FF #23: Final Issue

I was recently gifted a copy of Thomas Frank's latest book, Listen, Liberal (2016). It is basically the same thing that Frank has been writing about since he started The Baffler at the end of the 1980s -- how the working class has been and continues to be raped by the nation's political class.

While reading one of the early chapters yesterday I was struck by Frank's description of the great labor struggle that began with the lockout at A.E. Staley in Decatur in 1990s. One of the divisive issues was the company's demand that workers move from a regular workday to a rotating 12-hour shift. Frank mentions that this kind of 12-hour shift -- when you're on and then off and then on again -- basically precludes any kind of normal life. You can't go to church on Sunday, coach little league, maintain decent relations with one's family. Management demanded the shift change knowing it would bring about a war with the union. And it did.

Reading this passage in Frank's book made me realize that it is the same problem I am experiencing in my life. I am not working a mandatory, rotating 12-hour shift. But I am working a job where I never know what is coming from day to day. I do work the occasional 12-hour day. But mostly it is the incessant, cascading demands, never knowing when the next flaming arrow will pierce my hide. I have no protected time to perform my duties. Each day brings new requests; and once fulfilled, nothing is ever good enough.

I have been operating in survival mode since July. All my usual routines have been backburnered. Hopefully, after Labor Day and the big annual event hosted by the organization I work for is done, I can begin clawing my way back to a normal life. (I have an escape plan hatched.)

Earlier this summer I completed Jonathan Hickman's historic run on the Fantastic Four from a few years back. The final issue, FF #23, is an amazing statement of Modernism. Nick Dragotta's art captures the essence of the 1930s optimism regarding human achievement, which is largely inseparable from the Manhattan skyscraper sky. The apex of political achievement in the United States is the New Deal, the Comintern's Popular Front, the Flint sit-down strike, etc. It is no coincidence that the comic book superhero is born at the same time. The idea is that the future is open and it is bountiful and ours to harvest. The future. Can you imagine a better visualization of it than Dragotta's first three pages below? Franklin Richards talks with his sister Valeria, both Reed and Sue Richards' children from the future.

Now we have no future. The Hippies had one. It was back to Mother Nature. That was cashed in for an ersatz free market utopia, which, after not too long, certainly since the Millennium, has been reappraised as a dystopia.

If we are to get out of our death sentence we have to go back to the foundation of our "future," the 1930s, and discover what we did right. Charles Bukowski thought it was because everyone was so tough from the Great Depression. Can we be that tough again?

Fantastic Four 605.1

Corporate behemoths can of course be agile and iconoclastic. The West Coast digital ascendancy of Apple, Google and Amazon proves this point. But Marvel under Disney can also be added to the roll call.

No better of example of Marvel's willingness to take a sledge hammer to its brand is Fantastic Four 605.1, written by Jonathan Hickman with art by Mike Choi. It re-imagines the Fantastic Four origin tale through the lens of counterfactual history. What if Hitler had won the war and begun the 1,000-year reign of the Third Reich?

In Hickman's telling, Doktor Richards is tasked with keeping the people of the German Reich from growing soft. As the Führer asks the Nazi Mister Fantastic:

You see, Doktor . . . while it starts with symbolism, it is the possible fulfillment of that dream which truly energizes a people. But, and this is our real problem, how do you motivate the already victorious? Hmmmm?

I'll tell you . . .

With new horizons.

So I ask, are you the man for the job, Doktor Richards? Can you peak [sic] past the sun and race to infinity?

To which Doktor Richards replies:

Yes, Führer, I am. Watch as I conquer heaven. 

I think the space program played much the same role in the Cold War United States. It is well documented that the U.S. space program "arose from Nazi Germany's ashes."

Hitler in actuality was a control freak who suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. He tried unsuccessfully to centralize all functions of the state under his administrative control, an impossibility which led to the eventual meltdown of the Reich.

Most of the corporate chieftains and dominant U.S. oligarchs suffer from the same mental disorder as the Führer. The political system has been gobbled down whole.

The twelve scans that follow relate the Nazi origin of the Fantastic Four. Richards vivisects the brain of a young, brilliant Viktor von Doom to augment his own; he then uses his enhanced brain power to conceive and launch a space shot to harness cosmic radiation. He recruits a brutally violent sister-brother team, the Sturms, along with, from out of a concentration camp, a Jewish pilot, Benjamin Jakob Grimm.

In the last couple of scans the Golem-like Grimm pulverizes the Führer and shatters the skull of the Iceman Sturm.

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!"

****

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.

New Avengers #30

Last Sunday I hit a stride and read somewhere around ten issues of Jonathan Hickman's New Avengers. For almost two years now Hickman has been plotting the story of the extinction of all life, not just in our universe but in universes throughout all dimensions, the multiverse. This multidimensional pan-universal extinction is triggered when one Earth from one dimension collides with another Earth from another dimension at an incursion point.

Most of the action in the title to date has been superheroes, the Illuminati,  rushing around weighted down with the moral quandary of having to commit genocide by destroying the intruding, non-Earth-616 planet before it collapses both.

On this day, the day that Hillary Clinton announces her candidacy for President of the United States, collapse is an appropriate topic. The Democrats are in a state of denial so extreme it approaches brain death. Most deep-blue Democrats when pushed will acknowledge that Hillary is not the best candidate -- Elizabeth Warren is most often sited as a preference -- but they don't see a way around Hillary's name recognition and deep pockets. So Democrats plan to sit tight and hope for the best. In the meantime, the tune that is being whistled as the Democratic Party drives past the graveyard is that Hillary will be able to mobilize and deliver to the polls the "Obama coalition" -- blacks, youth, Latinos.

That's not going to happen. The only thing that might save Hillary's bacon, assuming a dark horse like Jim Webb doesn't get traction and trounce her in the primaries, as Barack Hussein did in 2008, is if the Republican primary is so chaotic and vicious with billionaire funders engaged in mutually assured destruction that it deliveries up a terminally wounded standard bearer, a la Mitt Romney in 2012.

Right now let's assume that both the Ted Cruz clown car and the Marco Rubio daydream don't survive long after Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina -- granted, this is a large assumption -- and the race for the GOP nomination boils down to Scott Walker vs. Jeb Bush. I think either one beats Hillary.

Then what are we looking at? I think if it is Walker we'll see the repeal of Davis-Bacon. And with the loss of federal prevailing wage, there will be an even more pronounced spike in income inequality. Labor unions will become an almost non-factor in national politics. Union density is already so low, around 11%, one has to go all the way back to before the U.S. entered World War One to find a similar level.

Historians will tell you: When inequality spikes, societies fracture and collapse. That is what Hillary's candidacy augurs.

And we haven't even discussed the rapid disappearance of the Earth's ice. The April Harper's had a terrific and terrifying story by Gretel Ehrlich, "Rotten Ice: Traveling by dogsled in the melting Arctic." The Greenland Inuit are finding it increasingly difficult to hunt because so much of the ice is weak and in retreat. Many subsistence hunters are committing suicide.

So Hickman's New Avengers tale of collapse, genocide and extinction is timely and should find a receptive audience. What I particularly like about issue #30 is the art of Dalibor Talajic. (You will find eight scans below. Alan Davis is the cover artist, found in the scan at the top of the post.)

Talajic's work reminds me of the great Wally Wood and the work he did on the early Daredevil, with its heavy inks of the horror comics of the 1950s but in a superhero setting -- very appropriate for Hickman's epic of the death of the multiverse.