriously began with a writer at DC suggesting, “We need a rape.” (This begs the rhetorical question, “Do we?”) It’s a distasteful story because it never shows the woman dealing with the fallout of her rape. She’s dead by the time the readers find out about it. There were also a number of other editorial problems that left the story infamous.

This fridging has happened a few times at Marvel but seems to be less pervasive at that company. Daredevil has lost his wife and almost every other girlfriend he has had. This includes Karen Page, a secretary who left Matt Murdock’s law firm to do porn and ended up addicted to heroin and in trouble with gangsters in my favorite comics story ever, Born Again. The Wasp also apparently died in a Skrull invasion because the writer felt Hank Pym would be more interesting with a dead ex-wife. The Avengers overturned this later by revealing that the Wasp was alive but missing. I guess the Avengers Disassembled story could be a gender-reversed fridging since the Scarlet Witch killed the Vision, Hawkeye, Ant-Man and Jack of Hearts, although most of these deaths were later overturned.

Marvel avoided fridging a character when Mockingbird got sexually assaulted in West Coast Avengers. Most of the story was about her reaction to the assault and her dealing with it (it did not end well for her attacker) and she actually called out her husband Hawkeye for going on a macho kick and making her attack all about him.

There are probably more examples of this but now I’m depressed and need to go home from work and lie down for six or seven hours.