The Iowa Caucuses (Comic Book Edition)

Whether it's Hillary Clinton or Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, or John Edwards or John McCain, you can be certain of one thing: Steve Rogers, depicted above in his Captain America garb, and Lex Luthor, depicted below, will not prevail in today's Iowa caucuses. Both of these fictive figures, from Marvel and DC Comics, respectively, ran for president. Cap lost in 1980 and Luthor won in 2000 (if you can believe that). How they fared in the Iowa caucuses, however, was not explored in significant detail, if at all.

Marvel Comics did pause once in 1981, in its alternate history book What If?, to reflect upon the world that would have been had Captain American been elected to the presidency:

Off Duty VII

Travel today thwarts my attempt at a more substantive post. Have you queried your presidential candidate of choice as to his or her views on the Mutant Registration Act?

Los 4 Fantasticos (The Fantastic Four)

After the Monday I had yesterday, don't expect voluminous commentary on popular culture in today's bite-sized post. Accordingly, behold, and be content with, this early 1980s Spanish language Fantastic Four comic book cover, Los Four Fantasticos! (As always, click the image to enlarge it.). In fact, it is from this very issue that I found the Spanish language advertisements for Fraggle Rock and Dungeons & Dragons (not to mention the earlier posted image of Ben Grim a/k/a The Thing saying his catchphrase in Spanish).

Marvel Team-Up #74

"It never fails. The world could be ending tonight, and we'd still have a full house. Hm -- What's that noise from Belushi's dressing room?" - Gilda Radner, commenting to herself prior to performing in a 1978 episode of "Saturday Night Live," which is soon to be disrupted by the Silver Samurai and his goons, in Marvel Team-Up #74 (Marvel Comics, Issue Date: October 1978).

It is 1978, and Peter Parker plans to take Mary Jane Watson for a Saturday date to a taping of NBC's "Saturday Night Live." At that time, the program had been on the air but a few years, and the cast was comprised of Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Bill Murray, Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner, all of whom make appearances in the issue, along with SNL producer Lorne Michaels. Delays have made Parker and Watson late to the taping, and as they arrive, they find they must sit in the balcony. As they proceed to their seats, a brute of sorts brushes past Parker, whose spider sense begins to tingle:

Parker and Watson find their seats. The episode's guest host is, if you can believe it, Marvel Comics empresario Stan Lee with musical guest Rick Jones, a fictive musician who exists only in the Marvel Universe. (Potential musical guest Dazzler would not be created by Marvel for another two years.). Lee references his duties and position in his monologue, which draws praise from an NBC page (who is thereupon attacked by an anonymous henchman):

The bare bones plot is driven by the existence of a mysterious ring, which Belushi mistakenly receives in his fan mail. The ring, it seems, has magical properties which make it an object of interest for the Silver Samurai, who arrives at the taping with goons in tow knowing only that a member of the cast possesses the ring. (One ring to rule them all?) As the taping progresses, Parker becomes Spider-Man to investigate the assault of the page. The cast then joins Spider-Man as he fights the Silver Samurai and his men. Morris dons a Thor costume as the melee ensues while Newman dresses as Ms. Marvel (ruses which temporarily distract the anonymous thugs long enough for them to be defeated). Murray even disguises himself as one of the henchmen in an attempt to ascertain their intent and mission:

As the battle rages towards a climax, Belushi, as his character Samurai Fatubua, duels the Silver Samurai, who finds insult in the actor's portrayal of the ancient Japanese warrior. Before the villain can be captured, he wrestles the ring from Belushi. Wielding the ring and using its power, the Silver Samurai teleports to safety, though Spidey predicts that "[h]e'll be back, probably when I least expect it, too." Everything is tidily resolved:

Written by Chris Claremont, the issue was also penciled and edited by Bob Hall, inked and colored by Marie Severin, and lettered by Annette Kawecki. (Hall did not respond to an email seeking comment on the issue - see the update at the end of this post for the email sent to me by Bob Hall on this isssue.). Interestingly, Marvel Comics would try a similar trick several years later with the Avengers and David Letterman (then on NBC):

What is bizarre about the fact that Lee is the SNL guest host is that his presence establishes that Marvel Comics, the corporate enterprise, exists as a company within the Marvel Universe. Put another way, in a world where superheros exist, fight, and frolic, consumers still, apparently, buy comics about superheros - and not fictitious ones, either. (In Alan Moore's Watchmen, comic book readers follow the exploits of pirates instead of costumed superheros, about whom they can read in the newspaper.). Not only do customers purchase comics, but apparently, they do so in such numbers to make Marvel a successful enough company that Lee is invited to appear on a nationally televised sketch comedy show. Pre-meta meta, anyone?

Of course, if "Saturday Night Live" and its various players exist in the Marvel Universe, then my earlier speculation about the Human Torch proves true. Last week, I reviewed Fantastic Four #285, in which Johnny Storm a/k/a the Human Torch is emotionally affected by the death of a thirteen year old boy who set himself ablaze in an attempt to become like his hero. That story took place in 1985 during the crossover debacle that was Secret Wars II, a full eight years after Dan Aykroyd parodied cheap Halloween costumes. In that post, I wrote:

And was such a tragic accident truly as unforeseeable as Johnny Storm's grief suggests? Certainly, if the Marvel Universe is anything like our own, then children injure themselves using certain products in an attempt to emulate television and cinema. This should not be a surprise to a hero who regularly visits outer space, fights aliens and monsters, and generally sees death and destruction on a rather frequent basis. After all, was it not eight years before this issue appeared that Saturday Night Live parodied cheap Halloween costumes and "a bag of oily rags and a lighter" sold as a "Johnny Human Torch" costume?

Thus, Marvel Team-Up #74 confirms that SNL and the Fantastic Four exist in the same universe, which means that Storm would have been aware of Aykroyd's gag (which went unreferenced in FF #285, despite Storm's acting as if the accident was unforeseeable).

Really, Marvel Team-Up #74 is less interesting as a narrative than as a relic and a bizarre cross-promotional item. One wonders how the cast reacted when the issue was inevitably delivered to 30 Rockefeller Plaza following its initial publication. Did they enjoy it? Were they awed by being in an actual comic book? Or did they pay it any mind at all? I found no reference to it in James A Miller and Tom Shales' Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, as Told By Its Stars, Writers and Guests (not that the issue would be among the first memories to be recounted by anyone affiliated with the program). The issue would be less interesting, perhaps, if the 1970s era SNL were not still so much in the public memory and consciousness, so I suppose Marvel's marketing department made a good decision in making the cross promotional. It could have been much, much worse.

UPDATE (9/25/07): Bob Hall, the penciler and editor of this issue, was kind enough to respond today to my earlier email asking about the origin of the Spidey/SNL storyline. His response is intriguing enough to quote in its entirety below:

I have no idea how it started, maybe with Shooter, but it was probably Claremont's idea -- he was always full of ideas and had not yet found his niche as the richest writer at Marvel because of the X-Men .

I was an editor and assigned myself to draw, figuring it would be fun and that I might get to interact with the celebs. We did get to go to 30 Rock and watch rehearsals but clearly none of them had time to schmooze with lowly comic book types. We all shook hands with Lorne Michaels and I got to sketch the studio. Mainly, though, we talked with NBC lawyers. We were going to use the NBC symbol along with the usual Spider-Man logo in the upper left of the cover since we wanted to avoid featuring one Saturday Night player to the exclusion of the others. The lawyer went on and on about proper use of the logo and we (Claremont and Shooter if I remember right) couldn't figure out why. Then it hit me and I said, "I understand; I'm from Nebraska." The lawyer turned green -- literally -- but said, "Then you know what I'm talking about." As I explained to Shooter later, a staff artist named Jim Brown, who worked for public TV in my home town, Lincoln, Nebraska, had come up with exactly the same logo for the Nebraska ETV station at least a year before NBC (after most likely paying some agency a 100,000 to create the thing) started using the image. Shortly before we did the comic, Nebraska sued and NBC settled for something like a million bucks. Hence the paranoia.

I was not the best choice to draw the comic. Claremont was a TV fan and while I watched Saturday Night Live, that was about all. Claremont wrote something like "The Muppet Show meets Saturday Night, meets The Avengers." I was OK with the Avengers but the Muppet references were lost on me. Whats more, it was the 70s well before VCRs let alone the Internet. Getting useful reference was difficult to impossible, even for the Muppets. For instance, Chris wanted me to draw the two old guy puppets who sat in the balcony were critics of the show. I just couldn't find pictures of them and ended up, I think, drawing them from behind from verbal descriptions. I would have watched the show, but I had a play running off Broadway and I was there every night. The Network could not be bothered to send us more than a few old head shots of the Saturday Night cast.

As an editor, I should have fired me and hired someone who understood Chris's story adaptation and could draw at least some of it from memory. Marie Severin inked the thing and knew some of the references so that helped -- although we had very different styles. Actually, that was so early in my career, I don't think you could say I had a style at all, really.

The best part of the project was that someone engineered me and Shooter and some of the bullpen going to the premiere party for Animal House; I can't say if Chris was there. It was at one of the famous clubs but I don't remember which one. We went out in the alley with Belushi and presented him with the cover. Belushi passed a joint around -- so I can say I smoked dope with John Belushi. I did inhale, this was after all the 70's.

The two Muppet characters Smith references are Statler and Waldorf, who sit several rows behind Parker and Watson in the balcony of the SNL studio.

Fantastic Four #285

"Look at this lad, Johnny. Look at the joy in his eyes as he consumes each detail of your exploits. Look at his room. Contained within these four walls is a virtual shrine in your honor. His was a small, sad life, Johnny. Without friends, without true parental love and guidance. The death of this boy is not a burden for you to bear. He did not die because of you. It was through you that Tommy Hanson lived!" - omnipotent, multidimensional being The Beyonder, attempting to console Johnny Storm a/k/a The Human Torch, after the death of thirteen-year-old fan, Tommy Hanson, who set himself ablaze while trying to become his favorite hero, in Fantastic Four #285 (Marvel Comics, Issue Date: December 1985).

Part of the massive crossover that was the wearisome Secret Wars II, Fantastic Four #285 begins in the office of Dr. Janet Darling, some type of coroner investigating the death of Thomas H. Hanson, a thirteen year old boy whose official cause of death is third degree burns. Dissatisfied with that brief clinical conclusion, Dr. Darling begins an investigation into the circumstances which led to Hanson's death (a more existential task which, likely, would exceed her formal duties in the real world). The narrative then flashes back to to the last few days of the life of Hanson, an all too familiar experience for many young comic book readers in the mid-1980s. Bullied, unpopular, and all too interested in the exploits of super heroes (which in his world exist not in fictional comic books but in news reports and celebrity magazines), Hanson idolizes The Human Torch, founding member of the Fantastic Four, sister of Sue Storm a/k/a The Invisible Woman, and young hero of New York City.

Hanson is a latch key kid who rarely sees his parents, both of who maintain professional careers. On the day in question, at school, a stereotypical bully brandishes a new celebrity magazine featuring the Torch in front of Hanson's face and only agrees to give it to him if he will fork over his lunch money and do his homework for him. Later, a teacher confiscates Hanson's hard won magazine and attempts to explore with him his unhealthy fascination with the Torch. Hanson replies only that Johnny Storm is, after all, "the greatest hero ever! Better 'n Spider-Man, or Captain America, or Thor, or . . . or anyone!"

Hanson's only friend, it seems, is an aged misfit toy-maker named Joss, who is making some type of model airplane than operates on actual jet fuel. (This friendship is somewhat reminiscent of the friendship between Doc Brown and Marty McFly, characters who also appeared for the first time in 1985. However, McFly was older and far, far more confident in himself than Hanson, and Brown was certainly less negligent than Joss turns out to be.). Leaving the test area to return a page, Joss warns Hanson to stay away from a fuel can, for it "could turn ya into another human torch." This, of course, is exactly the wrong thing to say to young Hanson. Only moments before encountering Joss, he had placed a call to Johnny Storm at Avengers Mansion, where the hero was staying following the destruction of the Fantastic Four's headquarters. Says Hanson to Avengers butler Edwin Jarvis, who answered the phone:

Just tell the Human Torch that Tommy Hanson called.

...

No, sir. He doesn't know me. I . . . I just wanted him to know my name.

Left alone with the can of jet fuel, Hanson does what the foreshadowing suggests he will:


As Hanson lays dying in the hospital, Dr. Darling locates and informs Johnny Storm, who has just enough time to visit Hanson at the hospital before the young boy passes away. Storm's parents, heretofore absent, berate Storm from their newly dead son's bedside. Storm is devastated. He commiserates with his fellow team members and threatens never to become the Human Torch again. Upon this vow, he is visited by the Beyonder (whose insertion into the story seems a bit heavy-handed), who takes him into the past to observe Hanson's life. It is during these moments that the Beyonder gives the monologue cited above.

Written and penciled by John Byrne, the issue is not typical narrative fare for super hero comic books. The issue was also inked by Al Gordon, colored by Glynis Oliver, lettered by John Workman, and edited by Michael Carlin. Byrne's art is somewhat unusual in that the faces of Hanson and his bully look to be far older than their ages and builds would suggest. It is as if the heads of adults have been placed upon the diminutive bodies of children, and the effect is somewhat detrimental to the overall theme and message of the issue:


See what I mean?

The issue has drawn some critical commentary in, of all places, non-comic books. In his 1999 book, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers, author Matthew J. Pustz explores the portrayals of comic book fans in the medium. He notes:

The depictions of comic book fans themselves fall into two main categories, the direct and the metaphorical. Mainstream visions of comic book fans have usually been metaphorical. Some, such as Byrne's story, "Hero" (Fantastic Four #285 [December 1985]), have been sympathetic. Tommy Hanson, a devoted fan of the Human Torch, faces so much parental neglect and peer ridicule that he sets himself on fire in an attempt to become more like his hero. When the boy's parents blame the Torch for his death, the superhero briefly vows never again to use his powers. An omnipotent extradimensional creature named the Beyonder soon intervenes and shows the Torch the error of his ways by taking him back in time to see Tommy happy in his room, reading Fantastic Four. The Beyonder explains, "the death of this boy is not a burden for you to bear. He did not die because of you. It was through you that Tommy Hanson lived!" It is not difficult to make the jump between Tommy, the fan of the "real" Human Torch, and fans of the comic book superheros, turning the story into commentary on the role of superheroes in fans' lives. Comics do not make fans' lives one dimensional or lacking in human contact; rather, says Byrne, comics provide fans an escape, an outlet.

Pustz, now a professor at Endicott College in Massachusetts, was kind enough to offer his thoughts on the issue eight years after the publication of his book. In an email, he notes how he came to include a discussion of FF #285 in his book:

My book is all about the world of comic book readers as I'm trying to explain what the comics mean to the people who read them. But I also wanted to get a sense of the opposite perspective as well: what do comic book creators think about the people who read their comics. How are fans depicted in the comic books themselves? Tommy Hanson isn't primarily a comic book fan. He's shown reading comic books, but the focus of his fandom is the Human Torch, someone who is a real person for him. Making the leap from someone who is a fan of (real life) superheroes to someone who is a fan of comic books that star (fictional) superheroes seemed reasonable to me. After all, it was in The Fantastic Four comic that readers learned that the team stars in its own line of comic books on the Marvel earth -- comic books that we on this earth read as if they are fiction. The scene in Tommy's room, where the Beyonder takes Johnny back into the past to see him happily reading, focuses on comic books. And when his parents lash out at the Torch, they blame him in the same kind of rhetoric that people have used to pin responsibility on comic books and other forms of popular culture. So the connection is clearly there.

Twenty two years after its publication, Pustz believes the issue "holds up pretty well" in 2007. However, as time has passed since the publication of his book, he has reconsidered, somewhat, his initial view of the portrayal of Hanson in Byrne's narrative:

It's still a powerful comic book, especially for people who can see themselves in Tommy. (Reading it again, I had to blink back a few tears when the Beyonder describes Tommy as being "without true friends, except those he finds in the gaudy pages of these periodicals.") In my book, I argue that his depiction is "sympathetic," but I'm not sure that I would go as easy on Byrne now as I did then. Tommy certainly seems to be a nice enough kid, and it's true that he's abused by his classmates, misunderstood by his teachers, and neglected by his parents. At the same time, though, he's not the brightest kid for 13. He falls for his classmates trick to get his lunch money for a magazine that Tommy should have been able to find anywhere, and then he gets himself in trouble by reading it in school. Maybe this is a sign of Tommy's obsessive tendencies, but it certainly doesn't reflect well on comic book fans. In fact, I'd argue now that Tommy is portrayed much like stereotypical fans: immature (his actions seem to be more like someone who's closer to 8 than 13), obsessive, less than smart, and potentially dangerous. Near the end of the story, Byrne (through the Beyonder) tells Johnny (and us) that he's not responsible for Tommy lighting himself on fire. Certainly his self-absorbed parents and irresponsible neighbor are more at fault. The Beyonder explains that superheroes (and comic books)d on't make fans' lives one-dimensional and so empty that they light themselves on fire. Instead, comics and superheroes give fans an outlet, a way to live their lives vicariously through people they idolize. This may be a positive service that comic books provide, but that doesn't really say very much in support of the average comic book fan. So, I guess the bottom line is that the story holds up (I'm always impressed by the way Byrne is able to give so much life to secondary or even tertiary characters who will never appear again) but that my interpretation of the story doesn't. I guess I need to go back and re-write my book!

Although spoken in an attempt to console the Torch, The Beyonder's words are not entirely sympathetic or even appropriate. Essentially, the Beyonder consoles Storm by telling him that Hanson's attempts to live vicariously through him were what made his life worth living to him, and thus, Storm should not lament or feel responsible for his death. What lies in that message? Does it not lessen the life of Hanson to imply that he was happy only because he would sublimate his own identity to live through the exploits of a hero celebrity? There is an element of dehumanization implicit in his remarks: Tommy Hanson may be less than a human being for not living his own life, but at least he could be distracted from his troubles by reading of a hero actively living his own life. (You would think, too, that Storm would simply ask the omnipotent figure to resurrect the boy, but in comic books, resurrection is only for characters whose reappearance will sell issues. It is not a reward for minor human characters who serve as plot devices in single issues.).

Further, it seems a bit strange that Storm would not have to deal with the media consequences of such a death. Who cannot imagine such a tragedy finding itself onto the front page of the New York Post? Would it really be the place of a coroner to investigate the social and situational issues leading to the child's sad demise, or would that be the task of an investigative reporter, or better yet, a lawyer retained by his parents to sue the Fantastic Four (whose pockets are deep enough to justify such a lawsuit)? Why didn't this story linger for several issues, or perhaps a year, for Storm to deal with the consequences of his actions? And was such a tragic accident truly as unforeseeable as Johnny Storm's grief suggests? Certainly, if the Marvel Universe is anything like our own, then children injure themselves using certain products in an attempt to emulate television and cinema. This should not be a surprise to a hero who regularly visits outer space, fights aliens and monsters, and generally sees death and destruction on a rather frequent basis. After all, was it not eight years before this issue appeared that Saturday Night Live parodied cheap Halloween costumes and "a bag of oily rags and a lighter" sold as a "Johnny Human Torch" costume?

Here are the panels which feature the Beyonder's brief speech to Storm:

In the end, Storm revokes his promise to never become the Torch again, Joss is imprisoned, and everything is, for the most part, tidily resolved. Fantastic Four #285 certainly seems to be an issue that has lived on in the memory of its readers, as evidenced by Pustz's commentary and a handful of Usenet postings over the years. There is no true villain, unless you count fame itself, which is why it may be memorable.