INTRODUCTION - "I WANTED US TO BE A FAMILY ... IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?"The most remarkable aspect of the work by Mark Millar that's been completed and collected since "Civil War" in 2006 is how uncharacteristically and unambiguously moral it is. For in "1985", "Fantastic Four", "Old Man Logan" and "Ultimate Avengers", the explanation for the presence of good and evil in the superhero world is repeatedly, if not exhaustively, rooted in one simple factor; good and effective parenting or its absence, either through misfortune or abuse. Time and time again, Miller's antagonists are the victims of disastrous relationships with their parents. "Spider-Bitch" in "Old Man Logan" is abandoned by her father Hawkeye when just three months old, and grows up to become a murderous wanna-be super-crimelord, while the inbred and monstrous children of the insane Bruce Banner murder Wolverine's own family in his absence. Clyde Wyncham in "1985", already scarred by his father's early death, is beaten by his mother into brain-damaged silence when his mutant powers emerge. And the apparently-psychotic Red Skull in "Ultimate Avengers" is taken by the government from his mother after the apparent death of his father Captain America, and brought up as little more than a laboratory rat in an isolated government institution, a vile business which makes his last words before his execution, explaining his motive for stealing the reality-altering cosmic cube, all the more affecting;
"I wanted my father to come home from the war and marry my mother. I wanted us to be a family. I wanted us to have a different life. Be something better ... Is that really too much to ask? To be happy for once?" (UA 6:22:1&2)
Even in "Kick-Ass", so often criticised for it's supposed glorification of meaningless and exploitative violence, the action is rooted and resolved in a straight-forward correlation between family circumstances and the choices made by the children so affected. Dave Lizewski, having lost his secure grounding in a traditional nuclear family upon the untimely death of his mother, seeks meaning for his life in acting out the fantasies of superhero comic books in the identity of "Kick Ass". Yet Dave has his grieving father to love him, and his actions as "Kick-Ass" are never as morally compromised as Chris Genovese, who becomes the villainous Red Mist in a desperate attempt to win some affirmation from his unloving mobster father, or Mindy McCready, who's existence as the 11 year old criminal-executing "Hit Girl" is entirely imposed upon her by the deranged and inadequate Big Daddy. (In fact, even given the desensitised and apathetic times we live in, the grounding of Hit Girl's behaviour in obvious abuse gives Millar's comic book the moral foundation to avoid the worst of both conservative and politically-correct criticism. After all, "Kick-Ass" is obviously a satire in part on the relationship between immorality and upbringing, and no matter how many bad guys Mindy chops up, only a moron could mistake her childhood for anything other the sickest kind of exploitation. Nobody's going to mistake Hit-Girl for a role model unless they see Big Daddy as a model father, and that's simply not possible for anybody other than the highly confused where the comic book at least is concerned.)
Indeed, it's instructive as an exercise to draw up a simple cause-and-effect explanation for how the characters in these tales behave. Toby, for example, is in many ways the least damaged of all of them, and he possesses not only a mother, but a father who regularly visits him. Dave has lost his mother, yet his relationship with his father is a loving one; he's definitely not experiencing a normal childhood, but within the bounds of the superhero narrative, he means well and he even achieves a measure of good too. We never even hear of Chris's mother, but his father's influence is baleful . Mindy has been denied access to her mother and raised in the most twisted fashion by her father, and Clyde is again without one parent and beaten into permanent brain-damage by the other. The message seems clear, though it's so clear and straight-forward that there can hardly be any suggestion that it's been placed in these stories consciously, for any such thing would very odd where Mr Millar's work is concerned. Yes, the influence of poor or absent parents has appeared in Millar's work before, but never as a consistent principle underlying a string of major works. Amateur psychologists might like to dwell on Mr Millar's statements that "1985" was inspired by his own childhood, where he lost his much-loved mother to a cruelly early death, but that wouldn't explain how very central parenting is to all of these books during this specific period of time. After all, Millar has always refuted the charge that he deliberately constructs his stories to deliver a particular message, and, accordingly, there's no suggestion on my part that there's a conscious campaign for the two-parent nuclear family going on in his work. Indeed, the very idea would be absurd, for Mr Millar, after all, doesn't do "messages";
"No, I think whenever you try and write something with a message, it becomes really laborious and unpleasant to read ... So wherever stories come from, I just let them come out, and if a subtext emerges, it's entirely by accident." ("Writers On Comics Scriptwriting 2, 2004)
Yet, the importance to a child who's grown up with two loving parents of having that marriage continue intact throughout their adolescence is a recurrent issue in this stage of Millar's career. And if the examples mentioned above show the challenges to a child of losing a parent, and the horrors of being a victim of an abusive parent or organisation acting in loco parentis, then the "Fantastic Four" is a comic book about what happens when fate and love conspire happily to lend the innocent child the support of both mother and father.
It is, if you like, "The Broons" with costumes and Kirby krackles, and all the more magical a comic book for that.
THE FANTASTIC FOUR # 554: THE FAMILY THAT SWALLOWED THE WORLD WITH KINDNESS: - THE SUPERHERO AS LOVING PARENT
"The interesting thing about Swamp Thing, and so - which were in places quite scary and quite horrible - is I remember a friend of mine saying to me, "Oh, I wonder if you'll, now that you've had a baby, you'll go all Ian McEwan." I don't know if you're familiar with Ian McEwan - his work used to be very, very harsh, and then he had a baby, and he went quite gentle. "So I wonder if that will be happen to you, if you'll lose your edge." I was, "Oh my God, no." So I think I purposefully went the other way .... I think since then, maybe subconsciously, I've always been aware of, "Don't go soft." I probably push it a little too much sometimes, so that I don't seem as I've gone soft." (Mark Millar interviewed by Keith Phipps, 2010, http://www.avclub.com/articles/mark-millar,40126/)
It should have come as no surprise to anybody involved in the Mark Millar/Bryan Hitch "Fantastic Four" project that it wasn't the overwhelmingly commercial success that so many believed it would be. But if ever a comic book had apparently been designed to run contrary to the expectations of the regular reader of cape'n'costumes comic books, then this was it. For the typical post-Sixties superhero narrative has nearly always involved the struggles of a costumed protagonist in conflict with the everyday world as much as with any villainous and costumed nemesis. Whether it's the business of hiding their identity from society, or finding a refuge amongst similarly atomised individuals in some super-team; whether it's acting as an alienated vigilante dealing out violent "justice" or simply revelling in their physical advantages which mark them out from the conformist world, the superhero is now predominantly a figure which can be associated with, and appreciated by, outsiders. Yet Mark Millar's Fantastic Four is just the opposite to all of this. There are no outsiders to identify with in this tale, heroic or otherwise. Everybody belongs in his take on the world of the Richards family, and nobody there is excluded for being young or old, super-powered or just plain odd; no-one has to hide their true nature or struggle for acceptance at all as long as they're doing the best they can in the circumstances they're in. And so this is a kind and community-minded version of the Marvel Universe, where only the brutish, ignorant or just plain evil choose not to be part of the Fantastic Four's extended family. In essence, being in some way a member of the Richard's clan is something a citizen of the MU has to actively opt out of rather than strive to achieve.
Indeed, Millar's FF soon sets off absorbing everyone they meet as a member of that family network, regardless of whether they're apparently friend or foe, or indeed whether the Richards have ever met them at all beforehand. The team of world-conquering super-villains from the future who've travelled back to the present to steal the world from its current inhabitants? They're soon overcome, by wisdom and kindness, forgiven despite their torture of Johnny Storm and Dr Doom, and accepted as friends and allies. After all, their world had been ruined by our abuse of the eco-sphere today: they're "our" children and it's fitting that their "parents" from the past should put things right without rancour. (And it's even tellingly revealed at the conflict's end that the leader of this team of would be world-conquerors actually is one of the Fantastic Four herself, namely a future version of the Invisible Woman. Even the FF's villains here are on occasion members of the Fantastic Four!) Ben Grimm's new fiancee, Debbie Green, and Franklin and Valeria's new nanny, Mrs Deneuve? Immediately and lovingly taken in without hesitation as one of the family. Indeed, pretty much everybody is made welcome by Millar's FF. It certainly seems as if all the superheroes of the world are immediately granted membership of the Richard's extended clan simply by pulling on a costume and being willing to do good, as we see later on in the run at the funeral of the Sue Richards from the future, where the final oration by her counterpart from 2008 contains the following;
"This is obviously a speech I never intended to make. But that's the thing about being in a family. You never know what to expect. Personally I'm pleased to see so many old faces here, and touched to see all the new ones too." (FF: 561/2)
Now you or I might consider it something of a impertinence to turn up in costume to the funeral of a woman you don't know simply because you and she share the title of "super-hero". But not Sue Richards. To her, everyone who stands with her family is "family", and she doesn't even seem to care in which relation of intimacy they stand to her. (It's only a surprise not to see Alicia Masters, Willie Lumpkin and a host of other "typical" and familiar folks at the ceremony too, but then, if Mr Millar doesn't do messages, he doesn't do slavish continuity references either when a eye-catching spectacle of super-heroes can be splashed over two pages instead.)
And so, taken all-in-all, Millar's Fantastic Four is a remarkably touching and socially-progressive, if rather sweetly naive, sentiment for a man so often decried as irresponsible and uncaring. In many ways, his Fantastic Four is the closest thing since "The Superman Adventures" to an accurate depiction of what Millar has publicly declared his political and religious beliefs to be. As a "liberal" and a practising Catholic, it's quite appropriate that Mark Millar's Fantastic Four should be concerned with stable and responsible families, with traditional western norms and, most relevantly, a committed situational explanation of human evil. People placed in difficult and challenging environments in these stories often make bad and selfish choices, whether they're trapped on an environmentally collapsing future-Earth or living in an alien-controlled Scottish village where they're offered immortality in return for their children's lives. Yet transport the desperate hordes from the future into the empty sustainability of Nu-Earth, for example, and they immediately become responsible adults, and friends of the Fantastic Four too. (No such a deal is available for the villagers who sacrificed their children to the monster Korgo. But then, killing the most vulnerable member of the family unit would indeed be the ultimate sin of this period in Millar's world, and the only one which apparently places the sinners involved beyond the pale. As, of course, it would in so many ways do in our Korgo-free universe too.)
All of which is, when considered in relation to both the modern-age superhero tale and Mr Millar's previous work, rather benignly perverse. For rather than looking at society through the eyes of the outsider, of the innocent or the disaffected, here the gaze we're captured by is a grown-up one. And every single sympathetic character is either a responsible adult, a youngster training to be one with a good heart, or an uncommonly wise and exceptionally child.
And what a conceptual nightmare this must have been for a great number of the adolescently-minded superhero fans, let alone some of their more convention brethren. (I belong to the first group, actually, so I don't mean that comment in a sniffy com-crit way. My expectations were what caused me to miss this FF's virtues the first time around.) For this isn't a classic superhero story at all. It's a damn good run of stories, but it isn't that. Oh, super-people get punched and monsters get stomped, but that's all spectacle anchoring a far less conventional message than might at first be expected by the burning men and invisible women. For here is depicted an environment free of despair and angst and alienation, where there's no need for embittered and desperate costumes to knock seven bells out of each other, where if they'd just talk to each other and trust one another then everything would be alright. It's a world where your parents are nearly always correct (*1) and where they always really do love you, where rebellion is a waste of time because the family is so utterly just that they'll just love you back to a willing conformity anyway, and where the only dedicated non-conformists for the alienated to root for are brutal bigots on the streets of New York, and Victor Von Doom of course. Yet even Victor von Doom himself doesn't want to destroy the Fantastic Four in these adventures. Rather, it's revealed that in his most secret-most heart of hearts, he wants to join them, to supplant Reed as Sue's husband and take his place as the leading, and most benevolent, superhero on the planet.
*1 - Unless they're worshippers of Korgo, of course.
Even Johnny Storm, the FF's in-house teenage occasional-rebel, is here reduced to a practical and moral idiot, a harmless gum-chewer fixated on celebrity and sex, and, especially, celebrity sex. The Human Torch, as cast by Millar, is the rebel without a brain but with a dully good heart and a functioning set of genitalia too, a rebel always in need of his families' shelter and support, a rebel who regularly requires the aid of his sister and her husband and his best friend to put him back onto the path of the family tradition. (There aren't even any "Torch versus Thing" bust-ups in this run! Heresy!) Worse still for those who like their wish-fulfillment grim'n'gritty and disaffected, this Johnny Storm is quite content, as he should be, with the loving situation he finds himself in. He obviously adores his family and is willing to die for them, even if the mental plan which might join the "love" to the "sacrifice" often eludes him. He wouldn't leave the Baxter Building's extended family if he could. It's a fine place to be and he treasures it, just as he thoroughly enjoys his reality TV shows and nights in with beautiful models dressed as Storm and the Scarlet Witch. But as his sister Susan Richards declares;"Oh, God, I've just realised ... My little brother's Paris Hilton." (FF 554:8:4)
And because we see Johnny through the eyes of adults who don't share his enthusiasms for the prurient aspects of modern life, and because Johnny establishes his virtue by fighting with the grown-ups according to their ends and, ultimately, their means, it's impossible to see him as anything other than a rather irresponsible if well-meaning young man. He's no anti-hero, no outsider on the super-heroes journey, no Wolverine or even a Spider-Man, Peter Parker's quips being far more questioning of authority by their very existence than anything this Johnny could ever care to produce. For while Millar's Human Torch may aid and abet a known criminal all in the name of being able to continue to have sex with her, it's not part of any opposition to the state or an expression of any angst he feels at his role in life. He's not unhappy with the status quo. It's just that he likes having sex with her.
All of which may well continue to explain why the Fantastic Four never quite grabbed the imagination of the reading public as it ought to have done, for as we'll discuss, it's a splendidly involving and touching run, and that's not what the superhero tradition is anymore. But if "going soft", as Millar describes it in the quote at the head of this section, can be read as producing a happy and thoroughly middle-class view of the world, then "going soft" this book definitely is. It's certainly not what either the casual or the committed cynic would regard as edgy. Consequently, it's no wonder that this was all a sweetly difficult pill for many to swallow, with the typical element of contrariness we expect from Mark Millar's work existing here in the form of an unexpected and taboo-breaking form of optimism and inclusiveness. Where some readers complained about the sexual content, or the non-continuity takes on the character's personalities, the real truth is that these elements are only minor issues. What's perverse about Mark Millar's Fantastic Four is that it's a superhero book that has rejected so very much of the traditions of the modern-day superhero narrative. It's a superhero book that isn't really concerned with the business of superheroes at all. Instead, as has become Millar's method, familiar characters are recast in his scripts as Hollywood stars might be in blockbuster movies, placed into familiar and yet not identical roles while acting out different stories. And this particular movie isn't the one which was expected, for who would have foreseen that Mark Millar would write "The Family Which Through Love And Kindness Swallowed The Whole Marvel Universe And Made It Lovely"?
And it's that very lack of fidelity to established continuity that helps to make Millar's later Marvel work so very interesting. Because of all the major superhero writers of the modern-age, he is of course profoundly disengaged from the minutia of the comic-book past while still working on occasion on mainstream material. Instead, there's a little of Osamu Tezuka's approach to his characters in Millar's recent Marvel Comic's work. For if he needs an aging superhero to accompany, say, Old Man Wolverine across America in what's essentially a spaghetti western, well, what could be more appropriate and amusing than casting the classic loner superhero Hawkeye in the role? And if this Hawkeye behaves utterly out of character in abandoning his child practically at birth, well, so what? He's not the classic comic book character with an almost 50 year history where Mr Millar is concerned. Instead, he's a costume and a power and a role being re-cast in a distinct and separate property. And so it is with Johnny Storm too, who would never in all his years behave as he's shown here within continuity. Oh, Sue's little brother might have previously be torn with longing for the lovely, and bank-robbing, Psionics, but he wouldn't have been practising the making of babies with her on a bed lined with stolen bank notes while hiding her from the police. No, previously, he'd have stayed away from her and pined.
Yet "casting" Johnny Storm as this exceptionally immature and yet endearing man-child allows Millar to do an awful lot of things which continuity would deny him. For one thing, it allows Millar to indulge in his favorite trick of discussing aspects of modern youth culture which will associate his comics with, if not the "now", then the "day before just yesterday". (This Johnny is entranced by all the most shallow aspects of celebrity, and if Paris Hilton wasn't by 2008 the most cotemporary symbol of that, she was at least a well-known one which even the least media-engaged fan might recognise.) For another, it permits the writer to go wherever his tastes want to take him, or in short, allows him to have more fun than might otherwise be possible. And if that seems unacceptable to the traditionalist, and if the cry goes up that he ought to carry out his playful innovations in out-of-continuity books, or that he should draft convincing explanations for why these characters aren't quite ringing true, then a reasonable counter-argument might also include the fact that a comic-book considered "in continuity" adds tens of thousands of readers and dollars to its sales, in addition as the fact that Millar's work was very fine indeed.
Yet oddly enough, Mr Millar sometimes seems to forget that he's doing this very thing. There are times in interviews when he almost seems like an writer/director who forgets that an actor isn't in reality the character he's been cast to play. For example, Millar said the following about Johnny Storm's law-breaking tryst with Psionics;
"He likes this girl, but on one hand she robs banks, and on the other hand she's just so good in bed. [laughs] He's left with this classic Johnny dilemma of: does he bust her or does he continue a relationship with her?" (*2)
Of course, it's not a "classic Johnny dilemma", unless you define "Johnny" as the character he became in Millar's first issue, which isn't "classic" at all. (This wasn't even the Johnny Storm of Millar's work on the Ultimate Fantastic Four several years before.) No wonder so many superhero fans, a notoriously conservative breed, found that they couldn't get excited enough about this run, for though, as we said, it may have looked like familiar fare, it was something else
indeed. A superhero book that's not a superhero book, with a Fantastic Four that's not quite the Fantastic Four. Instead, Millar's FF was an unexpectedly touching tale about how decent people save the world every day through simply being as helpful, reasonable and loving as they can. It's about how women run the world and men do what they can when they're needed while not screwing up when they're not, and of how children learn to be themselves while flying high above isolated Scottish villages.
It's not about punching, or monsters, or a gritted-teeth brand of jeopardy, or the Marvel Universe at all, although all of those elements play a prominent role in the stories. It's about a good and competent family doing the right thing as best they can.
And considering how rare such an approach is in the superhero marketplace today, I'd suggest that Mr Millar's scripts for his Fantastic Four are hardly a mark of a man losing his "edge" or "going soft". After all, saying what a great deal of the audience don't care to hear, and doing so in a form guaranteed to alienate at least a number of committed readers, isn't a safe option at all.Or, to put it another way, when Millar and Hitch produced a holiday pastich of Norman Rockwell's painting "Freedom From Want" for a Christmas cover and wrote upon it "You have our word that nothing this lame happens in this issue", they weren't really suggesting that a happy, laughing family celebrating Christmas in that way was in any way "lame" at all. (*3)
Quite the contrary, of course.
*2 - From the interview by Sean Boyle at http://www.comicsbulletin.com/features/120286510850855.htm
To be continued in the near future with a look at FF # 554, the first in the Hitch/Millar run, where we'll take a closer look at Mr Hitch's work and some of the more contentious aspects of the book too. I hope I have your company there.
And a quick SOS if I may. If anybody knows how to contact the folks at Millarworld so I can activate my account with them, I'd be grateful. Their automated e-mails never reach my account, not even the spam box, and without receiving them, I can't contact them. Catch-22. It would be pleasant to occasionally have the option of contributing there. A little matter in this occasional sea of tears, and a mark of my technical ignorance too no doubt, but any advice would be appreciated!
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