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Chapter 4: Kirby’s Technological Sublime
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144 4 KIRBY’S TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME For the effect of genius is not to persuade the audience but rather to transport them out of themselves. — LONGINUS, On the Sublime, Fyfe translation He didn’t seem so concerned with the wiring of plausibility but more with the nuts and bolts of what makes us tick. — DEAN HASPIEL, “Jack Kirby Makes Me Stupid” Kirby and Lee’s The Fantastic Four, on which they worked in tandem from 1961 to 1970, was Marvel’s flagship and, along with Ditko and Lee’s The Amazing Spider-Man, one of the signature superhero comics of its era. It led the sudden surge in creativity which, as we’ve seen, overtook and transformed Marvel between 1961 and about 1963 and that laid the foundation for the since much-elaborated Marvel Universe. Understandably, a great deal has been written about The Fantastic Four, mostly in the fan press, and many comic book creators have weighed in on its significance and on what it is like to take up the reins of the franchise (see for example DeFalco et al.). As the prototypical superhero “team” book of the sixties, it has been variously reimagined, dismantled, alluded to, and parodied in numerous other comics, from market-minded relaunches of the sort typified by the Ultimate Fantastic Four series (2004–2009); through the auteurist one-off, Unstable Molecules (2003), by James Sturm and Guy Davis, et al., which casts the team in a domestic tragedy—a critique of 1950s middle-class conformism and sexism—in a naturalistic style that evokes alternative comics; to Warren Ellis and John Cassaday, et al.’s Planetary (published not by Marvel but by DC/WildStorm, 1999–2009), an allusive metastory about pulp culture archetypes in which the villains, known simply as “the Four,” represent a nightmarish spin on the Fantastic Four, essentially a dystopian shadow of Kirby and Lee’s heroes. Kirby’s Technological Sublime 145 All such retakes of the FF have two things in common. First, they exploit, sometimes spectacularly, the idea of scientific and technological development, often going so far as to treat the advancement of science (in keeping with the Cold War vibe of the original) as a race or bid for power. Second, they testify to the FF’s reputation as not only superheroes but also explorers and futurists— in current Marvel parlance, “imaginauts”—in an endlessly unfolding cosmos, a reputation that, implicitly, acknowledges The Fantastic Four’s importance as Marvel’s earliest generator of new characters, settings, and concepts, in effect the cornerstone of its Universe. (Even the ironic Unstable Molecules ends with a paean to escape, exploration, and “real knowledge.”) The Fantastic Four is known for inventing, then consolidating, key elements of Marvel’s vast narrative —the results of what I’ve called Kirby’s graphic mythopoesis—and its mid-sixties peak is celebrated as a crazily fertile period of “research and development ,” a spike in creativity coexistent with and undeterred by the cosseting constraints of the Comics Code. Within the straitened, post-Code world of comic books, The Fantastic Four was a salutary kick in the pants. The truth about Kirby and Lee’s Fantastic Four is that it was neither consistent nor consistently excellent. Its high points, though, are very high. The series is beloved among fans for its bounding excess, graphic dynamism, eyepopping designs, archetypal characters (a common claim is that its four heroes represent earth, water, fire, and air respectively) and, above all, sheer imaginative fecundity. In fact, inconsistency or patchiness would seem to be one of its strengths, for The Fantastic Four “works” by “not” working, by embodying, as argued in the previous chapter, an unresolved clash of sensibilities. This clash is not simply that between the contrasting outlooks of Kirby and Lee, as has often been argued (see, for example, Wells), nor even the prevailing irony that, as we’ve seen, marks Marvel comics. Rather, it is the clashing of narrative strategies drawn from different genres. The Fantastic Four was a stew in which soap opera elements informed by Kirby’s and Lee’s respective work in romance comics (I thank fellow scholar Craig Fischer for insight into this) mix with Kirby’s interest in science fiction, in particular his growing fascination with the technological sublime. I derive the term technological sublime from many sources, notably Leo Marx’s book The Machine in the Garden (1964) and a web of related work by other scholars, notably Perry Miller, John Kasson...