Father's Day has come and gone--but, from a comics perspective, we shouldn't forget to give a nod to Reed Richards, now blessed with two children and hopefully imparting to them a little wisdom from past mistakes. One of my favorite such moments comes from a story from 2002, where Reed has hired a PR firm to revitalize the FF's image--a decision which strikes his three partners as a bit out of character for someone who previously has shown little to no interest in the group's celebrity status.
By week's end, Mr. Shertzer has come up with a viable advertising campaign, including how to handle their comic book. But as he shares his thoughts with the book's creative people, he's unaware that there's an eavesdropper present--and it leads to one of my most memorable Reed moments ever.
Happy belated Father's Day, all.
Not to dampen the sentiment of this scene, but Reed's rationale doesn't really add up on a few points. Can you spot them?
11 comments:
By making them celebrities he could be forgiven for, well, making them celebrities?
I take it this is the bit you're saying doesn't add up?
I think the point he's making is that by making them celebrities without secret identities, they became more acceptable to the public, without the fear aspect (except, perhaps, in The Thing's case) that the more secretive X-Men suffered from. He gave them fame, adulation, money (from merchandise, etc.), which he hoped would compensate them in some way for their lives no longer really being their own.
One could even argue there's a difference between being famous and being a celebrity. Reed Richards seems to think so, but it's possible that Comicsfan disagrees & that this is what he's thinking about when he says Reed's argument doesn't add up.
I hate the words being in lower-case. Thankfully that idea didn't last long!
I agree, CJ - the lower case (upper & lower case to be precise) gave the pages a UK 'nursery' comic appearance. I suspect the idea behind it was to emulate the text of a book and thereby bestow a more 'literary' feel, but it failed miserably.
dangermash, after coming across this scene I was trying to reconcile Reed's explanation with the time and circumstances of some of the things he mentions. For instance, Reed gives himself the name of Mr. Fantastic almost immediately following their crash landing, once he and his group have discovered their new powers and decided on how they'll use them in the future. That means that he hatched this plan of his before leaving the crash site, without even knowing how they would all be received by the general public or the authorities, good intentions notwithstanding. Wouldn't it be prudent to take the temperature of those they'd reveal their condition to first before going ahead with this kind of plan? Further, if his guilt was truly so unbearable, wouldn't his first thought have been to isolate the four of them and work on curing their conditions, instead of taking the kind of gamble he dreamed up for their future?
There's also the fact that it was Sue who conceived and designed their costumes as a surprise for all of them, including Reed--and each of them thought of their own names the day of the crash, though writer Mark Waid gets a pass by implying that Reed simply encouraged them to own them in public.
I was completely off the mark then!
They all sound like obvious inconsistencies once they've been pointed out.. Well observed Comucsfan.
But this sort of retroactive 'expanding' goes on all the time in comics, CF. The original origin was only interested in giving a neat, tidy and quick explanation of how they got their 'codenames', it wasn't interested in exploring psychological motivations. It could be argued that Reed, being a genius (despite flying into space with inadequate shielding), instantly anticipated how things were going to pan out, and it was this that informed his decisions. A similar thing happened with Iron Man; at the end of TOS #39, Tony Stark walks off into the jungle and we next see him in TOS #40, with no mention of James Rhodes. Years later however, Stark's first meeting with Rhodes was retroactively shoehorned in between the two issues. In the case of the FF, I think we're supposed to assume that the origin we're familiar with is a condensed telling, with a lot of introspective examination which readers aren't witness to. That would allow Reed's assessment of how the four's new life would likely affect them to have been done 'off-camera', and therefore alleviate somewhat your difficulties with the later revelations of Reed's motivations. I think, looked at in that way, the original origin and later details are not necessarily incompatible. At least not if we allow for a little artistic license and the development of storytelling technique.
I think that's a very big reach to make, Kid, even when it concerns one whose power is stretching. :) Yes, Reed was something of a genius at the time (I use the word "something" because, as you allude to, the brilliant scientist Reed evolved into would have thoroughly covered his bases on the rocket's shielding instead of gambling with the lives of his three friends)--but no one could see into the future and envision with even the slightest amount of certainty that the four of them could lead the lives of celebrities if they were given the right amount of handling. With the shock of their transformations and their future completely uncertain, it would have been absurd for a guilt-ridden Reed to have made those kinds of plans on the spot. Their situation was very different from the example you give of Stark and Rhodey, whose meeting (and subsequent adventure) fit nicely into Iron Man's origin and involved no decision-making that affected either of them except for laying the groundwork for a job offer (which Rhodey would eventually take Stark up on).
You're correct, however, in describing Waid's scene as retroactive, and I did actually appreciate the artistic license that he exercised. I'd only add that it also tiptoes into revisionist territory, a different concept altogether.
Sounds like Mark Waid BS to me. Coming up with a condescending reason as to why Reed was/is a jerk because doing good and being a hero isn't enough motivation. I guess Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were wrong.
Definitely revisionist to a large degree, CF, but sometimes it's necessary in order to tell interesting stories. As for being a very big reach, well, it is just a comic and I gave up expecting comics to be treated like gospel a very long time ago. (And did you see what John Byrne did to The Hulk and Spider-Man origins?) Also, when I first read this story, I assumed that Reed was being a little selective in his memory in order to alleviate his guilt over being responsible for the group's 'accident'. In other words, he was unconsciously remembering things the way he wanted to remember them, rather than the precise way in which they actually happened. So from that point of view, it still made for an interesting story and revealed something about Reed's character at the same time.
I'd also suggest that revisionist tampering has been going on from the days of Superman's early appearances. First, he came to Earth as a baby, later it was as a toddler; he had no Superboy career, then he did have, he couldn't fly and a bursting shell could penetrate his skin, then - well, you know the rest. Nothing surprises me anymore when it comes to writers squeezing an idea for a good story (and sometimes a bad one) into a comic character's (or group's) early history.
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