In Jack Kirby & Stan Lee’s Fantastic Four #51 (1966), no one punches anyone and few characters use their powers. There’s no world-ending threat and no one defeats a villain or even fights one. Which is precisely what makes it one of the best single issues of the #SilverAge. 1/12
Everything that happens in Fantastic Four #51 happens because Ben Grimm is sad. He’s specifically sad about being the Thing. In other words, he’s sad about being a superhero who fears he’s a monster. Thus, the inciting incident is an existential crisis about identity. 2/12
Within a genre that celebrates masculine aggression, the Thing’s utter despondency remains unusual—and striking. As does Kirby’s art, which uses framing, posture, and rain as symbolic (and melodramatically excessive) tears to heartbreakingly humanize a lump of orange rocks. 3/12
The (supposed) villain is motivated by ego and hubris to use a “duplication apparatus” of his own design to take the Thing’s place and prove his superiority to Reed Richards. But he also doubles the Thing emotionally—through his isolation, insecurity, and jealousy of Reed. 4/12
Sue Storm is mired in gender tropes; her priorities are family dinner & begging men to stay safe. But her interactions w/ Reed underscore the merging of superheroic action & romantic melodrama. The relationship tension caused by Reed’s own hubris is a central story conflict. 5/12
FF’s genre-mixing is also on display in a subplot where Johnny Storm gets hassled by his new classmates at Metro College and defended by Wyatt Wingfoot, son of a famed decathlete. The coach’s struggle to convince Wyatt to play football is framed as another genuine conflict. 6/12
The comic’s central physical threat is self-inflicted. Reed insists on using his “Radical Cube” to explore subspace for… reasons. But this conflict is again emotionally contextualized. The danger is Sue losing Reed, and Reed promises he’ll return because he loves Sue. 7/12
The domestic conflict is exploded by Reed’s psychedelic journey into subspace, for which Kirby employs a collage splash page. These pages are already impressive, but the tonal shift enhances the sublimity. In the FF’s world, any door can open onto jaw-dropping wonder. 8/12
The next pages chronicle the internal struggle of the nameless “villain,” disguised as the Thing. He realizes his hatred is based on lies. Reed and the real Thing’s selfless heroism—and deep friendship—inspires him to be a hero in turn, plunging into subspace to save Reed. 9/12
The fake-Thing’s sacrifice glorifies Reed & the rest of the Fantastic Four. But it also elicits a remarkable degree of empathy for a supposed villain. Kirby underscores the tragedy with three panels detailing his increasingly small, helpless body disappearing into the void. 10/12
The story concludes with more romantic/familial melodrama. Ben prepares to confront his girlfriend Alicia Masters in his human form, only the suffer the ironic twist of turning back into the Thing. Then Reed and Sue dramatically embrace, and everyone hugs the real Thing. 11/12
Reed’s closing message about facing fate “like a man” is heavy-handed. But as a whole, Fantastic Four #51 is built around more complex relationships, emphasizing tenuous boundaries between men & monsters, heroes & villains, romance & action, comparing different realities. 12/12
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DC’s #SilverAge comics promote family values & the “American Way” while spotlighting wild transformations & decidedly non-normative family units. In “Superman Family Values: Supersex in the Silver Age,” Matt Yockey discusses the symbolic value of this tension. 1/11
Yockey opens his essay by highlighting “the dialectic of the familiar and the strange” in this pinup of “The Superman Family” drawn by Curt Swan. It originally appeared on the back cover of Superman Annual #6 (1962) and was reprinted multiple times throughout the ’60s. 2/11
In this family that includes multiple sets of parents as well as merpeople, aliens, and super-pets, “Everything that is marked as heteronormative… is inflected with a strong sense of the uncanny, and that which is unfamiliar is coded as part of the heteronormative.” 3/11
In the 1940s comics by William Moulton Marston & Harry Peter, #WonderWoman is an intentional (if complicated) feminist character. Post-WWII & in the wake of the 1954 Comics Code, her world changed, becoming more domestic & romantic. But there are still subversions to be had 1/9
The ways Wonder Woman changed post-WWII partly extend from the emphasis on domesticity & traditional gender roles in Cold War America. Wartime justified WW’s heroism, just like it justified real women working in munitions factories. Postwar, that justification evaporated. 2/9
Wonder Woman also changed because her implied gender & sexual deviance were attacked by Fredric Wertham in Seduction of the Innocent, which influenced the 1954 Comics Code. “For boys,” wrote Wertham, “Wonder Woman is a frightening image. For girls, she is a morbid ideal.” 3/9
In the 3x Harvey Award Winning graphic novel “Louis Riel,” Chester Brown’s perspective creates a depiction of the historical Métis leader that drives the resolution of the autobiography, defining the main subject’s relationship to both the reader & history itself. 1/8 #LouisRiel
Throughout the first three sections of the book, chronicling Riel’s unlikely rise to power and doomed efforts to lead the Métis people against the Canadian government in a war of independence that led, ultimately, to massacre, Brown uses a wide variety of perspectives. 2/8
In his final chapter, the trial of Louis Riel, Brown seemingly fixes his perspective, presenting a view of Riel that consistently frames Riel in profile in a medium long shot. The repetition of the perspective helps establish the banality of due process. 3/8
Superhero comics didn’t invent retroactive continuity but have become strongly associated with it. Some retcons shock readers or streamline stories. “Alias” offers a critical retcon that self-reflexively comments on its own history and context. 1/12 #JessicaJones #comicsstudies
Alias employs a variety of techniques to insert Jessica Jones into the existing fictional history of the Marvel comics universe. The character’s history is initially hinted at through photos of Jessica dressed as a superhero standing next to the Avengers. 2/12
Jessica locates the photos firmly in her past. They’re also located within the past of the superhero genre through the extreme contrast between their brightly coloured, smiling world and Jessica’s more grounded, noirish present, where she’d never wear white spandex. 3/12
Alias was created – quite specifically – to be something different from mainstream Marvel comics of the time, and those differences create a series of visual challenges for the artwork. #JessicaJones 1/7
Most notably, Jessica Jones is a noir detective story, not a punch-em-up superhero spectacle. The majority of scenes are constructed around tense, rapid-fire dialogue rather than action sequences. 2/7
It is this exact problem that inspired Wally Wood’s famous “22 Panels that Always Work: or some interesting ways to get some variety into those boring panels where some dumb writer has a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page!” 3/7
Because Western culture has historically privileged the male gaze, the act of looking can be gendered. As John Berger famously said of Western art, “Men act and women appear.” But “Alias” deliberately—and self-reflexively—foregrounds a woman who looks. #JessicaJones 1/11
“Alias” emphasizes the gaze of Jessica Jones both narratively and stylistically. At a plot level, her job as a private investigator affords her an active, knowledgeable gaze. She uses experience, technology, and various special skills to see things others don’t. 2/11
Stylistically, too, Michael Gaydos’ page composition, framing, and panelling routinely emphasizes Jessica’s active, knowledgeable gaze. Her face and eyes are prioritized, and we often spend multiple panels watching her watch people as well as photos and videos she’s taken. 3/11