Crisis On Infinite Roys, Part 1

So: it seems I might be blogging about FF for a good long time. Because my initial FF post left even me unsatisfied, for God's sake! Yes, so many questions raised, because as soon as the microscope is turned on to answer just one, suddenly more appear: more questions, and even questions underlying questions...that prop other questions up, and hope not to be noticed, because once these questions are asked they endanger even the asking itself...

Oh, my point?

Roy Thomas, sucka.

Roy. Thomas.


In an earlier post, I defined four grades of Fantastic Four comics: Real, Very Good, Caretaker, and Shitty, with the Caretaker grade reserved for those FF creators who didn't do any lasting harm to the property (more on that ugly word shortly), but who also didn't do any lasting good. Pretty good definition, eh? Well, shucks, thanks a heap, folks...and yet don't thank me too soon, because something about it doesn't actually fit that well. Because ultimately the word "caretaker" means more than just "invisible one" or "harmless one", it means also (inevitably) "maintainer of the status quo." And maintaining the status quo is exactly what Roy Thomas did, we can probably all agree. In fact it's hard to think of anyone in the whole Big Two comics world who maintained quite as assiduously as Roy the Boy: Stan may have had the brilliant notion of having all Marvel's superhero titles inhabit the same world, but it was Roy who braided those threads of interconnection Stan established into ropes, and then cables, and then finally vast anchors of necessity that in later days carried Marvel's unique continuity-based charm to the depths of the sea...

Ugh. And it's made a hell of an ugly mess, hasn't it? The Cancer of Marvel, seeping out everywhere, metastasizing itself even into other comic book companies...

So you may ask, why isn't Roy classed as a Caretaker, when he so clearly best exemplifies the whole idea of Caretaker? Good question. And the answer is: because he was the first Caretaker, which means he had to create simultaneously the very status quo he was in charge of protecting. Because it certainly wasn't left to him!

Nor could it have been. Beyond the fact that Lee and Kirby were obviously just making things up as they went (Jack: "Hey, Stan, what if the F.F. fought the Inhumans?" Stan: "Great idea, Jack! Now what's an Inhuman?"), and that Marvel probably couldn't have found a status quo with both its hands anyway until every title had a hundred issues or so under its belt, the elliptical nature of superhero and monster comic book milieux itself made the consolidation of continuity a very difficult project. Possibly it could only even be conceived of in the mind of a comics fan: and even then it would be a slippery thing, its ambition at least half-laughable. In fact Roy did laugh at it! In my 1974 FF Treasury Edition, the reprint of FF #11 (set in 1962, one presumes) shows a flashback of Reed Richards handling a rifle on the front lines of WWII, as the modern-day Reed reminisces about how in those days he was always thinking of the girl he left behind...but underneath the image, this editorial comment:

"Hmmm...Reed must've enlisted in the Korean fracas, too! Sue isn't that old! - Rascally Roy."*

"Rascally", absolutely, that's what he is...because is everything falling apart in 1974 without the institution of a special "Marvel Time" to replace both "real time" (i.e. the sort of time shared between Marvel and its readership, and expressed mainly in topical references - for example it's the existence of this time that allows Ben and Johnny to meet the Beatles), and the generic comic-book time in which things are just roughly going on "now"-ish? Hmmm, no, probably not. But Roy sees it coming, and can't resist poking fun. It should probably be noted that although Roy did invent the idea of Marvel Time, I never noticed as a reader that he required Marvel Time from any of his writers during his tenure as EIC...to me, it always seemed to be just a funny, fannish idea, that helped to explain something that (actually) didn't really need an explanation. Just as it doesn't need explanation today, although for some reason we have explanations aplenty lying around, all slowly digesting their own hearts...

However, I don't think you can really blame Roy for all that, because it seems to me that his fixation on continuity was more in the nature of writerly conceit than editorial rule, and I think in that context he put continuity to good use.

Back to this in a moment, but first the business of the elliptical superhero milieux, because it's important. Let me introduce it by sharing with you a debate I recently read on the John Byrne forum (although "debate" is a pretty polite word for what went on there) : it seems there's this guy who wonders how Batman's origin can possibly make sense as it stands in the fully-unified and rationalized DCU, and he's got a point. If such a rationalized universe had existed at that time, then Bruce Wayne might very well already have known of Superman's existence, and so his decision to put on a cape and tights could not have been...um, unforced, shall we say? In fact as this guy over at JBF pointed out, if you had the example of Superman before you, you would probably not decide to dress like a bat in order to frighten criminals, so much as you might decide to frighten them by dressing to resemble that scary indestructible guy a couple counties over who keeps sending crooks to the chair. And then, you know, throw in some spooky bat-imagery too, just for pizzazz.

As you can imagine, the JBF crowd was pretty rude to this guy. Eventually someone deigned to engage with him to the point where they allowed as how, yes, okay we say it's all one big universe now, but when Batman started up it wasn't one big universe, so of course he didn't know about Superman even if we must now officially say that he must have.

Which is practically a kind of superhero gnosticism, of course; the conceit of continuity should actually be intolerant of such a viewpoint, because inside that conceit things are by their nature always taken literally, and so they just can't work this way without implying something truly bizarre about the way they handle the relations of space, time, and memory. We know, certainly, that the Gotham of the late Thirties isn't the same as the Gotham we read about now...but that remains a kind of unofficial knowledge, because if the current canon states that Batman and Superman have always lived in the same universe, then Batman's origin really doesn't make sense as it stands, officially, and there's isn't too much that can be done about that "officially" except to officially swallow it. Well, except there is one thing, actually: we could always take a page from the Rascally One's book, and simply accept the fact that these rationalizations of ours have limits...we could admit that continuity in superhero comics is just another fantastical storytelling device, much like the super-powers themselves, and that as such it was never designed to explain anything as thoroughly as we have now decided it must. Continuity (I would argue) is above all a creative tool, whose intensity can be dialled down or up to produce intended effects: the undefined cityscapes of pure imagination like "Gotham" or "Metropolis" or Central or Star or Coast Cities are clearly intended to be malleable settings, little symbolic universes of their own that are deliberately disconnected from the values of any "real" world, and for that reason there are certain questions about them that we simply never need ask...but then we need not ask them in Marvel's New York City, either, because continuity accounts for their naturalness in 1960s Marvel as easily as the lack of continuity accounts for their naturalness in 1930s National, where ellipsis rules, and "Gotham" is as much an adjective as a noun. Until Batman and Superman meet, Superman's world knows no Batman, and Batman's world knows no Superman. The question doesn't even arise, and if the dogma of continuity says otherwise, then the dogma of continuity is a ass.

(See, I told you I would do annoying reference-type things even if they weren't that Walt Whitman thing! And now you see I'm no liar.)

But that guy on JBF is a little genius for bringing it up, I think. Yeah, well what does your continuity say about this? Rascally and a half, especially for trying it over there...

But on to costumes in general, and the way they in their turn don't make sense. I should be careful to stress this: they don't make sense at all. Except for Superman's, that is. Because as Ed notes, what Superman wears is essentially the costume of a circus strongman, and in the Thirties that would have been a very comprehensible and resonant image. But now? Or even: subsequently? Get outta here. Only in a thoroughly elliptical comic-book universe might Batman dress in a get-up similar to Superman's, because he could do it just because...we as readers will know that he is dressing that way to compete with Superman on newsstands, so inside Gotham City itself it simply makes sense for him to be dressed that way because it does, and nothing more need be said about it. So he has a big cape, and a mask. Well, naturally! What's weird about that? Meanwhile over at Marvel things are the tiniest bit more rationalized: the Fantastic Four have uniforms made out of a helpful special fabric, Thor has a "mythological" costume, Captain America was given his star-spangled chainmail by the U.S. government, Iron Man's costume keeps him alive, Spider-Man plans on being a masked celebrity anyway...but, what about Giant-Man's costume? What about Wonder Man's? What about Magneto's? Marvel rationalizes things brilliantly, but not endlessly; at a certain point a costumed superperson is simply expected, even if no one goes to the circus to see the strongman anymore. And anyway it is all just a clever, clever riff on superhero costumes no matter how you take it: by the time the Black Panther shows up, it's easy enough to accept his superhero suit as "traditional tribal garb," even though that, too, clearly doesn't make any sense at all.

And yes, that's nitpicking, don't I know it. However the point is that nit-pickable stuff is usually good to have in your superhero property, because it shows that things are working...after all, without superhero versions of what theologians call "the improbables", you have nothing anyway. Red Raven can be related to the Inhumans (gee, that just occurred to me! So is he, do you know?), and that's fine, but goddamnit his wings have to work too, or it's all pointless. Hey, superpowers count as ellipsis too! Consider The Flash, for instance: in William Messner-Loeb's brilliant run on the Wally West Flash, the "biophysical" explanation for his powers eventually runs out of steam, with that fact even openly admitted by the scientist character whose job it was to explain them. Well, of course! If Flash couldn't think as fast as he runs (to use an example of continuity-breakdown that Messner-Loebs never gave...whoops!), then he'd never be able to do anything useful at super-speed except stop...but, if he could think as fast as he runs, he'd lose all the benefits of super-speed anyway, because if in his frame of view the rest of the world is only moving much more slowly than he is, it would still take him a couple of years of subjective time to run across the country...so by the time he arrived at Coast City to see Green Lantern, would he even be able to remember why he was going there in the first place? Nerdy nitpicking wins again, because it shows up the fact that if any of this made the slightest sense beyond feel, it wouldn't make any sense at all, and so in fact any continuity worth its salt should probably admit up front that its elliptical elements are also its dominant elements: anything not explicitly stated in the story is necessarily out of play, from the functionality of costumes to the need of supervillains to rob banks or set death-traps, and even all the way to fudging on whether or not Superman and Batman really know each other. When two superheroes or even super-teams meet, after all, the thrill is in the way the anxiety of their elliptical worlds are being toyed with: wait, the X-Men and the Avengers are going to meet? What, really? That's amazing... You can get the same response from any kid if you tell them about King Kong vs. Godzilla. Their eyes get as big as frying pans. They love it. And usually they don't complain about it not making sense, because they know the elliptical world of monsters and superheroes and fantasy in general is large, very large...as large as the world of the crosstown bus is, as large as Disneyland, or the local department store, even as large as the pictures in books. It's a world that can accomodate any number of secret earth-shattering events, a world that can somehow manage to have Fin Fang Foom, Goom, Xemnu and Titano in it without completely falling apart.

And just to go a little deeper into this, though not too deep if I can help it: that Timely's monster comics are all presented as reminiscences told in the first person is not a trivial matter either, particularly since they eventually turn into Marvel's superhero stories, none of which are told in the first person. I should probably defer any detailed reading of Marvel Monsters Group 'til some later time, so for now let me just note that in Timely's "universe" there are a multiplicity of narratives nevertheless recounted in pretty much the same voice, and concerning the same kinds of people, who encounter the same sort of situations. Like Penrose tiles, they can be clicked together in an almost limitless number of ways, but inevitably they form something very much like the same type of pattern no matter what you do to them. Taken in a large group all together these stories form a kind of formal chaos without significant differences (or even many details of any kind, different or not), and one gets the sense that in a way all these narratives must live next to each other, like neighbours on the same street only separated by very tall fences that they can't see over. In other words these narratives are as essentially elliptical as they are solipsistic, turned in on themselves and needing to explain no kind of larger context, just like 1930s Batman or Superman; however, just like Batman and Superman they will eventually break out of their innumerable ghettoes-of-one, to enter into a larger story on their front street where first-person narrative isn't possible any longer, because everything is given a pre-existing structure or template to find its place in. Thor is perhaps the best example of how this happens in a single title: when Don Blake goes on vacation to Norway, he is not in the Marvel Universe yet, only still in solipsistic Monsterland...and one of the ways we know this is that in the Marvel Universe, not only are the Stone Men of Saturn not waiting to attack, but there are no Stone Men of Saturn at all. ...Oh, what, they retconned them in in the 80s? Damn. Well, I still refuse to believe that there are any Stone Men from Saturn in the Marvel Universe, thank you very much. Because if there were, my FF would have been all over them like white on rice anyway, let me tell you, and Don Blake would have been rescued long before he ever got trapped in that cave. So Monsterland is where he is. But also we know he's in that location because the form of his story tells us so: his is a classic Timely first-person monster story by Jack Kirby, just as Doctor Strange is a classic Timely first-person monster story by Steve Ditko, and it's only later on that they both move to the New York of the FF and Spider-Man, where first-person narratives are never heard, and in this move there is also an unrecognized smoothing-out of solipsistic differences that you might even call Crisis on Infinite Monster-Earths.

You know, if you wanted to.

God, you've been so patient. Don't worry, it won't be long now.

So: Crisis. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the Marv Wolfman/George Perez CoIE was of necessity the one time when all of the multiplicity of the DCU was summoned together to the same place at the same instant, incongruities and all. Let's call this a Narrative Watershed; a supreme moment where the elements are gathered in perfect potential, but simultaneously a moment that only exists so those elements can be ordered in a new way. Sorted in a new way, if you like; or (more accurately, perhaps) depotentialized, from something almost limitlessly elliptical into something that grows progressively more real and fixed through contradistinction. Something that grows smaller, even though the net of continuity is spread wider in it. The elliptical elements still dominate; but, what they are gets changed. Has to get changed, because the fences between incommensurate non-sense-making things get knocked down, and the incongruities become much harder to tolerate. Nevertheless, the whole thing will just fall to pieces if no part of it is allowed to stay untold, or to continue not making sense; to merely toy with what is to be elliptical and what is not invites disaster in the form of a massive collapse of suspension of disbelief, so there has to be a plan. There has to be a reason to do it. And it must be done in a creative spirit, or it's only bookkeeping, and no one will care.

Which brings us back to Roy.

Yes, he did a lot of whacko things in his time. Yes, his writing style beggars description...well, maybe not Dave Campbell's description (scroll down)...and yes, he was responsible for the FF visiting the dimension of Machus, ruled by the tyrant Makhismo - no, I'm not kidding - but if Wolfman and Perez were the Watersheds of DC, and Stan and Jack the Watersheds of Timely, then maybe we can say that Roy Thomas was the Watershed of Marvel, playing Augustus to Stan and Jack's Julius as he turned their conquests into dominion...ooooh, ouch, I think I stretched a point there, but oh well. I'm sure it'll heal. Anyway, under Roy the FF becomes a real corporate property for the first time, inasmuch as its direct creators depart from it without it coming to an immediate finale, and it's in this way (using Roy's assumption of the role of FF scripter as a metaphor for his influence on the Marvel Universe as a whole, although in fact I think he may actually have written more Avengers comics, for example, than Fantastic Four comics) that it even becomes possible to have something other than Real FF, at all. So: Roy Thomas, Caretaker? No. Because there was no precedent for it, and therefore new ground had to be cleared. The transition from idiosyncratic vision, to corporate property capable of enduring multiple authorship, meant that for the first time there was a responsibility on someone's part to do the FF right, because for the first time it was possible for someone to do it wrong. Weird stuff! In a way, Stan and Jack had it easy, because they were the property, and it was them; hence, it could never tell them what to do, and it always worked just the way they wanted it to. A kind of ellipsis, absolutely: for the FF to live in New York while New York went on unchanged around them was an easy paste-in from the feeling of the monster comics**, where Xemnu or Titano is dispatched without anyone ever knowing about it, except that anxiety was even heightened by the FF being a family of iconic superbeings whose powers have become their personalities or vice versa, living in a dreamlike science-fictional paradise. Reed Richards kept four spaceships in his garage and a portal to another dimension in his den, while the man on the street couldn't catch a cab, and that was fine while the Sixties lasted, because that was as long as the protracted moment of Stan and Jack's creation of FF lasted too. The anxiety in the meeting of FF and real world thrilled as long as they continued to reinvent it, just as the anxiety in the meeting of superhero and superhero thrilled. But by the time Roy Thomas and the Seventies came along, that moment was over: first Jack left, to be replaced by John Buscema, and then Stan left, and finally the old thrilling anxiety that had come pouring out of them left too. And what could be found to replace it?

Well, continuity, of course, that's obviously what I'm suggesting. And not just continuity as the byproduct of a freewheeling imagination, but as something to be investigated for its own sake, and used for its own primary effects. Did Reed Richards ever need to be too old to have fought in WWII, when it would have been the simplest thing in the world to make an elision over this, and never mention it again? Hmmm, very probably not, but Roy was far too Rascally not to point out how that kind of elision was becoming more and more necessary as the Marvel Universe went on and grew, that is if "continuity" was to be maintained. Because Roy had never worked in Monsterland, only Superheroland, and it was a different kind of anxiety which thrilled him. We might call it the anxiety of perspective, if we wished. Or of history. The thrill that says: will it all make sense, in the end? Or will it fall apart? Can it last? And most importantly, does it matter? The Marvel Universe is a pretty weird place to this day as far as canonical continuity and assumed time-compression goes, operating under largely hidden rules that it seems only Roy Thomas ever thoroughly worked out, and that perhaps because he was such an ardent fan, the first Marvel fan-turned-pro. But I'd submit that it was an interesting project he got into, and not intrinsically harmful, because it preserved the elliptical nature of the milieu by adding more unexplained and dimly-sensed connections into it, instead of pruning them away with endless depotentialization.

But then again, I could just be talking through my hat, too. Hard to say, really.

...

And so, to conclude lamely! I do have to take back some of what I said about Marv Wolfman. Not all of his run was Caretaker-y. For example, even though I didn't care for FF #200, I did like the issues leading up to it well enough, and I do concede that it was a fitting #200 even if not quite Grade Two in my book. Forgive me, Marv; you deserve better from me.


Gee, guess I better review this tomorrow to make sure it's intelligible. (That it makes sense just might be too much to hope for.)


Oh, did I say that out loud?





* My italics, I'm afraid.
** Yes, I know I haven't mentioned the Challengers of the Unknown, or any other Kirby tributaries to FF. I'd prefer to leave that to someone who knows more about it.