First Impressions: Fantastic Four

My first memory of the Fantastic Four is The Human Torch; not Johnny Storm, mind you, but The Human Torch; and to be fair, not really of the Fantastic Four.

The same way I knew The Flash and Iron Man without actually knowing who they were as a kid, I knew The Human Torch. I had no concept of who was under those flames and certainly no idea that he was part of something called the Fantastic Four, but I recognized—and dug—that a guy colored red with little black lines running up and down him and underwear you could still see underneath meant he was on fire and a super hero (even though just about every artist since the late 90’s has gone over to depicting a slightly more “realistic” version of the Torch’s flamed on form, in my mind the black lines and yellow eyes ala Kirby will always be what I default to).

Truth be told, I’m even less sure than usual how I came to know The Human Torch. Usually my gut goes with thinking I must have watched a cartoon and picked it up, but the Torch was infamously left out of the late 70’s animated series because the powers that be thought young viewers might light themselves on fire and was replaced by H.E.R.B.I.E. I know I watched the 90’s FF portion of the Marvel Action Hour, but I definitely was drawing the Torch before I was 12. Maybe I saw a toy or a t-shirt? Not sure, but regardless, I knew who The Human Torch was before I knew who or what the Fantastic Four were.

Sometime later, still before I read my first FF comic but also definitely aware I became aware of The Human Torch, The Thing came on my radar. Again, I’m not quite sure how it happened, but certainly Marvel characters were licensed all over the place dating back to when I was a kid, so it’s not unlikely I saw a lunchbox or whatever and the two most visually striking characters jumped out at me while the others receded into the background; honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that my established childhood fascination with the colors red and yellow—it wasn’t a coincidence Flash and Iron Man were my earlier examples—drew my eye first to the Torch, but surely the big dude with the dinosaur head made of rocks proved an irresistible lure to my young eyes.

I got my first Fantastic Four comic in a grab bag from the grocery store in 1988. I was six years old and it was issue #314, written by Steve Englehart, drawn by Keith Pollard, sporting a cover from Ron Frenz and edited by my recently-retired former co-worker Ralph Macchio. Belasco was the bad guy and the blurb next to him on front reading “From the pages of the X-Men” no doubt increased my excitement to read the book. I don’t remember much about the story other than that the FF were fighting demons, the sky was on fire at some point and a blind lady who was married to The Human Torch was really worried about him.

Oh, and the roster of the Fantastic Four was The Thing, The Human Torch, Ms. Marvel in her “She-Thing” incarnation and, of course…Crystal.

Again, recall that The Thing and The Human Torch were the only FF characters I knew; I had some vague idea that there was supposed to be a stretchy guy and a girl on the team, but I assumed Crystal was the girl and maybe I made the stretchy guy up or he was actually on the Justice League. It seemed odd to me that there was a female Thing, but I didn’t know any better so I assumed she had always been there; likewise, The Thing being extra mutated didn’t faze me because I was at least familiar with the concept of new costumes.

As far as I knew, The Thing, The Human Torch, Ms. Marvel and Crystal had been the Fantastic Four for over 300 issues.

Like some sort of crazy therapy hypnosis session, I do believe writing this blog entry has helped me recall exactly when my hatred for Crystal began. Like I said, there’s a scene in this issue where Alicia Masters—Johnny’s blind wife whose name I did not know at the time—is freaking out with the rest of the world’s population because the sky is on fire and she’s worried about her husband. On the flipside, the Torch keeps saying how worried he is about his wife since they’re underground fighting demons and he doesn’t know what’s happened to her. In the midst of this, Crystal keeps hitting on Johnny and wanting to talk about why he won’t get with her despite him repeatedly telling her to knock it off.

At six years old, with no knowledge of continuity or that Crystal had a husband of her own she was mistreating or a kid she had ditched to chase after her old boyfriend, I understood enough about the basic dynamics of marriage to know that this bimbo was bad news. I was a really smart kid.

Looking back, while I would gradually track down further issues of comics my dad would randomly bring me home in grab bags like X-Men and Spider-Man, it would be years before I ever got into reading Fantastic Four, and I think I now know why. While I’m sure there were merits to this particular version of the book, to a kid, all I saw was a super hero team with nothing to set it apart other than a reduced roster. Why would I want to read about only four characters when I could instead pick up Avengers or Justice League and see many more? Besides, two strong ugly characters seemed redundant and I didn’t understand Crystal’s powers.

It really goes to show how intrinsic to the value of the Fantastic Four that family dynamic is. I’ve since gone back and read the really good FF stuff—Lee/Kirby, Byrne, Waid/Wieringo, etc.—and gained a whole new appreciation for it as an adult because it’s so different. The banter, heightened emotions and genuine affection the core characters trade or feel for one another puts the FF on a level apart from all those other teams. Even now, while the Torch may be gone and the Four have become the Future Foundation with Spider-Man and a half dozen kids in tow, that feeling of family and casual closeness as opposed to the professionalism of the Justice League or office politics of the Avengers gives FF its own identity I couldn’t see from my first Fantastic Four experience.

As a bit of a postscript, I finally gave Fantastic four another shot around 1994 when the new cartoon was rapping its way into my heart thanks to Brian Austin Green. The Thing was sporting a mask, The Invisible Woman wore a bathing suit, and Mr. Fantastic was dead, replaced alternately by Namor and the Scot Lang version of Ant-Man. So while I considered myself a pretty hardcore Marvel fan by the mid 90’s, I still had no idea who Reed Richards was.

The Many Loves of The Human Torch

Two months removed from the death of The Human Torch and a month and a half after Valentine’s Day, I’m riding the zeitgeist as I always do and writing a post about Johnny Storm’s various girlfriends and shape shifting alien wives.

Many good super hero comics have a strong soap opera element. From the Superman-Lois Lane-Clark Kent triangle to the Melrose Place-like shenanigans of the early 90’s X-Men, love and lust between these attractive folks in spandex can be as crucial to keeping things fresh and building an acclaimed run as your central mystery or monthly action scene.

As with many things, 60’s Marvel pioneered a lot of the soapier elements in comics—or to be fair polished them up, since the aforementioned Superman stuff was going before and the Legion of Super-Heroes had to have been at least holding hands and trading flight rings—with Peter Parker’s pursuit of Betty Brant in Amazing Spider-Man, Bruce Banner’s Quasimodo-like yearning for Betty Ross in Incredible Hulk, the shy courtship between Cyclops and Marvel Girl and so on. But nowhere was the interpersonal as important as Fantastic Four.

The personal dynamic amongst the FF has always been at the forefront of their stories, just as much as their villains or the wild locations they visit. However, it’s not like any other super team because it’s not a group of peers hanging out and waiting to couple off, it’s a family; to go back to my favorite analogy-generator already used once in this very post, if the other teams are Melrose Place, Fantastic Four is The Waltons. Romance played a role, but paternal, fraternal, maternal and whatever means the sister version (saternal?) bonds came first.

Reed and Sue Richards are the longstanding royal couple of the Marvel Universe; they’re Billy and Alison if things had worked out (three Melrose Place references in five paragraphs—I’m rolling!). Theirs is a mature and sweet but ultimately kinda boring love. And The Thing is an awesome character, one of the best, but part of his whole deal is that no girl is ever going to get with him unless she’s blind and has a kink for clay already established.

Which leaves us—or left us—with The Torch.

For 50 years, Johnny Storm had to shoulder the burden of being the single guy bringing any and all romantic intrigue to Fantastic Four (because Sue was never really going to swim off with Namor). He played every role from love struck teenager to swarthy playboy to even over-his-head newlywed. Every time a new creative team came onboard or a direction shift was made, invariably, Johnny got a new girlfriend—and what a group.

Let’s talk about a few.

DORRIE EVANS
The Human Torch’s mostly anonymous teenage girlfriend who came more or less pre-packaged with the series and then stuck around predominantly off-camera for the first 50 issues or so. For real, the best ever appearance of Dorrie Evans is Amazing Spider-Man #21, in which she has more lines then every issue of FF she showed up in combined—and is named Doris for some reason—and spends the story trying to use bookish Peter Parker to make Johnny jealous but also kinda falls for him (as I recall). It’s the most personality Dorrie ever displayed, much of it the usual Silver Age girlfriend “make the hero jealous” routine, but she also came across as kind of sweet at time and perhaps would have been perfect for Peter. I also love that when Stan Lee had to name his young male lead’s love interest he went with “Dorrie”—was that name more common in the 60’s?

CRYSTAL
I would hope at this point my loathing for Crystal is well-known or I’m really not doing my job here. She is in all likelihood my least favorite comic book character ever, with only Sardath giving her a run for her money—and that idiot got taken out again in the new issue of R.E.B.E.L.S.! But I digress. That aside, the Romeo & Juliet romance of The Torch and Crystal is one of the classics and even I kinda dig it. The funny thing is, finally having recently gotten around to reading the original stories in Masterworks form recently, the whole thing comes out of nowhere entirely; one issue Johnny is sort of pining after Crystal’s older sister Medusa (and maybe still dating Dorrie?), then the next he’s madly in love with Crystal—and likewise—and then the next they’ve got an unbreakable barrier between them and it’s heartbreaking. It’s one of those stories that are really great and emotional as long as you just look the other way on its origins and how quickly the dial got turned up to 11, but that’s the simultaneous beauty and absurdity of Silver Age comics. Of course Crystal broke Johnny’s heart because she’s an awful, awful shrew, but it was nice while it lasted.

FRANKIE RAYE
I’ve got a weird soft spot for Frankie Raye, despite the fact she co-opted the Nova codename for a couple decades. Her back story is nutty—she’s the stepdaughter of the guy who created the original Human Torch, got fire powers from a lab accident, and then was given amnesia, an invisible golden swimsuit that blocked her abilities and subtle pyrophobia by her stepdad via hypnosis—and she was actually a bit out of Johnny’s league and didn’t seem to realize it. More than that, though, I love the John Byrne story where she more or less became Galactus’ willing herald because it would save Earth but also because she just thought it would be fun to see outer space; she again broke Johnny’s heart, but doing so by getting cosmic powers from an immortal planet eating space god is a pretty clever and unique breakup strategy.

ALICIA MASTERS
Midway through his awesome FF run, with The Thing out of the picture, John Byrne decided to experiment with mixing things up a bit and not only moved She-Hulk in as a new member of the team, but also hooked up Johnny with Ben’s longtime love interest, Alicia Masters. I was initially intrigued by the pairing, but ultimately, like I believe most fans, didn’t think it worked. A lot of interesting but somewhat ham-fisted of Johnny noticing that Alicia is actually somewhat close to his age and stuff. After Byrne left, Roger Stern ended up marrying the couple, which really didn’t seem to work, as it altered the dynamic I talked about at the beginning of this post and took Johnny out of play as the FF’s single guy. Eventually the folks working on the book came to see it was an odd fit as well—though not for awhile—which brings us to…

LYJA
…it wasn’t Alicia after all, it was a Skrull! Lyja had a lot of potential as a character and as a love interest for Johnny, but I don’t think she or their relationship ever really got a fair shake since she was created as a solution for a situation rather than a new idea. Her alienation from her own race and the way she somewhat put her warrior nature in check because of how much she cared for Johnny and on the flipside his having to work through such ultimate betrayal as getting married under totally false circumstances but realizing he did love this woman is all good story fodder, but the whole thing came along at an unstable time for the book and the characters, so it never came to fruition as it may have during another period. I did like Lyja’s brief return during Secret Invasion, as she deserved to tell off Johnny for forgetting about her, but I also like that they still couldn’t quite resist one another.

NAMORITA
The Nova-Namorita fan in me of course despises this pairing, but aside from that, I kind of love it. It’s so perfect on so many gimmicky levels: the mini-Namor/Sue thing, the fire/water thing, that they’re both just outgoing party hard characters who know how attractive they are. This is another one that never got enough play and it’s too bad she’s gone (and presumably the Namorita who turned up during War of Kings was plucked from before her dating Johnny days); they’d be a fun occasional hookup.

ULTIMATE FIRESTAR
Even in the Ultimate Universe, Johnny is a mack daddy who can’t win. Crystal ditched him even harder over there, and just when he seemed to have a good thing going with Liz Allen, she burst into flames and went off to hang with the X-Men. I’d like to see this one revisited. Somebody get me Brian Bendis…

Oh Crystal, you utter hussy...

Crystal's greatest infidelity hits, from the recently-collected Avengers: Vision & The Scarlet Witch - A Year in the Life.

To set the scene, at the time of this series, Crystal was married to Quicksilver and had recently given birth to their daughter, Luna. Let's see what our favorite elemental Inhuman/village bicycle is up to...

Why I never!

For those of you who didn't want to blow up the panels, let me share some highlights from Crystal Rationalization Theater:

***

CRYSTAL - "We've always had to sneak before, Norman -- what with Wanda and Vizh living so close by! But now that they're on vacation--! Oh, it's so perfect!"

***

NORMAN: "If only you weren't married--!" (She knows how to pick 'em!)

CRYSTAL: "Now, Norman, we promised we weren't going to talk about that!"

***

NORMAN: "Let's tell [Quicksilver]! Tell him you want a divorce and stop sneaking around!"

CRYSTAL: "Well...easy for you to say! You don't have nearly as much to lose!" (Norman, you selfish asshole!)

***

CRYSTAL: "It's better I continue to tell [Quicksilver] I miss Earth, take the anti-pollution potion (Science!), and come down for fabulous weekends -- and I do mean fabulous, hunk-o!" ("Hunk-o" is Inhuman Royal Family for "convenient")

***

Annnnnd scene!

All together now...

OH CRYSTAL! (Cue laugh track and closing theme)

Crystal: The Marvel Universe Bicycle

For a guy who reads as many comics as I do and spends as much time dealing with comics as I do, you'd figure by the numbers alone there would be a fair amount of characters I don't like. However, while there are certainly plenty of comic book characters I find to be dull or irritating or whatever, I can't think of too many who when they show up I roll my eyes and audibly sigh in frustration.

There are a few though, and Crystal of the Inhumans is at the top of that list.

I first encountered the "pumpkin-haired bimbette" (as I vividly and fondly recall Diamondback referring to her as in an issue of Captain America--thank you for that, Mark Gruenwald) when she was a member of the Avengers back in the early 90's. Bob Harras' run on Avengers was largely characterized by a greater focus on the soap opera aspects of the team than perhaps ever before, with a love triangle between Crystal, the Black Knight and Sersi being at the center.

Not knowing any history about any of the characters, I assumed the Black Knight had always been the stubble-chinned Gambit lookalike and ladies man I encountered in these pages. He was kinda like a badass Archie, as he had the hot bitchy brunette Sersi looking to unsheathe his sword (BAM!) and the "sweet, innocent" semi-blond Crystal also making a play for him. So my initial "loathing at first sight" for Crystal was simply that she was the lame, uninteresting and sappy corner of this triangular romance, whereas the other two angles were edgy and rad. I also thought it kinda inappropriate for Crys to be pretty blatantly throwing herself at the team's resident bad boy when she was raising a young daughter, Luna, on the other end of the mansion, but that was secondary.

It wasn't until an issue of X-Factor around the same period where young Ben thought to ask himself, "Huh, I wonder where Luna's dad is?" That would of course be because in said issue Quicksilver asks Val Cooper for time off so he can go on vacation with his estranged wife--Crystal!

Whaaaaa?

I actually liked Quicksilver, so the fact that the lame elemental chick over in Avengers was his wife disappointed me greatly. However, what disappointed me even more was reading this X-Factor back-up story where Pietro is trying desparately to get Crystal to take him back and being a gentleman and everything and young Ben is yelling at the page, "Quicksilver, you fool! She totally made out with the Black Knight last month! She's NO GOOD!" and getting funny looks from his parents.

By the end of the story, some dude actually tries to blackmail Quicksilver by showing him pictures of his wife out dancing or something (really?) with ol' BK and Pietro beats the snot out of him but then heads back to the cabin he and essentially telling Crystal to hit the bricks.

That wouldn't be the end of the story, as Quicksilver would show up back in Avengers and make the love triangle into a sorta love square (honestly I just wanted him and Sersi to get together) and then Black Knight ended up in the Ultraverse and I stopped reading comics for awhile.

The lasting impression left on me from the whole ordeal though was that Crystal was a lousy, no good, two-timing skank who didn't even have the decency to act like one on the outside like the fine residents of Melrose Place, instead trying to seem all Pollyanna while she was lining up her next manwiche.

But that was only the tip of the iceberg, my friends. I got back into reading comics in college and actually took some time to learn the history of the Marvel Universe and in the process discovered that this was not the first time Crystal had pulled something like this--in fact, it was basically her secondary mutation to cheat on whatever dude she was with!

Let's go to the history books...

Crystal was originally introduced along with the rest of the Inhumans in the pages of Fantastic Four by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby back during their miracle run on that book. She was essentially the Juliet to Johnny Storm's Romeo; the one girl the smooth operating Human Torch could never attain because her people disapproved, she was trapped behind some impenetrable barrier in Attilan, etc. And this worked. It was neat idea and the sort of human quandary done on an epic scale that made Lee and Kirby's FF sing.

Eventually Johnny and Crys did find a way to be together, with her essentially moving in with him and them living happily ever after. But this is comics, so nobody can really live happily ever after unless you're writing them into limbo or they're Reed and Sue, so eventually, something suddenly came up (I confess to not knowing exactly what) and the happy couple split.

Here begin the problems.

Crystal ends up finding Quicksilver after he got the crap kicked out of him by a Sentinel and nursing him back to health. They fall in love and even get married. It's an interesting enough odd couple since Crystal actually lived up to her billing as chaste and kindly back then whereas Quicksilver was the consumate jerk he always was, is, and should remain. Maybe they didn't need to get married (and have a kid), but they were interesting.

However, to start with, from every summary I've read, it seems like the Crystal-Quicksilver relationship was always played as "She got bored of waiting for the Torch to want to be with her again, so she settled for the next warm body" (more or less). I'm sure this was done with the intention of playing up the starcrossed lovers thing to the next level, but from my point of view, it just makes Crystal seem like a shrew and Quicksilver of all people seem like the sympathetic party.

It gets worse.

Eventually, Crystal gets bored (happens a lot apparently) of hanging out in her hidden city playing wife/mom, so she visits her in-laws the Vision and the Scarlet Witch in the Jersey suburbs and starts an affair. Not with the Vision, or the Torch, or even the Witch, but just with some dude. In Jersey.

Ok, as a proud resident of a Jersey suburb, even I have to say it's incredibly sad that in a Universe populated with chiseled demigods running around in spadex, Crystal settled for some insurance salesman in Hackensack or whatever as her "other man." Adultery is bad enough, but have some standards, lady!

Because of the whole "his wife sleeping with a Jersey shore guido" thing, Quicksilver went nuts and became a villain for awhile. Rather than, oh, try to fix things, Crystal decided to join the Fantastic Four alongside her old flame (HA!) Johnny Storm (who was raising her daughter? I dunno, Triton or somebody...I'm sure she didn't care). Why is she suddenly interested in the Torch again? Because he's married now.

Oy.

After failing to convince her ex boytoy that cheating on your spouse was the hip new thing, Crystal remembered she had a kid and wandered back to the Inhumans. Quicksilver was getting sane again, so to avoid that potential deathtrap of domestic bliss and a stable home life for her child, she joined the Avengers and embarked upon the aforementioned floozying with the Black Knight. Crisis averted.

After that we had Onslaught, Heroes Reborn, Heroes Return...Crystal didn't show up a lot. I think she reconciled with Quicksilver for a speall, but (shockingly) it didn't last. Paul Jenkins did his awesome Inhumans mini and she was in it, but I've never been entirely sure if that story was in continuity or not (and Crystal doesn't get with anybody, so it's not really important for my purposes here).

Recent years have seen a modest resurgance of Crystal appearances and with them the requisite Crystal being a harlot. In the Son of M mini where Quicksilver goes nuts again and steals the Terrigen Mists from the Inhumans, Crystal can't be bothered to do much because she's busy tangling with a new plant-based Inhuman (and by "tangling with" I mean "having sex with").

Then, as if it couldn't get any better/worse, during a New Avengers tie-in issue to Civil War, the Sentry takes a trip to Attilan and we find out that apparently he and Crystal knocked boots back in the day when both of them were married. That's right: Crystal had a retcon affair!

Amazing.

I'm not the high-faluting "I've got the moral high ground 24/7" dude I was back in high school (I was Dan from Gossip Girl), but adultery still gives me the heebie jeebies (as I think it does most people). But with Crystal, cheating on her man of the moment isn't just a plot twist that got thrown in one day, it's what she does. And like I said, it's not that she's just a slut that bugs me, it's that for some reason she's never really called out on it. Every time she shows up, the male characters aren't all like, "Nice! Crystal! Somebody's getting lucky tonight!" She is still portrayed as Polly Pureheart.

For the record, I don't blame any writer or artist for my irrational hatred of Crystal. I honestly believe that Crystal somehow reaches through the page and forces creators to enable her in her ongoing sexcapades. And heck, I've read plenty of good Inhumans/Crystal stories, including the ones where she cuckolds her poor beaus. I've only seen snippets of those original Lee/Kirby issues, but I love the dynamic. The Jenkins mini is one of my favorites. I even dug that Harras stuff in a 90's sorta way.

The latest Crystal portrayal courtesy of Joe Pokaski in Secret Invasion: Inhumans showed promise. Joe did a nice job playing up te family aspect of the Inhumans and casting Crystal in the jealous little sister role to Medusa worked. Going into War of Kings, I'm excited to see how two of my favorite writers, Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, play with these characters. Crystal being put into a forced marriage with Ronan is an interesting twist (heads up to Ronan: she will cheat on you).

So here's looking to tomorrow, Crystal--best of luck in your future endeavors.

I will likely still hate you.