Marvel Comics (Fantastic Four # 3, March 1962)
The cover of Fantastic Four # 3 rather boldly displays a blurb declaring it to be "The Greatest Comic Magazine in the World!!"
Much of this is Stan Lee's well known penchant for hyperbole and salesmanship. But it wouldn't have been possible without the previous two issues having sold like hotcakes. Yes, the sales were in and they were good...great...the Greatest?! Lee and Kirby's brand of fanciful stories grounded by relatable characters with ongoing interpersonal conflict had paid off and paid off well.
Would this fame go to their heads? Not just the heads of Stan and Jack but the heads of Reed, Sue, Ben and Johnny as well? Because, as this issue stresses heavily, the Fantastic Four are even more famous within the story than they are outside of it.
Summary
Reed, Sue, Ben and Johnny attend a stage performance of the Miracle Man, who claims, as per his name, to be able to work miracles. At first he does simple, stage magician type tricks, things like levitating himself, but he soon notices and calls attention to the famous foursome in the audience. He then launches into a more impressive display, seeming to be able to do things like change size, become gaseous or even control thunder and lightning. He mocks the Fantastic Four, which immediately riles the Thing, who agrees to a contest of strength with the Miracle Man.
The Miracle Man proceeds to easily slice a large tree trunk in half with his finger, while it takes the Thing several powerful blows to shatter his. The Miracle Man then tops this off by effortlessly absorbing a punch from the enraged Thing.
The Fantastic Four return to their headquarters, located in the Tower of the Baxter Building, which they own. There Sue unveils the new team costumes she's designed for them. Reed expresses worries about if the Miracle Man were a criminal...
And, of course, the Miracle Man is planning to do exactly that. He brings to life a huge monster statue being used to promote the premier of a science fiction movie and sets it loose. The Fantastic Four contact the police and offer to help, using their flying Fantasticar, which can split into independent sections, to search the city. Reed encounters the creature first but is disabled by the Miracle Man while he tries to capture it. The monster attacks a military depot and steals their new atomic tank. The Torch confronts the monster and, when it grabs him, it burns, still just made of wood and plaster.
The Thing confronts the Miracle Man but is defeated and the Invisible Girl decides to follow the Miracle Man on her own. Sue follows the Miracle Man to a junkyard where he's hiding the tank. A dog catches Sue's scent, giving her away and the Miracle Man hypnotizes her, forcing her to become visible and fire off a flare to summon her teammates.
As the other three wait for word from her at the Baxter Building, the Thing and the Torch get into an argument and Johnny leaves to blow off steam. All three of them see Sue's flare and head off toward it. Reed and Ben arrive first. The Miracle Man holds them off with a machinegun and the Thing has to shield Reed from the bullets. The Miracle Man tries to flee with Sue in the atomic tank but Reed, Ben and the newly arrived Johnny give chase and the Torch stops the villain by flying ahead of the tank and blinding the Miracle Man with a blazing flash of light.
The Thing wants to attack the Miracle Man but Reed stops him, revealing the the Miracle Man has no real power but is just a clever, talented hypnotist who used his skills to convince people that he could work miracles. Reed forces the Miracle Man to release Sue from her trance but when Reed credits the Torch with removing the Miracle Man's hypnotic ability with his flash, the Thing objects. Tired of being treated badly, the Torch quits the team, flying away...
Credits
Writer: Stan Lee
Penciller: Jack Kirby
Inker: Sol Brodsky
Overview
The Fantastic Four debuted two issues ago, but there is an argument to be made for this being the issue in which they really arrive, the team taking on the visual style that it will maintain for a long time to come.
As I mentioned above, the sales numbers were in and the book was a hit. This meant that what Stan and Jack were doing was no longer a small experiment. No, now they had to build the Fantastic Four to last, to keep things going as long as they could.
Ostensibly, all they needed to do was keep churning out entertaining stories as long as they could (not that doing that is particularly easy.) But they also took the opportunity to refine the team both in concept and in terms of their "look."
Starting in this issue, they made the team more glossy and marketable (in and out of the story), more...superhero-ish.
The first step was simple: They gave them costumes. As far as costumes go, the Fantastic Four's aren't especially ostentatious or elaborate. There are no capes or elaborate color designs. Rather than emphasizing their individuality, they stress their uniformity as a team, the only symbol on them being the "4" of the team, rather than individual symbols for each member. They're practical, almost jumpsuit like. (Once again, you can see the influence of Kirby's previous DC work on Challengers of the Unknown.)
There are some individual character-look alterations as well. Johnny now maintains an identifiable humanoid form when he flames on, one that's a darker red color to make it distinct. This has the effect of making him look a bit less strange and frightening, instead human-looking and relatable. In this issue he still doesn't have recognizable facial features in his flaming form but those are coming in later issues.
This fits with the general change in the book's aesthetic from emphasizing how weird and strange the main characters are to portraying them as more more conventionally heroic looking.
That change is reflected in the issue's story as well. In the previous two installments, we'd seen the team set themselves against global threats to mankind. In this story, they're engaged in a much more conventional conflict with an apparent super criminal.
While not as dramatic a change as Johnny's, I also note that Ben's Thing-look is slightly altered in this issue, looking a bit more symmetrical and with a wider mouth, giving him a slightly more friendly, almost comedic look. The Thing's physical look will change quite a bit over the first few years of the book and that "grotesque but also humorous" look is where it's aimed. As with the Torch's change, it humanized him slightly, reminding us of the man inside the monster.
All of these changes are made possible by Jack Kirby's stunningly good artwork. I've made no secret of how much I enjoy Kirby's work. He had a gift for infusing his work with a dynamism and sense of impact that was almost unparalleled at the time (and rarely equaled now.) In this issue alone, his depictions of things like the Miracle Man commanding lightning during his stage show, of the contrast between the Thing's viceral effort to break the tree trunk compared to the Miracle Man's easy severing of his own or of the Torch burning the giant monster are all visually arresting (indeed, I'd go so far as to say the Torch's new look suits Kirby's style better than the original in general, particularly when the character is in flight.)
Despite the glossier, more super heroic look to everything, the story still maintains ties to Marvel's previous monster/horror output. The mere presence of the monster at all is a sign of that. Kirby also continues to make great use of shadow to emphasize the horror-aspects of the story. He's particularly good at portraying the Miracle Man's rather diabolical facial expressions (contrasted nicely with his much more contrite look at the end when he's been caught.)
In general, Kirby finds a perfect blend, retaining the feeling from the first two issues of a world in which bizarre and scary things are starting to emerge, while also adding a more conventionally heroic aspect to the main characters, setting them firmly as the barrier between those strange new menaces and humanity itself.
"Toy" Aesthetic
This is probably less a result of the book itself and more of my own upbringing in the 1980's, a decade where pretty much every kind of heroic storytelling had a toy line attached to it but...the team's new aesthetic really has that feel of "advertising a toy line" to me.
The new costumes give the team a more uniform, action-figure look to them, to make them more identifiable on the toy rack. They're all wearing the same uniform and presumably there'd be a big "4" on the packaging. The only character who doesn't entirely fit this mold is the Thing and even then, I get the feel of "shirtless Thing" being one of those mail-in giveaway figures. (Oh, and the Thing never wears his helmet because, like every little doodad that comes with an action figure, it gets lost within a day of getting the figure.)
It's not just the characters' new looks that give this impression, though. They have a vehicle (sold separately of course.) It looks a bit cheezy (apparently some readers at the time described it as a "flying bathtub") but it also divides up into four sections that can operate separately...precisely the sort of gimmick a vehicle toy would have, especially since the kids are going to go begging for a new one from their parents if they accidentally lose a section. I know that's what 10 year old me would have done.
Finishing off the toyline is, of course, the Baxter Building, the team's headquarters. It's huge. It's got tons of rooms, each with a different function. It's got a an elevator to park your (separately bought) Fantasticar. It's the ultimate playset for Fantastic Four "toy line." That said, it would probably be one of those playsets that most of the kids only ever dreamed about getting, a bit like that G.I. Joe aircraft carrier back in the '80s. Only the one rich kid in the neighborhood ever had one (so all the kids tried to get over there to play with it.)
Like I said, this notion of the book's new aesthetic as toy merchandizing is all in my head (especially since, as far as I know, no actual Fantastic Four toys actually showed up until the 1970s) but I still think it fits the issue well. Heck, everything I've mentioned above, the uniforms, the Fantasticar and the Baxter Building "Skyscraper Hide-Out" is even advertised on the issue's cover.
Plus, there are 4's on everything. Branding.
Reed's Branding Plan
Speaking of branding, let's talk about Reed's in-universe branding of the team because I don't think all this aesthetic change is an accident inside the fiction any more than it is outside of the story.
One of the more traditional elements of a super hero story is the secret identity. The Fantastic Four, of course, don't have those. Everyone knows who they are. More than that, they're actually famous. This issue opens with the Miracle Man noting them from the stage during his performance and he describes them as celebrities.
Now part of that is undoubtedly external to the story, Stan Lee deciding it would be interesting to explore the pressures of fame on people who engaged in super heroics publicly, rather than anonymously. (It was also a single-title experiment at that. His later creations would all have more conventional secret identities.)
But, Lee's motivations aside, it's interesting to examine why the Fantastic Four are famous within the fiction.
Because they weren't two issues ago. Yes, they made a big public splash with their powers in the first issue but that didn't involve announcing their identities to the world (and the rest of their adventure in that story was away from the public eye.) Come issue # 2, things have changed slightly. The public and authorities seem to know who the FF are. But now things have gone a step forward. Now they've got celebrity status with all the good and bad that goes with it.
How did this happen? How did the team go from being accomplished, but relatively anonymous, to being flat-out famous? I posit the following:
Reed did it. More than that, Reed did it on purpose. Back in my review of the first issue, I noted how fast Reed's mind works. I suspect that, as the four of them were vowing to use their powers for mankind after their crash, Reed was already thinking many steps ahead. He was looking at his friend Ben and noting that, yes, the world was likely to regard him as a freak for the rest of his life. The same was true of all of them, really. The world does not regard the new and different with open arms but rather with apprehension and fear. Reed knows that. He envisions a future where he and his friends are treated as objects of terror and ridicule, possibly even captured and detained. (He's not wrong to think that way, either. One need only look at how some later characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men are treated to see that his apprehension has legitimate grounds.)
So he figures out a way around it: He'll make them into celebrities. Authority is very good at quietly locking away people who live on the fringes of society but it's much harder for them if the people they want to lock up are famous and beloved, darlings of the public eye, especially if their fame is based on their altruism and heroism.
Back when everyone was choosing code names in the first issue, Reed chose "Mister Fantastic." I mentioned this in passing in my examination of that issue but I'll reiterate it here. Reed wasn't just stroking his ego with that name. He'd already come up with the team idea, already come up with the name (something ear-catching and alliterative that will stick in the public's mind) and he's already setting himself up as the front man for the group. This isn't about his ego. It's about protecting his friends. He's making them...well, too big to disappear.
He's also, in a sense, trying to make up for what he did to them. His mistake has derailed their lives (particularly Ben's) and so he's trying to make it up to them by giving them a new one, one in which they're celebrity darlings, a good life.
This also has the advantage of helping them in their more general goal of helping humanity. It's a lot easier to do that if they're famous and everyone's cooperative than it is if people get scared and run away every time the team shows up.
It's a multi-step plan and he's definitely had to make alterations along the way to account for both real-world circumstances and the decisions of his teammates. It's Johnny who first gives himself a code-name, not Reed, but I imagine Reed just works that into his publicity plan, even sees it as an improvement. He may even come up with the "Fantastic Four" title right at that moment.
And boy does he roll with it. Even before the Fantasticar, we've seen "4" on his helicopter. He's branding the team, making them a household name. In the previous issues we've seen the team operate out of a series of safehouses Reed owns but, starting in this one, they're headquartered in the top floors of the Baxter Building. This serves multiple purposes. It gives the team a well-equipped base of operations, one stocked with numerous methods of transportation and laboratories for his work and the team's business. It's also secure, keeping them safe from the prying eyes of the public, allowing them privacy as they go about their lives...while also being a large public building that everyone knows about. It simultaneously serves their public and private lives.
In a sense, the Baxter Building is bit like the castles of Willian Randolph Hearst, the hotels of Howard Hughes or even the Xanadu castle of the fictional Charles Foster Kane. It exists both as a symbol of the fame of its owners and also as as impenetrable shield between them and the public.
Oh, and it wasn't really a thing in 1961, but I imagine Reed would have been fine with the kinds of toys I was discussing above. More branding.
Reed doesn't come up with everything on his own, though. His teammates have minds and motivations of their own. I've already mentioned that the idea for code names came from Johnny. In this issue we see that the idea for costumes comes from Sue.
Actually, costumes probably isn't the right word. They're more like uniforms, giving the team a mutual "look." As mentioned above, they have an almost jumpsuit quality to them. Whatever we call them, though, they were Sue's idea, not Reed's. That isn't wholly surprising to me. Reed doesn't strike me as a particularly fashion-savvy guy.
That said, while it's presented as a surprise Sue springs on everyone in the issue, she must, obviously have been working on them for a while. Further, we'll later learn that all of the FF's clothes are constructed out of unstable molecules Reed has developed to withstand their individual powers (probably created by studying the flight suits they were wearing during the crash.) So Sue must have at least come to Reed for a bunch of unstable molecule material to work with. Whether that means Reed knew the uniforms were coming is a little more up in the air but I suspect, if he did, that it fit his plans just fine.
Still, those plans haven't come off without a hitch. If nothing else, I suspect that Reed original plans was to publicly announce them before they actually dealt with any menaces to mankind. But no plan survives contact with the enemy and the actions of the Mole Man back in issue # 1 forced them to act before all the parts of the branding plan were in place. As I mentioned in my analysis of issue # 2, I imagine this prompted a hasty announcement of their identities, in hope of avoiding a repetition of the kind of panic their first appearance caused. But this premature announcement, followed almost immediately by their impersonations by the Skrulls, caused the team problems.
Nevertheless, they're finally where Reed wanted them to be. Famous celebrities who can use that public profile to live their lives in (relative) peace, acting as protectors of mankind, rather than victims of it.
You can already see the benefits of their increased status in this issue. Their relationship with the police, in particular, has improved greatly, being a cooperative one rather than antagonistic, as in the previous two stories. I note that it's the team who reaches out to the police to offer assistance in this story, too, trying to further cement that cooperative role. It feels as though the team is trying to building off the good will they earned with the police at the end of the Skrull adventure and parlay it into an ongoing mutually beneficial relationship.
It's not perfect, though. There's still progress to be made. For one thing, as mentioned, the team still has to reach out to police, not the other way around, which means that the commissioner doesn't immediately think of them as a resource for dealing with larger-than-normal threats. (Again, this stresses how early we are in the Marvel universe, that the police still think of a giant monster as something they should tackle themselves.) That same commissioner also chews out Reed pretty hard when the latter fails in his first attempt to stop the Miracle Man. If you're going to present yourself as a resource that law enforcement can count on then you have to deliver. (Though one imagines this is made up for at the end of the issue with the Miracle Man's capture.) As many later Marvel heroes (and real life celebrities) can attest, public relations is a volatile and ever-changing situation.
In a larger sense, having that sort of the relationship with the police also puts the team in what is likely more of a crimefighting role than Reed originally intended for them to adopt as well. As I mentioned when discussing the first issue, the FF are less about conventionally fighting crime than they are about protecting mankind from larger, sometimes more existential threats. The Mole Man and the Skrulls both represented menaces to the entirety of the human race. The Miracle Man...well, he's impressive but in terms of his goals, he just steals stuff. So, in this issue, we see that the cost of forging that good relationship with the authorities means that the team may have to sometimes engage in more conventional law enforcement duties rather than the larger scale things Reed would prefer.
And, again, that relationship with the authorities is still in its embryonic stage at this point. The team needs it, lest they be treated as outcasts and freaks, but it's not perfect. It's worth noting that one of the soldiers in this issue opens fire on the Torch because "We can't take any chances with that flaming menace flying around" as the latter is trying to stop the atomic tank from being stolen, perhaps still thinking of him in terms of his frightening appearance in the first issue or the acts of sabotage his Skrull imposter engaged in during the previous story. Now, the soldier's CO calls him off but the point is that the foursome, while they've made great strides in terms of how the public perceives them, is still not universally beloved or trusted. The branding plan is working, but there's still more progress to be made.
Characters
Part of this is because, while Reed is very smart (ludicrously smart, really) he's not infallible, and this is definitely the issue to prove it.
I mean, he gets taken out with a thrown brick in this story. Not exactly his most auspicious moment.
More than that, for all his genius, Reed spends a lot of this issue behind the ball. He clearly didn't figure out what the secret to the Miracle Man's "miracles" was right away (more on that below.) Now, I'm not saying Reed needs to be portrayed like Sherlock Holmes and deduce every little detail of everyone he meets instantly but this particular instance seems a bit bizarre, especially considering Reed is an accomplished hypnotist himself (note him hypnotizing the Skrulls into forgetting their own identities last issue.) Still, I suppose this shows us that Reed isn't immune to hypnotism and if he were smart enough to deduce the villain's methodology immediately in every story things would get boring pretty fast.
In addition, Reed also has a particularly hard time keeping his teammates functioning as a unit in this story. He can neither keep Ben from going up on stage to challenge the Miracle Man nor stop Ben from throwing a punch at the performer when he loses. Imagine if the Miracle Man had been just a normal performer. Ben would have killed him!
In a more general sense, Ben and Johnny are at each other's throats throughout the issue in an escalating fashion and all Reed can think of to do is scold them after the fact. This had happened in the previous issue as well but it's even worse in this one, eventually leading to Johnny quitting.
Reed's reaction to that departure, his final reaction of the issue, is to state that he's less worried about Johnny's safety than he is about humanity if Johnny decides to turn against them. This seems like a pretty significant misjudgment to me. Johnny hasn't "turned bad." No, his issues are about frustration with the way the team is functioning and particularly with Ben. He's also a teenager and going off in a huff is hardly uncharacteristic for someone in those years. Heck, he did it earlier in the issue on a less permanent basis.
But instead of acknowledging those motivations and problems, Reed only expresses a more generic worry of Johnny "becoming" a villain. It's particularly insensitive considering Sue is standing right next to him and is obviously worried about her brother's safety. Reed cares about Sue. He cares about Johnny too. So why isn't he expressing that?
Because Reed's a genius but he's not that great with people. Reed's got an analytical, problem solving mind. 90% of the time, he's ahead of everyone else, but that's in terms of science and logic, not human interaction. I'm not saying Reed's socially inept, mind you, but I am saying that interpersonal relationships aren't where his genius lies. He can handle them in a macro-level, hence the branding plan, but one-on-one, when people's feelings are involved, he isn't always sure what to do.
And, as we'll see many times in the future, Reed doesn't like to act until he has a plan. Well, Reed has no plan for how to deal with Johnny's feelings if he's just upset. But if Johnny turns into a villain, he can cope with that. It's a practical (if unpleasant) problem that he can tackle.
Speaking of people not afraid to tackle villains, Sue's exceedingly confident and brave in this story. She doesn't think twice about tackling the Miracle Man in this story without any help from the others, with no knowledge of the source of his miracles. Indeed, she insists the others fall back and let her go after the villain alone. And why shouldn't she? It's not like the three men think twice about using their powers without immediate backup. And, while it's less visually flashy that the others, we shouldn't forget what an incredibly useful power her invisibility actually is. Generally speaking, you can't hurt what you can't see. It's not foolproof, of course. She does get caught. But then, the Miracle Man had defeated her three teammates as well so it's not like she was especially vulnerable.
Further, Sue contributes to the ongoing evolution of the Fantastic Four by being the one to create their uniforms, demonstrating an eye for fashion, practicality and branding. Reed may not be able to figure out how to get the team to bond, but Sue is obviously thinking along those lines. The uniforms are designed to emphasize their status as part of the team, not stress their individuality as many other super hero costumes do.
About the only miscalculation I think Sue makes in her uniform design is the helmet she makes for the Thing, which immediately puts him off the the whole idea of wearing the outfit. Ben was always going to be the hardest sell, anyway. He's the one least comfortable with being a part of the team, period. But more than that, I think Sue is unintentionally insulting Ben with the helmet. She's doing it with the best of intentions, mind you. She's heard Ben talk about how he feels about his appearance. She's seen the way he dresses in public, covering himself up as much as possible. So she concludes that Ben would want a uniform that completely covers his features.
But when Ben talks about how he feels about his appearance, he's actually talking about the way the public at large perceives him. He believes (or at least wants to believe) that his appearance is not something that bothers his friends, particularly Sue (who I still think Ben has a bit of a crush on.) By handing him an outfit that covers him up, especially his face, it must feel like being told "Yes, Ben, you are hideous, just like you feared."
So Ben refuses to wear it. He immediately ditches the helmet and even the shirt when he goes into action. Yes, he wants to cover up when he's out and about as Ben Grimm. But he'll be damned if he's going to hide who he is when he's saving the day as the Thing. What can I say? Ben's complex.
In a less psychologically interesting motivation, there is also the implication that Ben simply finds the uniform physically restrictive.
And, of course, I suspect that the meta-motivation behind all of this is that Kirby was well aware that, while Ben is the ugly within the fiction, he looks great to the readers and he had no intention of covering him up. But since the others were doing so, we explicitly see Ben rejecting it out of hand, his temper as quick as ever.
We get a lot of Ben losing his temper in this issue. He loses it (more than once) when the Miracle Man taunts him. One wonders why Ben's s easily riled by what is really just a stage performer taunting an audience member.
I think it's pretty simple, really. If Ben's not most powerful guy around, what good is he? I've mentioned this before, but Ben's post-accident life is a nightmare. He's a hideous, deformed monster that the world would shun if he didn't contribute something to it. (Indeed, he's the one who needs Reed's branding plan the most.) And what does Ben have to contribute? His strength. He is, as far as he knows at this point, the strongest, err, thing on the planet. That's his one consolation prize in all this. If that gets taken away from him, if some stage performer is more powerful than he is, well, what does Ben really have left?
Of all the things that set off Ben's anger in this issue, the one that seems to really get to him is Johnny. We'd seen a bit of their headbutting last issue, but it really starts going in earnest in this one.
Why does Johnny push Ben's buttons so easily? On a physical level, Johnny's power allows him to resist Ben's strength with minimal effort. All Johnny has to do is flame on and Ben can't handle the heat. And, again, this renders Ben's strength, the one thing he thinks he has going for him, useless.
More than that, as I mentioned when examining the last issue, Johnny's own power is pretty much all plusses, no minuses. About the only downside is Johnny accidentally burning someone or melting something he doesn't want to. He seems careful to avoid the former and...well, honestly, he doesn't seem to care much about melting things based on what we've seen so far. Ben hates what happens to him but Johnny enjoys his. That's enough for Ben to harbor a not-so-secret grudge against him.
Of course, the thing Johnny says that pushes Ben over the edge, that makes Ben actually throw a punch at him, is when he makes a crack about Sue not being attracted to him even if he wasn't ugly. More evidence that Ben's got a thing for his friend's gal.
All of this conflict, of course, leads to Johnny quitting at the end of the issue. It really isn't that surprising if one looks at the progression of their rivalry since the first issue. The beef between them is not getting better. In fact, it's getting worse. There's also no hint (as there will be later) that Ben actually cares about him deep down. It's worth noting that, in his issue, Ben saves Reed from an attack by the Miracle Man but fails to do so for Johnny. Now, looking at it from the outside, it seems obvious that this was mere happenstance, but, from Johnny's point of view, it's easy to imagine Johnny thinks Ben just doesn't care what happens to him.
Further, when Johnny and Ben spar, Reed and Sue don't really do anything to stop it. Sure, they'll say something admonishing after the fact, but they don't step in during the confrontation itself. The truth is that they both probably have faith in Johnny's ability to look after himself and also...well, they don't really know what to do about it. As I mentioned above, interpersonal relations aren't exactly Reed's area of expertise and, while Sue clearly wants everyone to get along, she's not sure how to make that happen. Both of them want these arguments and fights to stop happening but they're not sure how to go about that or what to do about them once they've started. They're both effectively just hoping time will calm Ben's anger. Reed, in particular, also likely feels like he can't criticize Ben because the man's "Thing condition" is Reed's fault.
Whatever their reasons for not interfering, though, the result is that Johnny's left to fend for himself and he's sick of it. He can see a day coming when he and Ben get into a real, full-on confrontation and Reed and Sue do nothing to stop it.
All of this reaches its climax at the end of the issue when Johnny takes the action that defeats the Miracle Man...and Ben gets annoyed at the idea of Johnny getting any credit for him. Now, this is the first real instance of something that will be a significant character trait of Johnny's, his need for credit. Johnny's got more than a bit of an ego on him. If he saves the day, he darn well wants people to know about it.
And when that's denied him, it's the last straw and he's out of there.
The Man Who Can Work Miracles
As with the first two issues, the focus of the characterization is much more on the FF itself than on the villain of the piece. Still, the Miracle Man does make for an interesting, if odd, adversary for the foursome.
Of course, the key to the Miracle Man is evident in the very first panel of the comic. He's a stage performer, skilled in the art of deceiving his audience. He's all about illusion and misdirection. Little to nothing we see him do in the issue is going to be straightforward. Hypnosis is his skill but it's how he deploys it that's interesting, in the classic stage magician fashion, getting everyone to look one way while he's acting in the other direction.
Indeed, the Miracle Man is such a skilled hypnotist and performer that one wonders why he felt the need to turn to crime at all, rather than just have a successful career in his legitimate field.
And, let's make no mistake, it's crime that the Miracle Man turns to. He's not interested in world domination, despite sending the commissioner a note saying he is. That's just another example of his deceptive stagecraft skill, leading the authorities to believe he's a would-be conqueror when he's actually a would-be master thief. Heck, he doesn't even adopt a "super villain" outfit, just wearing a hat and overcoat for his crimes. The "Miracle Man" is his stage name, not his super villain name.
But, again, what him prompts to make this leap from respectability to crime in the first place. Truth told, it's a question I'm going to end up asking about an awful lot of early Marvel villains. That's not to say there aren't ones where their motivations make sense. The FF's previous two foes, the Mole Man and the Skrulls are fairly understandable. The Mole Man has been extensively hurt by the surface world and essentially wants revenge. The Skrulls are essentially just acting as agents of their species, spies/saboteurs if you will.
But the Miracle Man? He could continue on with his career and likely have a fairly comfortable life doing so. Sure, not "sell an atomic tank to a foreign power" comfortable, but he'd have a good career. (It's never outright stated, but it seems pretty obvious to me from stealing and hiding it, that this is what he plans to do with the tank.)
That's probably the first of his motivations, pure greed. Some people want more wealth than legitimate work can afford them, no matter how skilled they are at it.
The other half is pure ego. It's one thing to be regarded as a skilled stage performer. It's a whole other level to be seen as a worker of genuine miracles. No matter how famous the Miracle Man gets on stage, the public will always presume that there's some sort of "trick" to his miracles, even if it's one they can't figure out...and they'll be right. But pulling off this crime? Making a fake monster come to life? Defeating the Fantastic Four? That's not being famous for being a performer. That's being famous for being a legitimate Miracle Man...even if he isn't one.
Greed and ego might seem like trite. simple motivations for the villain but it's worth noting that they continue with something that's been an ongoing theme of the Fantastic Four, that it isn't power itself but what you do with it that matters.
The FF use their power to good things. It's that which defines them as heroic, not the mere fact that they have powers at all. Arguably, Ben is used as a bit of an example of how hard it can be to stay on that path, how easy it is to let your power run wild when you can't keep control of yourself, when you let your anger and pain make your decisions.
On the flipside, the Miracle Man isn't bad because he can hypnotize people. Indeed, we see him use that skill to present legitimate entertainment in the beginning of the issue. It's the choice he makes to use his ability for more nefarious purposes that defines him as a villain. With great power comes--No, not quite there yet (but it's coming...)
On the more practical side of the Miracle Man's motivations, it is interesting to ponder what makes him think he was capable of defeating the FF at all. After all, they have legitimate super powers. For all his skill, he is, in the end, just a clever hypnotist. Why on Earth did he think he could get away with this?
I think part of this comes from the fact that we're still so early in the evolution of Marvel's world. The concept of people with super powers is still very new. Yes, there've been rumors going around since the late '30s but the FF are the first modern super powered people. It isn't like later Marvel when super beings abound. It's a new phenomenon. Which means it's not something criminals are used to dealing with. The Miracle Man assumes that if he can fool the FF, he can beat the FF. His experience with them on stage and early victories over them only reinforces that belief. He also doesn't have any real sense of just how powerful the FF actually are. For instance, toward the end of the story when he threatens Reed and Ben with a machinegun, he's clearly under the impression that it's something that can actually harm them. When the Thing takes the brunt of the impact and is only momentarily stunned, the Miracle Man panics because it's first taste of the raw power his opponents actually possess. (For that matter, it's a little unclear if the machinegun was actually a threat to Reed anyway. Based on later stories, his pliable body would probably have just absorbed and repelled the bullets. I don't blame Reed for dodging or Ben for throwing himself in the way, though. It's early days for them too and they don't know that Reed can't be hurt by bullets.)
The machinegun begs the obvious question of what things the Miracle Man does throughout the issue are real and which are hypnotic illusions. It's fairly obvious the machinegun is real, though presumably the giant key the Miracle Man "turned into" the machinegun was an illusion. My best guess for the other things in the issue are as follows...
Illusion
All of his stage tricks including becoming a giant, turning into a cloud of gas and controlling lightning.
Cutting the tree trunk in half with a finger. (In fact there's a decent chance he hypnotized the Thing into thinking his own tree trunk was harder to shatter than it really was.)
Tanking a punch from the Thing. Presumably he wasn't even standing there, just made the Thing feel "impact" from punching air.
Bringing the monster statue to life. Indeed, everything about the monster after that, including making it disappear and steal the atomic tank. Creating the illusion it's still just wood and plaster after the Torch "burns" it was just for effect, since it was never actually there for the Torch to burn at all.
Making the Thing think his body was sinking into the ground.
Real
Stealing the atomic tank at all. Presumably he simply slipped in, stole the keys and drove off with it while everyone was watching the monster "walk away with it."
The brick he hit Reed with. Heh.
The chemical foam with which he shoots down the Torch.
The dog that smells out the Invisible Girl.
Looking at that latter list only emphasizes that, at the end of the day, the Miracle Man is actually just a simple criminal with a bit of a gimmick. Indeed, that last bit with the dog, leads to him more conventionally hypnotizing Sue, perhaps the most explicit hint in the story as to what his gimmick actually is.
Apart from that gimmick, the Miracle Man's methods of attack are pretty conventional. Chemical foam for dousing fires. A machinegun for shooting. A brick for throwing. Not exactly the stuff of James Bond villains, is it?
Which rather begs a question...
When Did Reed Figure it Out?
It's pretty obvious, as I mentioned above, that Reed didn't catch on to the Miracle Man's gimmick right from the beginning. He evidences genuine worry early on in the story about the Miracle Man potentially turning bad and whether they could stop him. He also makes an attempt to stop the monster later, something he wouldn't have done if he'd known it was an illusion.
Maybe the brick to the head jogged his thinking process, but I suspect it's in the aftermath of this that Reed figures out what's really going on. Yes, he's still obviously worried about Sue's safety but that could well be because he knows how dangerous those illusions can be. That brick made it pretty clear to him.
But, given that timing, why doesn't Reed share what he's figured out with Ben and Johnny before they go to confront the Miracle Man the final time. True, he might not have sussed it out before Johnny left but you'd think he'd at least share it with Ben. Heck, Ben almost lands a real punch on the Miracle Man before Reed blurts it out and, well, that would have killed the guy.
Is it because he doesn't think the others will understand? Possibly, but I doubt it. Yes, Reed is considerably smarter than the others and yes, he's fully aware of that disparity. But it's not like he regards the others as stupid. He had to know that, if the Miracle Man was just hypnotizing them into seeing things that weren't there, they'd be safer going into the confrontation knowing that.
No, I think it has more to do with the way Reed thinks. His mind is very rigid, very wedded to scientific method. And in the scientific method you don't announce your conclusions until you're sure of them. And Reed's not sure yet. I think, on their way to that confrontation, he suspects but he doesn't know. If anything, I think it's seeing Sue in a trance that clinches it for him and then he's got machinegun bullets to dodge and a chase to engage in (as one of the car wheels!) so he doesn't get the chance to tell everyone until the Torch has already inadvertently neutralized the Miracle Man's ability.
Whatever Reed's motivations for keeping his theory to himself, it's something his teammates are going to have to get used to because it's going to be a consistent character trait going forward. Reed's tendency to keep key information to himself, to not share his plans until after they're concluded, is going to be one of the most frustrating parts of his personality going forward. Still, that just shows that, like his teammates, Reed's flawed and fallible, which is part of what makes the Fantastic Four so good.
Little Tidbits
-There's almost no better example of how little those creating these comics understood about how valuable they would become than the little diagram of the Baxter Building that they suggest people cut out and "save for future reference." I wonder how many kids did this and ruined the value of their copy of a comic that now goes for thousands of dollars. Mind you, I've never been one of those people who think that comics need to be kept in pristine, untouched condition. They're a storytelling medium. I think they're meant to be read, which means opening them, holding them and turning their pages with all the wear and tear that entails. But...cutting that diagram out means you can't read the comic either!
-The Miracle Man smokes a cigarette during the scene where he's plotting his crime. That's not that big a deal in terms of the time this was published. Lots of people smoked in 1962. But I think it's interesting that it's contrasted later by a panel of Reed smoking the same pipe we've seen him smoke in the previous couple issues. One gets the impression that Jack Kirby was drawing cigarettes as the "low class" way to smoke while Reed's pipe makes him classy and intellectual. (Stan Lee smoked cigarettes I believe. Jack himself tended toward cigars.)
-Sue's eye for fashion will continue as a character trait. Yes, it's a bit of a stereotype, the celebrity girl with an eye for fashion but it's not like it never happens in real life.
-I joked (quite a bit) about Reed getting taken out with a thrown brick but it's worth noting that this is actually an example of the fact that there are limits to Reed's stretching power. In the scene, he's stretched himself out so as to try and make a "net" to catch the monster. We see here that, when he pushes his stretching to its limits, he effectively becomes vulnerable to normal physical attack.
-There are, quite literally, no panels in the whole story that give us a good view of the Thing in the helmet Sue designed for him. First it's obscured then it's abandoned. Makes me wonder if Kirby just didn't like the look. In his defense, it wouldn't be a look they'd really try again for over thirty years! (And it wouldn't last long that time either...)
-Illusion or not, the presence of a giant monster for so much of the story is a sign that there are still a lot of visual thematic links to Marvel's '50s monster story output. Like the evolution of the FF's uniforms, the transition fully into super heroic fiction takes time.
-As in the previous issue, we get a recap of the FF's origin for anyone who missed issue # 1. These days reprints abound but back in the '60s if you missed an issue, you really missed it.
-When Johnny leaves after his fight with the Thing, we see him hanging out at a soda/malt shop with some other teenagers. For one thing, this is a nice bit of character insight, showing us that Johnny has friends his own age and outside the foursome. For another, it's an interesting period snapshot, soda/malt shops being a fairly recognizable shorthand for teenage hangouts in 1961 and almost nonexistent now.
-There's a bit of early installment timidity in regards to the power levels of Reed and Ben. As mentioned above, it seems likely to me that Reed needn't have worried at all about a machinegun (though I understand him dodging to err on the side of caution.) Ben's strength and durability seems a bit downplayed too. Illusion or not, I can't imagine it taking Ben three full blows to shatter a tree trunk later on. I also can't imagine a machinegun knocking him down, let alone causing him pain the way it does in this issue. It's early days and they're still figuring out the characters' limits.
-Finally, we get the first real cliffhanger of the Marvel Age of comics, with the Torch quitting the team. It's not an immediate cliffhanger. No one's in imminent physical danger. But it does stress that there is a longer, overarching narrative to the story of the Fantastic Four rather than just being a bunch of largely standalone stories which happen to feature the same main characters.
Conclusion
So, did fame go to the Fantastic Four's heads? Well, a bit, but that's no coincidence. Reed set out to make them famous because it's the best way for them to both live their lives in safety and aid mankind as a whole.
More importantly, did the fame of the Fantastic Four go to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's heads? Again, a bit. This issue does declare itself "The Greatest Comic Magazine in the World." A variation on that phrase will grace the covers of the Fantastic Four for the next 60+ years. Modestly is not on display here.
But is that a bad thing? Because that same embrace of fame, that same confidence will build the entire burgeoning Marvel Universe.
And that's no bad thing...
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