Popular Culture Review
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flew, even if they had to cheat by vaulting or floating on bubbles o f
conjured forces or riding in a hovercraft. So it was a flying ring. By
the time I wore it again on that Berkeley hill I knew differently.
Invisibility was what every superhero really had in common. After
all, you'd ever seen one?
It is, o f course, a rhetorical question since Ebdus and his friend Mingus Rule have both
donned the costume o f Aeroman— their own secret superhero— and “battled" crime (with
varying degrees o f success and failure). And it is Ebdus’s use o f invisibility that allows
him to help his friend and right a terrible wrong. Or is it? Perhaps it is the power o f
narrative to override reality and present an alternative ending in the place o f the actual.
17 Marvel Comics was no different. Timely Inc., which was the publishing company, had
been publishing comic books filled with monster stories and science fiction tales (as well
as westerns and romance stories). Distribution for Timely’s line was through DC Comics,
who only allowed Timely eight titles per month. Stan Lee tells us that the germ for the
comic The Fantastic Four, comes from two parallel drives: a desire to compete for the
superhero dollar (especially after the success o f DC’s The Justice League o f America
series did so well), and to create a superhero comic “such as comicdom had never know’’
(Lee, Origins o f Marvel Comics 17). And part o f the mythology that Stan created was
that he purposefully wanted to create characters who did not have secrete identities or
wore superhero costumes— and indeed in the first few editions o f Fantastic Four the
heroes “dressed like real people" (17). But as Greg Theakston argues in Tales to Astonish
by Ronin Ro, the lack o f a costumed hero may have been a result o f Marvel wanting to
keep “their superhero line looking as much like their horror l i ne. . . . Hence, you get the
Fantastic Four in the first two issues without costumes” (87). And even when they did put
the Fantastic Four into costumes, the cover also featured “yet another slightly misleading
monster" (87). The point is that it was more a matter o f practicality than “artistic
expression" that brought about these changes in the normal superhero story or plot. That
is not to say that Stan Lee and Marvel did not exploit these differences as much as they
could (allowing them to become bigger than DC). The Fantastic Four, however, was an
entity unto itself and didn’t really match up with the idea o f DC’s Justice League where
various superheroes joined together to become greater than their individual parts. To
rectify this, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created The Avengers. Oh, what a group: Thor, IronMan, Ant-Man and the Wasp and the Hulk brought together by accident (and because
The Fantastic Four were “wrapped up in another case” [Son o f Origins 92]), they decide
to team up and become one of. to use Stan Lee’s word s: “The Greatest Super-hero teams
o f All Time” (Son o / 107). Interestingly, the Hulk seems pretty sentient here, remarking:
*Tm sick o f bein’ hunted and hounded. I’d rather be with you that against you. So
whether you like it or not I’m joining t h e . . . t h e . . . Hey! What are you calling
yourselves?” (107). Upon reading this, I am reminded o f the line in Lethem’s The
Fortress o f Solitude, where he writes: “The Incredible Hulk, if you followed him closely
over time, lost the use o f pronouns” (65).
Works Cited
Bimbaum, Robert. “Bimbaum v Jonathan Lethem.” The Morning News. http://www
.themomingnews.org/archives/bimbaum_v/jonathan_lethem.php
Chabon, Michael. Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures o f the Escapist,
Vol 1. & Vol 2. Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Books, 2004.