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

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V. The Human Torch: No Man on Fire

That leaves Susan’s younger brother Johnny Storm, a.k.a. the Human Torch, as the epitome of superheroic bodily parody. Granted by the cosmic rays the power to light up his whole body in living fire, project flames, and fly, the Torch takes his former hobby of hotrod car racing to turning his own body into that high-technology hotrod.^⁶⁶ The obvious representation of not only the torch of Liberty, an American symbol, but also an idealized Baby-Boomer generation—fast, shining, high-flying, ever-youthful, good-looking—is overshadowed however by the inability of Johnny to ever slow down or evolve beyond his shallow sophomoric self. He represents the team spirit; but the spirit of America’s biotechnological future is ever-racing, and to reign it in by way of a maturation process that would make the Torch less hot but more Human mocks the potential for everlasting dynamism that is America. For, “in America,” Baudrillard observes, “the arrival of night-time or periods of rest cannot be accepted, nor can the Americans bear to see the technological process halted”—as seen symbolically in “the obsessive fear of the Americans...that the lights might go out.”^⁶⁷ In Jungian terms, the Torch represents the ego, the part of the personality that tends “to follow its own arbitrary impulses” but only so as “to make real the totality—the whole psyche. It is the ego that serves to light up the entire system, allowing it to become conscious and thus to be realized” (emphasis mine).^⁶⁸ It is indeed very often the Torch’s impetuous and reckless actions that mobilize the team to a new adventure, or start some drama, but only as far as he follows Reed’s leadership to a happy conclusion. In the same way, the ego is said to be productive only when it is “able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any further design or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth,”^⁶⁹ a trait stressed in the film too, where Johnny is the first to embrace, name, and initiate the superhero team identity, but is only useful to it when he subdues his blatant egoistic immaturity. Since comics require constant action, however, those spells of human sobriety are soon burnt out, and it has been an increasing staple of the comic-book to show the Torch “incapable of committing to a serious, long-term romantic relationship.... Immature and prone to distraction in other areas.[....] Impetuous and hotheaded.”^⁷⁰ Johnny Storm is further undermined by the fact that he is not the original Human Torch, but a re-creation of a 40s “Golden Age” android superhero by the same name. This “passing on the torch” offers Johnny some legitimacy, but also sets an unsettling comparison between this technologically-mutated human who loses his humanity and the older, more dignified robot that achieves humanity and heroism by painstaking effort. Johnny’s plight suggests then that mere bodily evolution without the comparable mental or spiritual ripening leaves paradoxically one a mere “spirit” indeed—like alcohol, very flammable, but with no underlying substance.

VI. The Thing: Grotesque Rocks!

Representing the body in the fourfold division of the self, Benjamin Grimm, a.k.a. “the Thing,” is finally the only member of the team with a nonhuman codename, not kin to the others, wearing merely a pair of briefs (or, later, tights) instead of a bodysuit, and so is in every way distanced from the other three. While the others represent the “giant step” forward, he is like a primeval stone-idol drawn from the archetypal unconscious (though such idols carried an unusual amount of animation).^⁷¹ According to von Franz, “the stone symbolizes what is perhaps the simplest and deepest experience—the experience of something eternal that man can have in those moments when he feels immortal and unalterable.”^⁷² Since the cosmic rays turn his skin into a hideous orange rock-like growth, trapping him into a super-strong and invulnerable shell, the Thing in one sense resembles more Dr. Doom than the other team members, who can invoke their beautiful human bodies anytime.Yet Ben comes across unquestionably (both in the comic book and the film) as the most human of the FF, perhaps, for one, because, as Jungians say, stones “are especially apt symbols of the Self because of the ‘just-so-ness’ of their nature”^⁷³ that eschews any alienating super-imposition. For another reason, Ben’s role is the one comfortingly closest to the average man on the street, as opposed to a genius, a model/ wife, or a pop idol. His name evokes the Franklinean ethic that is the legendary bedrock of the American marvel, since Ben chanced as Reed’s college room-mate because of his football star scholarship, became a World War II combat hero, and used his aviator talents to build his own successful enterprise. Thus Ben serves as the Jungian animus, the inner masculine principle, both in its earliest manifestation as “a personification of mere physical power—for instance, as an athletic champion or ‘muscle man’,” and in its more mature subsequent role as a source of creative “spiritual firmness.”^⁷⁴ But Reed’s insistence that Ben pilot his experimental spaceship tragically confines Ben into being the mere strongman of the team, exaggerating his rough Hell’s Kitchen talk and attitude, summarized in the Thing’s battle cry: “It’s clobberin’ time!”

A deeper still insight about technoscience is therefore intimated here, beyond the obvious Shelleyan point that careless use of biotechnology can afflict one’s dearest buddy with Frankensteinitis gravis. Techno-evolution, we are told, can actually regress the human body, since by transferring skill, dexterity and importance to the biomechanical aids, the original flesh loses its usefulness, becomes a hulking, ungainly thing in contrast to its sleek and superfast accoutrements, and might as well be a Stone Age throwback—a grim fate indeed, as Ben’s surname suggests. In Eco’s terms, the Thing is the only hero who is really consumed by the accident; yet ironically, by virtue of his afflicted body, Ben’s tragedy can also provide a reliable point of contrast and criticism to Mr. Fantastic’s project. In fact, Ben is the only one with his own philosophy and license to contradict, or make fun of “Stretcho.”

The Thing is also the only team member to constantly develop outside relationships, something which designates him as the comic connection to the real world: Ben Grimm represents the average male teenage comics reader, with his yet-rough thinking trying to adjust to a changing, uncomfortable body that sprouts hair and acne and a gravely voice, and with his attempt to mask the fear of change underneath an armor of culturally-encrusted manhood and peer affections. In the avant-garde way of the FF, he may also be an early sign of the fitness craze that has been a basic trait of western society since the 1980s, and which has led thousands of people, and especially insecure teens searching for strength and confidence, to “pump up” their bodies, often monstrously, in gyms and through drugs, often illegal and dangerous ones. To put it otherwise in Kristevan terms, the Thing is the symbolic shell of patriarchal masculinity that congeals over the semiotic potential underneath—and the irreversibility of the process, despite Reed’s frequent attempts to “cure” Ben, suggests the gradual conditioning of humans to fit their assigned bodies. This speaks for “Lacan’s description [in his 1953 “Some Reflections on the Ego”] of the formation of subjectivity in the mirror stage, in which a sense of ‘primordial Discord’ emerges alongside an image of corporeal totality, creating a fantasy of ‘the body in bits and pieces’ as a retrospective representation of presymbolic chaos”—^⁷⁵ as pictured eloquently in the fragmented, cobblestone quality of the Thing’s hide.

It is also through Ben that the comic book tilts this Platonic supertechnological teleology towards the grotesque by going where Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein feared to tread, i.e. in the realm of the sexuality of the monstrous body. As we learn from Anne K. Mellor’s study, what drives Dr. Frankenstein to destroy his female animant while still at the creation stage^⁷⁶ is fear of:

...female sexuality as such. A woman who is sexually liberated, free to choose her own life, her own sexual partner (by force, if necessary). And to propagate at will can appear only monstrously ugly to Victor Frankenstein, for she defies that sexist aesthetic that insists that women be small, delicate, modest, passive, and sexually pleasing—but available only to their lawful husbands.^⁷⁷

Such a lady appears in 1989, when fellow superheroine Ms. Marvel is accidentally turned into a female Thing-clone with long eyelashes and breasts and becomes Ben’s lover. On the one hand, “Ms. Thing” may be a simplistic male conceptualization of the new 80s assertive woman: one of those Kirby women who, in Voger’s opinion, “are beautiful in their own way, but they’re powerful and not altogether sexual.”^⁷⁸ The romance promotes the comic-book soap-opera without transgressing into the forbidden “contamination” of interspecies/interracial relationships (especially in a comic-book without a single minority character in it!), and it is never concluded, as the grotesque Ms. Marvel eventually reverts to pretty Sharon Ventura. Nevertheless, it is sobering to consider, even briefly, the proliferation of the truly mutated body, the nonhuman new human race, which might well be the projected foreboding on the outcome of current cultural and technological tampering with the body.^⁷⁹ In the other team-members, the reversal into a human bodily form offers the comfort of the repeated and familiar sign whose recurrence in writing (here drawing), as Derrida suggests in Of Grammatology, is the basis for a system of meaning;^⁸⁰ but in a world of Things, what (signifying) value would the body have?

Adjacent to this issue is the deconstruction of the ostensible glorification of team heroism, science and family values in the FF by the focus on the unpredictable mutagenic potential of these same values. Alone, the body remains static; it is in its relation to other bodies that transformation occurs. Although technology can interfere with, or duplicate partly the process of adaptive mutation, the network of stimuli is so much larger than a laboratory can hold, or predict. One is then led to wonder if it is the infamous “bioapparatus” that we truly have to fear,^⁸¹ or whether we should instead focus on the transformations happening every day on a non-superheroic level due to simple interaction. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, “human bodies have the wonderful ability, while striving for integration and cohesion, organic and psychic wholeness, to also provide for and indeed produce fragmentations, fracturings, dislocations that orient bodies and body parts toward other bodies and body parts.”^⁸² Hence, one should amend Eco’s observation that the superhero never changes, because s/he never interacts with “our” reality on anything but a limited “civic” level.^⁸³ The informational density of the panels on the comic-book page, increasingly less linear in its unfolding, where the body appears as both human and, in the same sweep of vision, mutated; the further blending of such action images with word-balloons that require momentary stasis; and the—often drastic—changes wrought on comic book heroes by the changing of a penciller, or the re-casting of their origin in a new series to reflect new mores or fashion trends, all these suggest the potentially transformative complexity not only of the “su(pe)r-real,” but of the alluded-to real as well. At the same time, this “constellation of script and image in their material difference, being juxtaposed and integrated at the same time....parodies precisely that claim for a truth beyond the signs, and directs our attention to the constellation of signs itself”—^⁸⁴ but isn’t reality perception precisely such a sign system? Fantasy and reality interact further as the artists habitually put a bit of themselves into their characters: Kirby admits that many of his characters resemble him facially,^⁸⁵ while in the 2005 FF film Stan Lee upholds a private film tradition and makes a cameo appearance as the character Willie the Postman, who in the book brings to the team members fan mail from their comic book readers! Adding to that mimetic realism on the page (especially lately, with computer-assisted artwork), to superhero costumes at Halloween, to co-option of comic-book metaphors into the cliché stockhouse of language and culture, we see comic escapism constantly returning back to its human source.

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