situations involving romance and family drama, young human characters with ungodlike flaws, gently humorous asides, etc.—shouldn’t be undernourished. And, after the breakup, it was Kirby, like Lennon, whom the audience tended to want to credit as the greater genius, and Lee, like McCartney, who took on an aura of the shallow and crafty businessman.
Whoever deserves the lion’s share of credit for “inventing” (that is, designing outfits and powers, creating the origin myths and distinctive personae) of the Marvel Silver Age characters, it is unmistakable that in Marvel’s greatest comics—I mean, in the
Fantastic Four
issues which were reprinted in
Marvel’s Greatest Comics
, the originals of which Luke’s brother had assembled—Kirby and Lee were full collaborators who, like Lennon and McCartney, really were more than the sum of their parts, and who derived their greatness from the push and pull of incompatible visions. Kirby always wanted to drag the Four into the Negative Zone— deeper into psychedelic science fiction and existential alienation—while Lee, in his scripting, resolutely pulled them back into the morass of human lives,
hormonal
alienation, teenage dating problems and pregnancy and unfulfilled longings to be human and normal and loved and not to have the Baxter Building repossessed by the city of New York. Kirby threw at the Four an endless series of ponderous fallen gods, or whole tribes of alienated antiheroes with problems no mortal could credibly contemplate: Galactus and the Silver Surfer, the Inhumans, Doctor Doom, etc. Lee made certain the Four were always answerable to the female priorities of Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl, Reed Richards’s wife and famously “the weakest member of the Fantastic Four.” She wanted a home for their boy, Franklin; she wanted Reed to stay out of the Negative Zone; and she was willing to quit the Four and quit the marriage to stand up for what she believed.
I seriously doubt whether any seventies Marvel-loving boy ever spared a dram of sexual fantasizing on Sue Storm. We had Valkyrie, Red Sonja, the Cat, Ms. Marvel, Jean Grey, Mantis, and innumerable others available for that. We (I mean, I) especially liked the Cat. Sue Storm was, to our conscious minds, truly invisible. She was a parent, a mom calling you home from where you played in the street, telling you it was time to brush your teeth. Not that she wasn’t a hottie, but Kirby exalted her beauty in family-album style portraits, showing her nobly pregnant, in a housedress that covered her clavicle. The writers and artists who took over the Fantastic Four after Kirby and, later, Lee departed the series, seemed impatient with the squareness of Sue and Reed’s domestic situations. Surely these weren’t the hippest of the Kirby-Lee creations. Nevertheless, if you (I mean, I) accept my (own) premise (and why shouldn’t I?) that the mid- to late-sixties Fantastic Four were the exemplary specimens, the veritable
Rubber Soul
and
Revolver
and
White
Album
of comics, and if you further grant that pulling against the tide of all of Kirby’s Inhuman Galactacism, that whole army of aliens and gods, was one single character, our squeaky little Sue, then I wonder: Was the Invisible Girl the most important superhero of the Silver Age of Comics?
I’m breaking down here. The royal
we
and the presumptive
you
aren’t going to cut it. This is a closed circuit, me and the comics which I read and which read me, and the reading of which by one another, me and the comics, I am now attempting to read, or reread. The fact is I’m dealing with a realm of masturbation, of personal arcana. Stan Lee’s rhetoric of community was a weird vibrant lie: every single
true believer
, every single member of the Make Mine Marvel society or whatever the fuck we were meant to be called, received the comics as a private communion with our own obscure and shameful yearnings, and it was miraculous and pornographic to so much as
Whoever deserves the lion’s share of credit for “inventing” (that is, designing outfits and powers, creating the origin myths and distinctive personae) of the Marvel Silver Age characters, it is unmistakable that in Marvel’s greatest comics—I mean, in the
Fantastic Four
issues which were reprinted in
Marvel’s Greatest Comics
, the originals of which Luke’s brother had assembled—Kirby and Lee were full collaborators who, like Lennon and McCartney, really were more than the sum of their parts, and who derived their greatness from the push and pull of incompatible visions. Kirby always wanted to drag the Four into the Negative Zone— deeper into psychedelic science fiction and existential alienation—while Lee, in his scripting, resolutely pulled them back into the morass of human lives,
hormonal
alienation, teenage dating problems and pregnancy and unfulfilled longings to be human and normal and loved and not to have the Baxter Building repossessed by the city of New York. Kirby threw at the Four an endless series of ponderous fallen gods, or whole tribes of alienated antiheroes with problems no mortal could credibly contemplate: Galactus and the Silver Surfer, the Inhumans, Doctor Doom, etc. Lee made certain the Four were always answerable to the female priorities of Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl, Reed Richards’s wife and famously “the weakest member of the Fantastic Four.” She wanted a home for their boy, Franklin; she wanted Reed to stay out of the Negative Zone; and she was willing to quit the Four and quit the marriage to stand up for what she believed.
I seriously doubt whether any seventies Marvel-loving boy ever spared a dram of sexual fantasizing on Sue Storm. We had Valkyrie, Red Sonja, the Cat, Ms. Marvel, Jean Grey, Mantis, and innumerable others available for that. We (I mean, I) especially liked the Cat. Sue Storm was, to our conscious minds, truly invisible. She was a parent, a mom calling you home from where you played in the street, telling you it was time to brush your teeth. Not that she wasn’t a hottie, but Kirby exalted her beauty in family-album style portraits, showing her nobly pregnant, in a housedress that covered her clavicle. The writers and artists who took over the Fantastic Four after Kirby and, later, Lee departed the series, seemed impatient with the squareness of Sue and Reed’s domestic situations. Surely these weren’t the hippest of the Kirby-Lee creations. Nevertheless, if you (I mean, I) accept my (own) premise (and why shouldn’t I?) that the mid- to late-sixties Fantastic Four were the exemplary specimens, the veritable
Rubber Soul
and
Revolver
and
White
Album
of comics, and if you further grant that pulling against the tide of all of Kirby’s Inhuman Galactacism, that whole army of aliens and gods, was one single character, our squeaky little Sue, then I wonder: Was the Invisible Girl the most important superhero of the Silver Age of Comics?
I’m breaking down here. The royal
we
and the presumptive
you
aren’t going to cut it. This is a closed circuit, me and the comics which I read and which read me, and the reading of which by one another, me and the comics, I am now attempting to read, or reread. The fact is I’m dealing with a realm of masturbation, of personal arcana. Stan Lee’s rhetoric of community was a weird vibrant lie: every single
true believer
, every single member of the Make Mine Marvel society or whatever the fuck we were meant to be called, received the comics as a private communion with our own obscure and shameful yearnings, and it was miraculous and pornographic to so much as
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