Fantastic Four #600

I am making an ambitious commitment. Last weekend I decided to begin plowing through all my stacked-up issues of Fantastic Four, which run all the way back to the end of 2011 and the "100-PAGE 50th ANNIVERSARY 600th ISSUE EXTRAVAGANZA" (a scan of the cover appears above).

It is odd how little fanfare Marvel mustered for the golden anniversaries of its seminal titles -- Fantastic Four, Thor, Amazing Spider-Man, Avengers, X-Men -- titles that built its corporate brand. Marvel, I imagine, having recently been gobbled up by Disney, didn't want to accentuate the datedness of its stable of characters. Disney didn't want Marvel because of Marvel's comic-book subscribers; Disney purchased Marvel to puts its superheroes on the big screen and sell movie tickets to young people; to do this, it is best not to spotlight the rich heritage and long history of your fictional property. Young people are interested in the new and novel, not what was paradigm-shifting in the 1960s.

The Fantastic Four represented a new era in comic books (superhero group as a bickering, dysfunctional family) and helped usher in the Swinging Sixties when it first appeared at the end of 1961. This is the conventional wisdom among aficionados, and it helps explain why Marvel maintains the title despite its apparent lack of substantial contemporary appeal. (A new film version bombed at the box office this summer.)

The fact is that during the 1960s, when Marvel replaced DC as the top comic-book publisher, two titles were at the heart of the Marvel revolution: The Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man. It is hard to imagine today when Avengers and X-men are so clearly at the top of the heap, but Kirby's Fantastic Four and Ditko's Amazing Spider-Man essentially spawned the Marvel Universe and captured the Zeitgeist of the Sixties.

One drizzly Sunday morning around the time of the release of Fantastic Four #600, I saw Reed Richards and Sue Storm.

I was on the back end of an eight-mile run. A young married couple -- how I know they were married I can't explain; it has something to do with the harshness of silence in the manner they interacted with one another -- got out of a Subaru. The Subaru was parked in front of a hipster breakfast nook in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that is home to Amazon's campus (though, at the time, four years ago, the Amazon footprint was not as large as it is today). On top of the Subaru were snowboards. The young married couple were attractive -- hip, without being bohemian; solidly bourgeois, without being square -- in other words, an ideal manifestation of the fundamental building block of American society.

Right then and there it dawned on me, as I ran by and up the hill in the gray wet mono-climate of the Pacific Northwest, that I was looking at Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, the foundation of the Fantastic Four.

The following day at work, against my better judgment, I tried to explain to a coworker how by happenstance while out on a run I stumbled upon Reed Richards and Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four, and how this allowed me insight into the idealization of our consumer-oriented, bourgeois American society. My coworker gave me a confused, somewhat frightened look, and that was that. But I will always remember the moment when Sue and Reed were revealed to me.

That the Fantastic Four is no longer a popular title says a lot about the loss of optimism in the middle class. The solid bourgeois family with stable values and material prospects is a faerie tale of the post-WWII past. The middle class is cracked and crumbling, disappearing among the horde of working poor.

Marvel tried to juice interest in the comic book by killing off the privileged puer aeternus, the Human Torch, Johnny Storm, in Fantastic Four #587. (Johnny Storm, the prosperous teenage hot head, was so popular in the 1960s that he had his own series in Strange Tales).

The central feature of Fantastic Four #600 is "Whatever Happened to Johnny Storm?" by Jonathan Hickman and Carmine Di Giandomenico. The Human Torch is forced to fight in a never-ending series of gladiatorial battles in a Negative Zone arena for the pleasure of Annhilus. He invariably is killed; then he is resurrected by centipede-like surgery creatures. Eventually, Johnny triumphs over Annhilus and escapes from the Negative Zone reborn.

Below you will find 18 scans from the beginning of "Whatever Happened to Johnny Storm?"  I went overboard because I am such a fan of Di Giandomenico's art. Here it has a real Roger Dean vibe.

There is no finer superhero slogan than the Human Torch's "FLAME ON!"

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UPDATE: I ran by the cafe this morning where four-years ago I saw the young married couple who conjured up in my runner's mind Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman. The restaurant is still there. Butting up against it is some of the new commercial construction sprawl associated with Amazon's octopus-like expansion all over the Denny Regrade and South Lake Union area.

David M. Raup, an Originator of the Idea that Mass Extinction Events are Periodic, Died July 9

David M. Raup, one of the founding fathers of the hypothesis that mass extinctions are periodic, died earlier this month. The New York Times ran a decent obit last week by Bruce Weber, "David M. Raup, Who Transformed Field of Paleontology, Dies at 82":

Dr. Raup’s most famous contribution to the field may have been the revelation in 1983, after a six-year study of marine organisms he conducted with J. John Sepkoski Jr., that over the last 250 million years, extinctions of species spiked at regular intervals of about 26 million years. 

Extinction periodicity, as it is known, enlivened the study of huge volcanic eruptions and of changes in the earth’s magnetic field that may have coincided with periods of mass extinction. It has also given rise to numerous theories regarding the history of life, including that the evolution of myriad species has been interrupted by nonterrestrial agents from the solar system or the galaxy. 

One prominent hypothesis involved an undiscovered companion to the sun — it was christened Nemesis — that every so often swung close enough to the solar system that it redirected comets toward the earth. 

Extinction periodicity remains unproven — further published analyses of the Raup-Sepkoski data have been divided on their original conclusions — and Dr. Raup was open about the fact that the data could lead him only so far. (“I believe they really are periodic,” he said of mass extinctions in a 1997 interview published online, “but I can’t prove it.”) But throughout his career, it was the questions that arose because of his work that established him as among paleontology’s most creative thinkers.

Twenty years ago, in my late twenties and into my early thirties, I was fascinated by periodic mass extinctions. I read most of the books on the subject, which at the time were numerous, including Raup's The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science, as well as Richard Muller's Nemesis: The Death Star.

Here is a short book review of The Nemesis Affair by Jonathan Weiner published by NYT in 1986:

THE NEMESIS AFFAIR: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science. By David M. Raup. (Norton, $14.95.) 

In 1984 David M. Raup and his colleague Jack Sepkoski published a theory of periodic mass extinctions. Statistical analyses of fossil data suggested that the world has endured a Great Dying roughly every 26 million years. This theory added fresh fuel to the controversial hypothesis of Luis and Walter Alvarez, a physicist and geologist, and father and son, who in 1980 had suggested that the dinosaurs were killed when a big chunk of rock or ice fell from outer space. The astrophysicist Richard Muller, a protege of Luis Alvarez, soon linked both extinction theories in a long-shot, third hypothesis: the Sun has an obscure companion, Nemesis, the Death Star. Sweeping close every 26 million years, Nemesis is said to dislodge comets from their orbits and send them falling through the solar system like cannonballs. In ''The Nemesis Affair,'' Mr. Raup, Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, tells how each one of these theories, and some of their rivals, was born and how they were seized on by the news media - sometimes before the theories were ready. He stresses the social side of science - the roles of collegial advice, rumor, preprints, editors, editorials, peer review and especially the news media. A hot topic short-circuits the system, he argues - for better and worse. Mr. Raup is clear, low-key and good-humored. ''The Nemesis theory,'' he says, ''may turn out to be a major step forward in our understanding of the natural world or an embarrassing period of near-insanity in scholarship.''

I was intrigued by the idea that mass extinction might be linked to magnetic reversals on the planet. I read Alvarez's book too.

Somehow I was going to link this up with E.O. Lawrence and color television. One of the hypotheses I was working on is if Lawrence's version of the technology would have taken off a decade or more before color TV's wide introduction in the middle- to late-1960s, the American cultural revolution would have happened sooner; the idea being that part of the freak-out of the 1960s was due to the introduction of color television. It was just too powerful a new medium for people to absorb at first.

Now that mass extinction is a popular topic once again, it would interesting to see how the Sixth Extinction fits in with Raup's periodicity hypothesis.

Silver Surfer #4

Silver Surfer was introduced, like many of the characters that form the backbone of the Marvel corporate behemoth, in the pages of the 1960s Fantastic Four. He was the tragic, brooding, enslaved herald of planet-gobbling Galactus. Marvel's first "cosmic" comic-book hero, Silver Surfer captivated the Baby Boomers. A loner, a stranger, an alien, filled with regret and sorrow, Silver Surfer harnessed the power cosmic, riding the spaceways on his silver surfboard.

The 1960s were all about power -- explosive, mind-bending, colorful, no-holds-barred, live-or-die power, like a color TV Western high-noon gun fight. I realized this, felt this '60s indulgent Romantic feeling, on the bus on my way to a race last September when the garage rock classic, "To Die Alone" by The Bush (produced by Kim Fowley), shuffled on my iPod:

After the 1960s, the next period of great Silver Surfer popularity was the Grunge Age, the late 1980s/early 1990s.

A moment of mass social ferment that in hindsight is more indicative of neoliberalism's complete victory over social democracy and socialism (the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascension of New Democrat Bill Clinton) than any lasting cultural monument, Grunge nonetheless instilled belief in youth (and I was one) that another world was possible.

I read The Silver Surfer and listened to Pearl Jam's Ten at the time. I displayed issue #48, the "Past Sins" issue, on the wall of my Washington Heights studio:

Now that Silver Surfer is back with his own vibrant title once again, does this herald another age of social ferment? I hope so. What is different about this latest iteration is how whimsical it is. The Silver Surfer is teamed with a twenty-something slacker/bed-&-breakfast hostess named Dawn Greenwood. Gone are the testosterone-driven tales of deep-space combat with super-powerful cosmic villains. The comic book as scripted by Dan Slott with art by Mike Allred and colors by Laura Allred reads more like an airy Golden Age fable.

And that is what is so perplexing about this new Silver Surfer. With the fracturing of Western Civilization -- digital technology dominating social consciousness, neoliberalism pauperizing the planet, murder and mayhem abounding, displaced persons in greater numbers at any time since World War Two -- the comic book appears to be an inversion of current events. Rather than translating our Zeitgeist into a heroic, cosmic narrative, as Silver Surfer has done in times past, Slott and Allred create a comic book that turns our present age upside down and inside out. This is a good thing, I think. The system is collapsing, and we need to break on through to the other side. Slott and Allred are giving a glimpse of what might be there waiting for us.

Below are seven scans from Silver Surfer #4, the cover and six interior pages. Surfer and Dawn return to Earth after a cosmic odyssey. Strange events are unfolding at Greenwood Inn.