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dr_hermes
05 July 2009 @ 10:34 pm
Wait, how does that work again?  
Figure this one out. It's a sequence from "The Return of Doctor Doom!" in THE FANTASTIC FOUR# 10, January 1963. Script by Stan Lee, art by Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers.



So. Alicia Masters is a talented sculptor (well, her father was the Puppet Master, so you can see how she grew up with the materials around her), despite the fact that she's blind. She touches people and things to get a sense of what they look like and carves statues that are quite accurate. So far, okay, not out of the limits of the possible and (by comic book standards, quite modest a claim).

Yet how does she create these little figurines of finks like Dr Doom, the Sub-Mariner, the Skrulls? The Fantastic Four had only met the Mole Man once at this point, certainly hadn't taken any photos of him.

(The statuettes are in great poses, by the way, very expressive of the subjects' personalities).

Did Ben talk her through the process? How long would that take? Weeks, months? ("Naw, honey, the Miracle Man's waist was slimmer...")

There's only one answer that makes sense to me. Despite the fact he had fingers as thick as cigars, with only three fingers and a thumb on each hand, Ben was actually the sculptor! He was using Alicia as a front, because he thought his artistic inclinations were too sissy for a guy in 1963...
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[info]terry_mccombs on July 6th, 2009 06:41 am (UTC)
Perhaps she met them when they came over for tea, or a meeting of the supervillain's Union at the Puppet Master's house?
[info]dr_hermes on July 6th, 2009 10:35 am (UTC)
Twenty years later, that would actually work in a Marvel comic, when everyone knew everyone else and had been over-exposed. One of the things I like best about the first year or so of Marvel was the "secret world" aspect, where the characters were on their own agendas and no one knew about them.
[info]davidkevin on July 6th, 2009 07:42 am (UTC)


Alicia got hit with the same piece of radioactive material as Matt Murdock and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, giving her extra-sensory powers?!?

More seriously, it was later retconned, I think, that it wasn't just or wasn't at all the Puppet Master's radioactive clay which enabled him to control the people he modeled, but some sort of psionic ability -- otherwise anyone with a supply of that clay would've been able to duplicate his control. In retrospect, both he and Alicia have low-power mutations: technically, they should have shown up on Cerebro during Professor Xavier's early scanning. On the mutated third hand, perhaps Cerebro was crude enough in those days, and their power levels low enough, that the Professor simply passed over them during scans without perceiving them.

It'd be interesting to ask Mr. Lee about it today, just to watch the process of him coming up with an answer.

In the meantime, the early dialog bothered me even back then. If Ben was so sensitive about what he had become, and Thing was his pejorative term for what he saw in the mirror, why would his best friend call him that?

In short, if Ben was a "thing", Reed was a "dick".

[info]morienos on July 6th, 2009 07:45 am (UTC)
Perhaps she was the comic book bicycle, and had had a fling with all the aforementioned villains, and her father eventually had to blank her mind with his magical mud. Possibly making her blind.

After all erasing all the visual memories of making out with Moleman behind the bike sheds would take wonderbleach
[info]dr_hermes on July 6th, 2009 10:40 am (UTC)
Reed also called Johnny "Torch" frequently, although Sue always called her brother by name. I wonder if Stan gave this any conscious thought, or just batted out the dialogue by instinct. Gradually, everyone started calling Ben by his name rather than as "Thing." (It does seem insensitive, but after all the guy himself kept saying he wasn't Ben Grimm anymore, just a Thing.
Reed should have had enough awareness to insist on using "Ben" anyway.)
[info]morienos on July 6th, 2009 03:21 pm (UTC)
Scientists aren't universally famed for their emotional depth. After all lots of people called him Stretch, and not for example "Isn't she too young for you"