Adding to the Fantastic Four Mythos?

The core mythos of the Fantastic Four comics, launched in 1961 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, is that a family goes into space, gets turned into monsters by cosmic radiation, and decide to make themselves into a new sort of superheroes. They don’t have secret identities (at first they didn’t even have special costumes, but fans insisted); in fact, they’re celebrities. And they take on the biggest threats to Earth.

Family was key to the mythos: an arrogant scientist, his best friend, his fiancée, and her kid brother. As the crew of a space mission, an extended family made no sense. As a team stuck together and sticking together through one galactic crisis after another, it had deep meaning.

Earlier this year an alleged synopsis of the movie leaked and was then denied:

“The Fantastic Four” will tell the story of two very young friends, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm. After an event transforms the boys, they find themselves empowered with bizarre new abilities. Reed becomes a scientific genius who can stretch, twist and re-shape his body to inhuman proportions. Ben becomes a monstrous, craggy humanoid with orange, rock-like skin and super strength. However, the two end up being owned by the government and used as weapons. But after they mature, two others with powers come into the picture – Sue Storm “The Invisible Girl” and Johnny Storm “The Human Torch.”

In other words, the four principals weren’t a family first and superheroes second. That would be a big change. But instead of talking about that, a significant number of fans got upset only about the concurrent casting news: that the actor expected to play the Human Torch was Michael B. Jordan, a young black man.

That talk continued today as the studio confirmed Jordan’s casting and revealed more information, including Kate Mara as Sue Storm. Jamie Bell, who became a star in Billy Elliot, has been tapped for Ben Grimm, the Thing. I can’t really see that, and it’s impossible to imagine someone better for that role (as Kirby originally designed the Thing) than Michael Chiklis in the last two movies. But Bell can produce Grimm’s working-class, Yancy Street outlook, and we probably won’t see his body anyway—we’ll see a CGI, motion-captured overlay.

But again, a significant slice of people complained about Jordan being black. Some of those folks tried to justify themselves by saying that Johnny and Sue are supposed to be siblings, yet Jordan is black and Mara white. As artist Cameron Stewart responded on Twitter, “Interracial siblings are apparently much much harder to explain and accept than stretchy limbs, invisibility, burning skin and a rock man”. Other complainers simply repeated their gripe that today’s moviemakers were changing a detail of the story they liked when they were twelve simply to be nice to people of color.

I can see one argument that Johnny Storm’s character has to be white as Kirby originally drew him. In the early comics Lee wrote Johnny as a hothead with a big ego and dangerous powers. Only a good-looking blond kid could get away with that behavior in 1961 and become a celebrity. Even now, young black men are subject to dangerous stereotyping. So that argument for casting Johnny as white, male, and handsome rests on a racist society.

But to see Johnny Storm’s character or story requiring him to be black in this age depends on seeing his skin color and ethnic background as inherent to his character—more than being a young and handsome hothead, more than his relations with other team members. Furthermore, most of the criticism has focused on that casting instead of on the much bigger changes to the larger mythos. It’s hard to see it as not just resting on but perpetuating a racist society.

Weekly Robin Commentary Track

“Okay, this is a good action scene. But you know what I think it needs more of? Puns.”

“=tt=”

“Like, right there Robin could say, ‘You’re toe-tally stuck!’”

“You’re not serious.”

“That’s the point—throw the mooks off. ‘You can’t fire me—I quit!’ ‘Don’t you know little kids shouldn’t smoke?’”

“That’s the most ridicu—”

“‘Tanks for the lift!’”

“Grayson!”

“All right, all right…‘Feeling too hot? Should’ve worn a sweater vest.’”

“That’s it. I’m leaving.”


(Panels from Batman & Robin, vol. 1, #16, composed by Cameron Stewart from a script by Grant Morrison.)

Grant Morrison Talks Method

I caught a glimpse of Grant Morrison’s current comics scripting method over a year ago when artist Cameron Stewart told me:

Grant's scripts have full page and panel breakdowns, but the dialogue is either very rough or not included. Most of his dialogue is written after the artwork is completed.

That question came up because of an error in Batman and Robin, #7. On looking at Stewart’s panels, Morrison felt the dialogue would flow best if one panel was flopped, moving the Caped Crusader from left to right. Stewart delivered the change, but an older file went to the letterer, and a confusing panel appeared in the magazine.

In a recent interview at Graphic Novel Reporter, Morrison described how his approach evolved over years of working for different companies and with different people: 

I used to do a film script and all the dialogue complete, but then as I started handing in scripts with preliminary guide dialogue, but all of the panel descriptions in place, all the visual information was there, but the dialogue was just purely to let the artist know where the beats came or who was talking first. And once I got the art back, I would then kind of tailor the writing to suit the artwork, and it allowed me to take out a lot of excess, which was good—because once you saw the artist was doing the acting and the nuances of expression really well, you could often drop a lot of the expository stuff. So it allowed me to streamline the process.

And, like I say, in this particular period where I'm doing three Batman books simultaneously, which thank goodness is almost over (laughs), I've been doing the same thing, but this time it's been going in six and eight pages at a time sometimes, so I'm seeing chunks of each issue coming in all the time. . . .

Well, the story is already there as a kind of structure in my head, and it comes into view. I always compare the way I do this stuff to a photograph developing. I kind of know what the photograph is going to be, but as it develops, I start to notice things about it that I hadn't seen before and only by the very end, when I put the last line on it, I get what exactly it's been about (laughs). So it tends to work with that sort of weird way, the work comes into focus for me. It's almost like bringing it into the light.

This back-and-forth is possible now, especially for a writer who lives in Scotland and California, because of digitized art and nearly instantaneous communication. Even so, it must be a challenge to manage, and there have been mistakes, timing problems, and perhaps some grumpiness from other creators who’ve had to fit their storytelling into Morrison’s complex and slowly developing narrative.

An American Batman in London

This weekly Robin has no Robin per se, but it’s all about the original Robin, Dick Grayson, as Batman.

Cameron Stewart, artist for recent issues of Batman and Robin, kindly posted some of his layouts on his blog. Stewart wrote:

Note some of the differences between the layouts and the final printed artwork in the traffic scene. This was my first attempt at it, and I did some revisions to punch it up for the final.

So I’m noting. The major difference comes on page 4 of the magazine, as Batman makes his way through London traffic on Westminster Bridge.

Here is Stewart’s sketch for much of that page. The top panel in its original form shows the Big Ben Tower at the left; that has disappeared from the final version below, probably because it was on the wrong end of the bridge. Omitting that detail allows for a closer image of Batman swinging up onto the bridge from a river boat. We see the biggest change in the second panel. The sketch version shows Batman bouncing from vehicle to vehicle until he lands on a van headed in the right direction. Multiple images of the same character in one panel is one way comics artists have discovered to show fast action over a short span.

In the version below, Batman does the same acrobatics, but Stewart has broken each step into its own smaller panel. I find the action in the original to be more clear, especially on the right side, where below there are suddenly two Batmans in one panel and the more prominent is the one we should read second. (Stewart inserts a visual clue that the rear Batman comes first by having his cape overlap into the previous panel, but that’s somewhat lost in the dark border.)

That said, a black and white sketch is naturally going to be clearer visually than a color version with the usual Gotham/London gray laid over the line art. I doubt the original layout would have been as successful in color. The last of these panels shows another change: Stewart brings us closer to Batman’s face, showing us his characteristic grim determination as he speaks by radio to his sidekick for the day.

Stewart’s second batch of page layouts contains a panel from the same issue in which two characters confront each other. As printed, this conversation has become a bit confused, ending with the new Batwoman saying, “I’m the new Batman.” Stewart explains:

As you can see, the page was laid out with the characters oriented consistently from left to right, but after I’d completed the final artwork I was asked to reverse panel 3 because the dialogue (which is written after the art is completed) required Batwoman to be on the left. I did make the change [electronically] but somewhere along the way the original art file was used by mistake, and thousands of readers scratched their head in puzzlement.