I. Introduction: Comics as a U. S. Cultural Index

III. Mr Fantastic: Science Stretched Too Thin

Reed Richards, codenamed Mr. Fantastic, the unquestionable leader of the group, is prototype of the American man of the 50s-60s. The “consumed” hero in Eco’s theory³² can be seen as an apt metaphor of the American self, which for Baudrillard, “Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present”—something that would explain the everyday fabulism of American life.³³ Reed, accordingly, is already “consumed” as a multimillionaire scientific genius who creates an interstellar rocket, so his role changes little when his entire body acquires the ability to stretch like sentient rubber. Mr. Fantastic represents fittingly the Self, or the overall controlling “mind” of Jung’s fourfold division. As Marie von Franz says:

The organizing center from which the regulatory effect stems seems to be a sort of “nuclear atom” in our psychic system. One could also call it the inventor, organizer, and source of dream images. Jung called this center the “Self” and described it as the totality of the whole psyche, in order to distinguish it from the “ego,” which constitutes only a small part of the total psyche.³⁴

In fact, stretching serves as a physical metaphor for American identity since, as Stephen Fender shows, the immigrants’ journey across the Atlantic and the creation of the a new national super-imposed identity is a staple of the “American Difference,” and “exceptionalism.”³⁵ It also stands, however, for American techno-scientific theories and capacity (a point also made ironically at the beginning of the film). In this “dreamer’s” stretching are summed the 50s miracle of atomic energy and the 60s space program optimism about reaching the stars,³⁶ democratically available to all adventurers, as shown by Marvel’s and “the world’s first ‘imaginauts’”;³⁷ the expanded limits of knowledge; the blanketing hegemony of reasonable theory which Reed continuously spouts; the extension of the self through bulky exo-skeletonic machines, such as Reed ceaselessly constructs in his lab, and which signal not only the infantile wish of the brain for rapid maturation of the “premature” body,³⁸ but also clearly a penile valorization, where expansion matters. In Jungian terms too, the controlling-synthesizing principle that Reed Richards represents is often pictured as the archetype of the “Cosmic Man”: “a gigantic, symbolic human being who embraces and contains the whole cosmos” and appears in someone’s dreams to herald a “creative solution to his conflict.”³⁹ Mr. Fantastic fights by wrapping tight around his foes (or angry friends, in the film) like a giant straightjacket (symbolically restraining demented evil or rage by good reason). In short, his body is literally the cliché of the word made flesh—and a phallogocentric cliché at that (as Reed is always right—in theory!).

Finally, although Reed is the one to whom all the other teammates relate immediately, he bungles his social duties, prefering his laboratory sanctum: no matter how much he can stretch, the brain’s self-referentiality is a limited state of being. Ironically, Reed’s oldest relation is to the arch-enemy of the FF, the evil genius Victor Von Doom, or Dr. Doom. Typically the alter Ego of the scientist, Doom stands for the dark monstrous Other to the mythical hero, with a name that recalls mad professors like Dr. Strangelove,⁴² or even J. Robert Oppenheimer.⁴³ Although Dr. Doom’s status from orphaned nomad to monarch of Latveria (a fantastic Balkan nation)⁴⁴ contrasts to the democratic, family-oriented U.S. and its 60s fear of Eastern Communism, the Latverian prosperity suggests a kind of paternalistic enlightened rule not unlike Reed’s own leadership of his team. Doom was Richards’s college peer and rival, and it was due to their frenzied competition that Doom conducted an erroneous experiment that resulted in his disfigurement and subsequent permanent encasement in full body armor, topped by a medieval (i.e., anti-New World) green cowl and cape.⁴⁵ Antithetical to Reed’s stretching, Doom’s containing armor is, nevertheless, also a technologically-advanced device like a cosmonaut suit, signifying the dark side of Reed’s self-isolating vision which, for Groensteen, is duplicated by the “‘existential dream’ that a reader experiences when he plunges into the world of small pictures.”⁴⁶ After all, for Kroker:

Heidegger was wrong. Technology is not something restless, dynamic and ever expanding, but just the opposite. The will to technology equals the will to virtuality. And the will to virtuality is about the recline of western civilization: a great shutting-down of experience, with a veneer of technological dynamism over an inner reality of inertia, exhaustion, and disappearances....⁴⁷

Right from the start, therefore, the comic book questions the purity of its superheroic model and simultaneously casts a shadow (em-bodied as well as reflected in the Lacanian mirror-image of “dark-Ages” Doom) over the American obsession with the improvement of the body through technoscience (particularly intensified today with cyborg mechanics and genetic alchemy).