Friday, February 18, 2005

I'm back. Sorry. It took me a couple of days to take care of some business that suddenly came up involving an alias of mine, Jeff Gannon. I think it's finally blown over and I can get back to:

The Threefold Mission Of SUPERFRANKENSTEIN

1) To laugh at the same comics everyone else has been ridiculing for 45 years.

2) To find ways to mention that Bush cronies, religious fundamentalists and corporate vampires still outrage me, in case you assume my opinions changed since yesterday.

3) To try to seem contemporary--like when your Dad praises "the hip-hop music"--by linking to some creepy website five minutes before you would have found it on your own.

So... apropos of 1), yesterday I found myself bantering with Mark Waid about Jack Kirby's cover of FANTASTIC FOUR #1:

FF_01
This is one of the three most reprinted, swiped, traced and homaged covers in history. To comics fans, it's as familiar as Dave Barry's next punchline. So I practically got chest pains when Waid noticed something that I'd never seen, or heard mentioned, before. Hitting the very dregs of our decades-long conversation. we got down to Reed Richards' word balloon:
IT'LL TAKE MORE THAN ROPES TO KEEP MISTER FANTASTIC OUT OF ACTION!
And Waid said:
So... did the monster tie him up?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Corporate vampires outrage me too. Except for Angel and Spike.

Tom Bondurant said...

Bob Dole doesn't have a problem with Reed Richards.

Bob Dole is also above making a cheap Reed Richards/Viagra joke. Because that's the kind of guy Bob Dole is.

It's bad enough that Bob Dole is making cheap third-person jokes...

Yours,

Bob Dole

Franklin said...

Never mind the ropes. How is turning invisible (at any speed) going to help?

Jason said...

Dear Superfrankenstein,

Any Fantastic Four fan would know that in issue 24 of Fantastic Four Volume 1, page 10, panels 3-6 we see a retcon (or, a “redaction” for the English grads) of said “mistake”. A TRUE fan knows that Dr. Doom, in one of his ingenious plots to capture and/or kill the Fantastic Four used his Ultrasonified Space Bender (or, time machine for the laymen) and went back to the fateful day when the Fantastic Four first joined together to face the evils of Monster Isle and the dreaded Moleman.

Dr. Doom’s plan was to actually tie up Mr. Fantastic so that he could not fight the giant monster. The Fantastic Four might be able to turn away the beast but the Not-So-Fantastic Three? I doubt it. And so did Dr. Doom.

What Dr. Doom did not know was that it would indeed take more than ropes to stop Mr. Fantastic, and his plan was foiled. So why wasn’t this in issue 1, you ask? Because realizing the utter folly of his plan, Dr. Doom used his Ultrasonified Space Bender in order to go back and stop himself from using the ropes to tie up Mr. Fantastic in an attempt to ward off any necessary embarrassment. The cover represents an alternate reality, one that is realized 23 issues later, thus showing the genius of Stan Lee.

So, before you or this Mr. Waid fellow start going around and user your rubber stamp to label perfectly explainable covers as “silly” or “illogical” you should consult a true Fantastic Four historian such as myself or my buddy, Dr. Hax0r, who posts at the Fantastic Four fan site.

Mr. Waid has again proved his incompetence and has once again showed the world why Jemas was right in pulling him off of Fantastic Four.

Jason Rodriguez – FF Fan Site Handler Mr. L33t

Stang said...

That wasn't Dr. Doom, technically. It was Rama Tut, the European-looking Egyptian Pharoah from the past who might be the future Dr. Doom.

So he's kind of a Bob Dole figure.