NYU Press

Chapter Title: “Flame On!”: Nuclear Families, Unstable Molecules, and the Queer History of
The Fantastic Four

Book Title: The New Mutants

Book Subtitle: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics
Book Author(s): RAMZI FAWAZ
Published by: NYU Press. (2016)
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2 / “Flame On!”: Nuclear Families, Unstable
Molecules, and the Queer History
of The Fantastic Four

Few tales of teenage angst could compete with the experience of young
Johnny Storm as his body bursts into flame before his very eyes. Watch-
ing horrified as his three closest friends, among them his sister, miracu-
lously transform into a human plastic, an invisible trace, and a rock-like
behemoth, Johnny can only imagine they have become nothing short of
monsters. As a terrifying heat overtakes his body, Johnny’s horror at his
own violent transformation quickly evaporates into a newfound sense
of freedom: he can survive the flame. He can fly. Released to popular
acclaim in 1961, the inaugural issue of Marvel Comics’ The Fantastic Four
tells the story of four companions who attempt an unauthorized rocket
flight into space, hoping to outrace the communist menace. Their fateful
trip ends with their bodies bombarded by “cosmic rays” that would alter
their molecular structure, their skin absorbing substances once thought
alien to the touch. Ben Grimm’s rocky epidermis, Johnny Storm’s flam-
ing body, Sue Storm’s invisible silhouette, and Reed Richards’s physical
pliability were marvelous gifts and social burdens that collapsed objects
and bodies in decidedly abnormal ways. Now the four had been made as
deviant as the threat they had sought to contain.1
More than any previous figuration of the superhero, The Fantastic
Four dramatized a fantasy of bodily vulnerability to the forces of science
and to the social norms of national citizenship in the era of anticommu-
nism. The transformation of the team’s biology into “unstable molecules”
that mimicked the malleable plastics and synthetics of postwar material
science revealed that the interaction between the physical self and the

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 “flame on!” / 67

material world could produce nonnormative or “queer” effects. I use the

term nonnormative to describe those behaviors that mark the failure to
conform to the proper performance of gender and sexuality; this wider
designation folds within it distinctly queer modes of intimacy and affili-
ation, or ways of being in the world that thwart the assumed direction
of heterosexual relations. In the logic of cold war containment, those
who stepped outside the bounds of sexual and gender norms—including
homosexuals, people practicing premarital sex and nonmonogamy, and
gender outlaws—were understood as abnormal or queer, and hence lack-
ing the qualities associated with good citizenship.2 As David Serlin and
Robert McRuer have shown, this mark of sexual or gender perversion
implying failed citizenship commonly extended to the disabled, people
whose apparent distance from the “normal” human body was inter-
preted as a material expression of their inability to perform the proper
functions of able-bodied heterosexuality.3
The Fantastic Four’s powers played on this logic as a physical mark
upon the flesh that indicated their failure to live up to the sexual and
gender norms of cold war culture and, more broadly, their abjection
from proper humanity. Consequently the narrative’s central conceptual
conflict was not the split between a civilian and a superheroic identity,
as it had been in The Justice League of America (unlike most heroes, the
four claimed no secret identities) but between what the members of the
team felt or believed themselves to be and what their mutated bodies
suggested they actually were: something “more than just human.” By
rewriting the superhero as a figure that highlighted the impossibility of
suturing an unpredictable body (and identity) to the narrowly construed
social norms of cold war America, the series presaged and oriented itself
toward the radical political reappraisals of self-making that would take
place in the coming decade.
In The Fantastic Four between 1961 and 1967, the series’ first sixty
issues, writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby developed the foundational
attributes of the fantastic foursome and introduced more than a hundred
supporting characters, a cadre of fellow superheroes, villains, cosmic
beings, and human allies who collectively made up a growing “Marvel
Universe.” I frame The Fantastic Four as a popular fantasy that bridged
the gap between the ideological conservatism of 1950s anticommunism
and the emergent radical political sensibilities of the 1960s. It accom-
plished this by visually critiquing the relationship between sexual and
gender identity and cold war politics, namely McCarthyism’s powerful
political framing of the heterosexual nuclear family as a bulwark against

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68 / “flame on!”

communism.4 Against this worldview The Fantastic Four imaginatively

crafted a new kind of citizen capable of engaging cosmopolitan political
projects without an attachment to narratives of heterosexual normaliza-
tion and bodily regimentation. In so doing The Fantastic Four became
a visual repository of an array of nonnormative identities, affiliations,
and kinships that were gaining public visibility due to the politics of civil
rights, the New Left, and an emergent counterculture, movements that
resisted the political constraints placed on private life by the imperatives
of the cold war security state.
During the cold war the state increasingly sought to regulate pri-
vate life—particularly individuals’ sexual orientation, gender identity,
and intimate social relations—with the rationale that private conduct
was symptomatic of political loyalties. Government officials argued
that deviant forms of gender and sexual identity indicated a tendency
toward communist sympathies.5 This attitude was bolstered by the
popularization of psychoanalysis, and the rise of a postwar therapeutic
culture, as a medical practice that purported to identify nonnormative
sexual proclivities as expressions of underlying neurosis and expunge
them through sustained investigation of the “interior self” or individual
psychology. Psychoanalysis promised to cure neurotic psychosomatic
symptoms by helping the mind conform to the prevailing sexual and
gender norms of the time; in so doing it echoed the ideological thrust of
a variety of cutting-edge medical treatments—including plastic surgery,
hormone replacement therapy, and prosthetics—which sold people on
the idea that they might remold their physical body to comport with
their mental self-image.6
The most publicized expression of this will to align the psyche with
an ideal body was the case of Christine Jorgenson, a former U.S. naval
officer who, in 1952, was the first American to undergo sex-reassignment
surgery. Jorgenson’s public declaration of having transformed her for-
merly male body to comport with her female self-image was celebrated
as an act of unprecedented individual empowerment.7 In Jorgenson the
public saw proof of people’s capacity to use the tools of modern medicine
to remake themselves into the image of the ideally normal American. The
alignment of popular discourses of normalcy with institutions of politi-
cal and medical coercion that Jorgenson’s case exemplified produced a
cold war regime of normalization that enforced a prevailing set of ideals
about what a healthy and adjusted life (and body) should look like. That
well-adjusted life was overwhelmingly heterosexual, able-bodied, family-
oriented, upwardly mobile, and traditionally gendered.8 Jorgenson was

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 “flame on!” / 69

celebrated because medical technology had helped transform her into

a blond bombshell who embodied the ideals of postwar femininity and
because that femininity was “purchased” through a willful act of self-
making; however, when Americans realized that Jorgenson’s procedure
had not given her a female reproduction system, many were disgusted by
what they now perceived as an inauthentic performance of femaleness.
Jorgenson found herself trapped between a valorized practice of empow-
ered self-fashioning and the drive to conform to real or imagined sexual
and gender norms.
The Fantastic Four visually celebrated the transitional body and
depicted perceived “neurotic” or pathological social types who failed to
live up to unrealistic sexual and gender ideals as paragons of heroic non-
conformity. In so doing it linked existing critiques of the culture of con-
formity lobbied by liberal intellectuals throughout the postwar period to
the production of new kinds of citizenship grounded in difference and
abnormality that were gaining traction in the early to mid-1960s. It did
so in three ways. First, the comic book visually dislocated individual
psychology from the physical body by depicting the bodies of its heroes
as explicitly contradicting their self-image. By magnifying and widen-
ing the gap between the body’s radical (and often monstrous) capacity
for transformation and the psychic desire to live up to the impossible
social norms demanded of that body, The Fantastic Four dramatized
McRuer’s contention that “able-bodied identity and heterosexual iden-
tity are linked in their mutual impossibility and their mutual incompre-
hensibility—they are incomprehensible in that each is an identity that is
simultaneously the ground on which all identities supposedly rest and
an impressive achievement that is always deferred and thus never really
guaranteed.”9 The Fantastic Four’s superpowers were presented as a series
of chaotic material surfaces whose unpredictable effects destabilized
each of the characters’ sense of self or else encouraged them to reorient
their psychic lives toward new ways of being and acting in the world;
this included taking pleasure in the ways their powers unraveled their
previous gender and sexual expressions as well as their claims to a prop-
erly “human” body. In this sense, while the characters did not explicitly
embody Jorgenson’s sought-after transition from male to female, they
played upon the emergent transsexual or transgender conceit of the mis-
match between social performance and embodied realities to identify
the putatively white, middle-class, straight American body as riven by
sexual and gender conflict and, as a result, in a continual state of political
transition or flux.10

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70 / “flame on!”

Each of the four characters initially appeared as ideal social “types”

whose physical comportment reflected the common categories of identi-
fication associated with the 1950s nuclear family in the decade’s popular
culture: Reed Richards, the emotionless scientist and proud father fig-
ure; Sue Storm, his doting fiancée and surrogate mother to her sibling;
Johnny, the hip teenage rebel with a soft spot for pretty girls; and Ben
Grimm, the former fighter pilot with a temper to match his hypermascu-
line demeanor. Though initially depicted as monolithic types, the physi-
cal transformations the four undergo ultimately reveal the tenuousness
of these roles and the social anxieties attending their performance. As
each character’s superheroic identity took shape, they grew to embody
a host of 1960s countercultural figures—the left-wing intellectual, the
liberal feminist, the youth activist, and the maladjusted queer—all
nonconformist figures that flatly contradicted the teammates’ original
self-presentation as patriotic, traditionally gendered, family-oriented
anticommunists.
Second, the series explicitly identified those objects most associated
with cold war normalcy—consumer goods and the material innovations
of postwar science—as the wellspring of nonnormative and implicitly
queer desires. By recasting the question of both sexual and social iden-
tity as one of orientation toward particular bodies and objects, the series
conducted what Sara Ahmed has called a “queer phenomenology” of
postwar material culture. Ahmed claims, “If orientation is a matter of
how we reside in space, then sexual orientation might also be a mat-
ter . . . of how we inhabit spaces, and who or what we inhabit spaces
with.”11 The Fantastic Four’s physical proximity to the rockets, synthet-
ics, and technology of the atomic age—not to mention a host of alien,
mutant, and cyborg others—meant that they literally and figuratively
“inhabited space with” bodies, objects, and worlds that existed far out-
side the acceptable boundaries of cold war heterosexual family life. The
series envisioned what might happen when subjectivity and the mate-
rial world that helped shape its psychic contours were collapsed onto a
physical body, much as they had been in anticommunist logic. The result
was both a reorientation of the putatively “normal body” toward sites of
radical queer encounter, as well as an expansion of comic book forms’
visual capacity to depict such encounters as the wellspring of alternative
desires.
Even as it creatively engaged with the social norms and personality
types common to 1950s culture, as a distinctly 1960s cultural phenom-
enon The Fantastic Four deployed the developing cold war space race

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 “flame on!” / 71

and the Kennedy administration’s New Frontier ideology as fertile

ground for linking the social norms of the 1950s to the political life of
a revolutionary decade. Though it still retained the policy of contain-
ment, Kennedy’s New Frontier sought to reorient the cold war from a
normalizing project to a dynamic national mission to propel mankind
into a technologically advanced and democratic, space-age future. As
Lynn Spigel explains, “The Kennedy administration . . . adapted its own
political agenda to the new space-age metaphors that were based on the
tenets of progress, democracy, and national freedom. The forthright do-
gooder citizen to whom Kennedy appealed was given the promise of a
new beginning in abstract terms. . . . The ride into space proved to be
the most vivid concretization of such abstractions, promising a new-
found national allegiance through which we would not only diffuse the
Soviet threat but also shake ourselves out of the doldrums that 1950s
life had come to symbolize.”12 The Fantastic Four framed its reinvention
of the rigid social types of the 1950s within the utopian technological
imaginary of the New Frontier, depicting its seemingly domestic and
ordinary heroes as champions of American space exploration. Yet far
from making the four heroes paragons of cold war citizenship, their first
rocket flight into space would irrevocably transform them into biologi-
cal “freaks” and security threats to the government they had risked life
and limb to serve.13 Moreover it produced in them a desire to reorient
their commitments to all those who similarly stood outside the bounds
of humanity.
At the dawn of the 1960s, advances in rocket science and utopian
hopes for a space-age future made the potential for encounters with
extraterrestrial life appear genuinely possible; in 1961 Time magazine
described projects by the nation’s leading astrophysicists to transmit
radio waves into space in hopes of contacting intelligent life beyond
our solar system.14 If contact was a potential outcome of such endeav-
ors, The Fantastic Four suggested that the rigid social types of the 1950s
would merely extend the conservative worldview of the cold war into
an uncharted cosmos, negating possibilities for cosmopolitan cultural
exchange beyond planet Earth. Through the dramatic transformations
of its four central characters, the series sought to develop the affective
and intellectual faculties required to approach a world of fantastic and
unexpected encounters with life in the universe.
Third, the comic book contradicted the cold war ideal of the conflict-
free nuclear family as a bulwark against communism by depicting the
family as a site of democratic debate that equipped individual members

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72 / “flame on!”

to engage with a heterogeneous world. The team took the shape of the
nuclear family—simulating the mother-father pair of Reed and Sue and
their two surrogate children, Johnny and Ben—while altering its form
through the production of a chosen kinship based not on the conception
of a universally shared humanity but on the mutual experience of differ-
ence from it, an “inhuman” cosmopolitics. Just as the team’s bodies were
transformed into billions of unstable molecules, their kinship was simi-
larly depicted as an unstable molecular unit capable of accommodating
a variety of social relations. I argue that the series’ recurrent depiction
of the family as a site of generative conflict and willed affiliation aligned
its values with left-wing political movements that similarly sought to
recast social relations as chosen bonds anchored by shared values rather
than social conformity or biological kinship. As they came to embody
the oppositional spirit of an emergent counterculture in the 1960s, the
Fantastic Four inaugurated a renaissance in superhero storytelling while
becoming iconic figures in the remaking of American liberalism.

Soft Touch: The Queer Textures of Cold War Masculinity

In the narrative of The Fantastic Four, Reed Richards, Ben Grimm,
and Johnny Storm took literal and figurative shape against three figures
of nonnormative masculinity in the cold war: the liberal, the neurotic,
and the queer. In visually referencing these figures, the comic book self-
consciously performed and critiqued the bodily and textural rhetoric
of anticommunism. During the early cold war, the terms hard and soft
were used to describe conservative and liberal orientations, respectively,
toward anticommunist politics. In the political logic of McCarthyism,
softness took on a double meaning, referring to a psychological suscep-
tibility to communist ideology that was also understood as an expres-
sion of effeminized or “weak” masculinity associated with homosexual
tendencies. The liberal, the neurotic, and the queer were understood as
interrelated psychic and material manifestations of “soft” masculinity
whose desires for particular ideologies and love objects were seen as two
sides of the same coin.15
The negative social meanings that came to attach to these figures were
articulated to textural language: alongside the “hard” and “soft” rhetoric
of anticommunist ideology, postwar psychology described the perceived
fragility of the male psyche in terms of “inner-directed” and “other-
directed” personalities, the latter suggesting weakness of character and
a will to conformity. The popularization of phrases like the “man in the

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 “flame on!” / 73

gray flannel suit” and “the doughface liberal” to describe the postwar
subject’s submissive pliancy extended the textures of anticommunism
to embodied figurations linking somatic experience with ideological
loyalties.16 In the bodies of the Fantastic Four’s three male characters,
these social types and their related textural economies would reappear
in extraordinarily mutated ways, transforming the meanings of mascu-
linity, heterosexuality, and ideological conformity in postwar America.
Reed is initially presented to readers as a paragon of patriotic mas-
culinity, a loyal anticommunist using his scientific genius to help the
United States win the cold war space race and a committed family man.
His subsequent transformation into the superhumanly elastic Mr. Fan-
tastic, however, placed the physical pliability of his body in opposition
to both the social “type” his previous performance of gender embod-
ied—the hard-minded scientist—and his responsibility to the state as a
producer of objective knowledge whose ideas supported anticommunist
goals. As the heroic Mr. Fantastic, Reed can stretch any portion of his
body to incredible lengths, flatten or balloon his physique at will, and
take the shape of a variety of objects. Mr. Fantastic gave visual expres-
sion to somatically inflected terms like softness and plasticity, which
described the material qualities of postwar consumer goods as well as
psychic qualities associated with the effete and “soft-minded” liberal.
Reed’s newfound abilities would have a direct effect on his psycholog-
ical orientation toward state-sponsored anticommunism. Following the
team’s failed rocket flight into space, Reed is the first member of the team
to voice the need to use their powers for the good of mankind, a liberal
egalitarian impulse that leaves him in a precarious relationship with the
government’s national security interests. His ambivalence toward these
competing commitments is showcased in The Fantastic Four #13. In this
issue the team attempts to thwart the diabolical plans of an evil Rus-
sian cosmonaut, Dr. Kragoff, to transform himself and three apes into
superpowered beings like the Fantastic Four. Just as the four are poised
to confront Kragoff on the dark side of the moon, Reed exclaims, “This
is wrong! Why should we battle Kragoff? Why can’t we leave our differ-
ences behind us! This is the first step to the stars—and we should all make
that trip together—as fellow earthmen!”17 In the prevailing conservative
rhetoric of his time, had Reed uttered such a statement anywhere besides
the dark side of the moon, he would have undoubtedly been accused of
being “soft on communism.” Though Reed is ultimately convinced of
Kragoff’s villainous intentions, his belief in the right of all humans to
share the fruits of technological advance echoes throughout the team’s

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74 / “flame on!”

many adventures. As the series progressed, Reed found intellectual

camaraderie with scientists and thinkers from an array of advanced
alien and “inhuman” civilizations that would provide the impetus for
reconsidering his unwavering loyalty to the nation.
Reed’s contradictory loyalties are best illustrated in a Mr. Fantastic
feature page at the conclusion of The Fantastic Four #16 (plate 3). Fea-
ture pages were stand-alone splash panels in the back matter of comic
book issues that gave readers in-depth looks at characters and their
unique superpowers. In this feature page Reed stands tall and stoic in
his Fantastic Four costume to the left side of the scene. To the right, he
appears in four miniature action sequences dynamically taking on a
variety of shapes and forms as Mr. Fantastic. As he performs these feats,
he explains to the reader, “The shapes into which I can mold my pliable
body are virtually limitless . . . from a spare auto tire . . . to a delicate,
life-saving parachute! These shapes can be assumed with the speed of
thought, but only because I have spent long hours practicing and devel-
oping my agility! . . . Due to the extreme flexibility and elasticity of my
molecular structure, I can absorb the impact of any type of shell (except
an atomic missile).”18
On the one hand, Reed presents his power as an egalitarian, even pro-
miscuous pliability whose boundlessness holds untapped potentialities;
on the other, the visual presentation of his skill ties his feats of bodily
transformation to the accouterments of the military-industrial complex:
mass-produced rubber, synthetic fibers, and atomic weaponry. As he
points out, the limit of his flexibility is marked by the highest achieve-
ment of military technology: the atom bomb. Similarly the transpar-
ency of his display, his willingness to publicly present visual evidence
of his bodily elasticity and the possibilities inherent in the technologies
he emulates—a particularly bold move in an era of intense government
secrecy about American military science and technology—is offset by his
reference to rigorous physical discipline as a prerequisite for his amaz-
ing feats. The chaotic energies of Reed’s power become acceptable only
within a discourse of physical discipline and control—captured in his
initial rigid stance—that was the hallmark of the hard-bodied anticom-
munist type. Yet, as Reed explains, the farther he stretches his body, “the
weaker [his] muscles become.” His power enhances his body but has the
potential to effeminize and weaken him.
The precariousness of Reed’s masculinity was impressed upon read-
ers in his physical interactions with other bodies and objects. The series
recurrently displayed Mr. Fantastic wrapping himself around the bodies

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 “flame on!” / 75

of other men, usually villains, using his pliable frame to contain and
neutralize a combatant’s powers. In these instances of physical homoso-
cial bonding, Reed’s masculinity is placed in crisis, his body distended
to the point where his gender is no longer clearly identifiable. These
moments of homosocial bonding recalled the cultures of male-domi-
nated professional spaces in the 1950s and early 1960s. The American
scientist, for instance, was often depicted in popular culture as a bland
“egghead” whose lack of personality made him interchangeable with a
seemingly endless procession of fellow lab-coated male researchers. Even
as he was celebrated as a national hero, the American scientist was also
perceived as antisocial and effete, more suited to interact with molecules
and microscopes than human beings.19 By the early 1960s, however, this
image had been superseded by a refashioning of the liberal intellectual as
an icon of “style, virility, and glamour.” As K. A. Cuordileone argues, this
transformation was enabled by the Kennedy administration’s celebra-
tion of public intellectuals as part of the “boy’s club” of national politics
and high society, while periodicals like Life and Time touted scientists as
brave and adventurous “explorers of the unknown.”20 Reed straddled the
dual personalities of the virile scientific adventurer and the antisocial,
and potentially queer, lab geek, while pointing to a third possibility: the
rerouting of the liberal intellectual’s mind and body toward cosmopoli-
tan social relations not predicated on masculinity and heterosexuality.
Mr. Fantastic’s implicitly queer encounters with the bodies of other
men referenced both his detailed knowledge of and work with “unstable
molecules” and the instability of his own heterosexual desires, which
were often derailed by his devotion to the inanimate object world of the
laboratory. On one pinup page Reed is depicted playfully straddling a
gigantic alien laser gun in his lab. At the top of the page appears a note to
readers written in flowing cursive letters: “Just between us, I don’t know
what this silly contraption is, either! Keep smiling—Reed.” Despite his
brilliance and masculine bravado, Reed appears more like a clueless Boy
Scout or amateur scientist fooling around in his garage; the image sug-
gests that scientists might just be “silly little boys” obsessed with playing
with their “joy-sticks.” Cheekier still, that joystick appears like a giant
mechanical phallus Reed gleefully fauns over, while the cursive flour-
ishes of his note offers yet another campy expression of his over-the-top
feminine masculinity. Despite his physical flexibility, Reed’s attachment
to the rigid, sterile tools of cold war science and technology damages his
emotional connection to Sue, who is repulsed by her fiancé’s obsessive
focus on experiments and technogadgets. In this way Reed materialized

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76 / “flame on!”

the ever-proliferating contradictions of cold war masculinity, which

demanded physically hard bodies yet intellectually flexible minds, sexu-
ally virile husbands yet docile government workers, creative applications
of science yet uniform and useful results. Despite his extraordinary pow-
ers and unparalleled intellect, Reed still laments in issue #14, “I’ve always
thought of myself as being able to accomplish . . . anything! With my sci-
entific talent, and my super-flexible body, it seemed that nothing could
ever defeat me! . . . Though the world knows me as the invincible Mis-
ter Fantastic, I am unable to win my most cherished goal! I am unable
to . . . conquer the heart of the girl I love!”21
Visualized as a dramatic foil to Reed’s pliable body, Ben Grimm’s
power encases his body in rigid orange rock, an invulnerable stony edi-
fice combined with extraordinary strength. As the teammate with no
control over the presentation of his powers and the figure whose affilia-
tion to the group is nonfamilial, the Thing’s struggles to come to terms
with his monstrous form became a central trope of The Fantastic Four,
positioning him as the neurotic subject of failed masculinity.
Throughout the series the Thing’s personality took shape in relation to
a form of popular Freudianism that saw the drive to conform to particu-
lar gendered and sexual norms as the source of insecurity and neuroses.
In the early twentieth century, Freud’s discovery of the unconscious—
a component of the human mind that he claimed housed fundamen-
tal instinctual drives and unfettered desires that had to be repressed
beneath our everyday conscious life for the purpose of normal socializa-
tion—led many radical thinkers to believe that cultivating mechanisms
for unleashing the energies of the repressed psyche might liberate indi-
viduals from the shackles of social conformity.22 During World War II
psychoanalytic therapy gained professional standing as it was incorpo-
rated into wartime medical practice to treat neurotic behavior. In this
period the neurotic came to be understood as a social type defined by a
lack of emotional and sexual control or else psychologically incapable of
dealing with the stresses of everyday life. The stresses of modern warfare
led countless soldiers to experience mental breakdowns and neurotic
psychosomatic symptoms, while the male-dominated environment of
the military became a hotbed for homosexual activity. The U.S. govern-
ment treated these two concerns as part of the same psychopathology,
dispatching psychoanalysts to the front lines of war to conduct mental
evaluations on overstressed soldiers.23 Psychoanalysis came out of the
war with a new image as a mental cure-all that could dissipate neurotic
symptoms and perceived deviant behaviors therapeutically.24 The great

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 “flame on!” / 77

paradox of postwar psychoanalysis was that it simultaneously identi-

fied the overwhelming demands of gender and sexual conformity as the
source of psychopathology but sought to reorient individual behavior
toward the fulfillment of those norms. By the mid-1950s and early 1960s
this contradiction would become the site of sustained critique by left-
wing intellectuals who sought to recapture the earlier radical thrust of
psychoanalysis by highlighting its capacity to unleash the charismatic
and nonconformist aspects of human potential, including sexuality, cre-
ativity, and individuality.25 This critique would be anticipated and taken
up by superhero comics, beginning with The Fantastic Four.
In Benjamin Grimm, the monstrous yet lovable Thing, The Fantastic
Four celebrated the neurotic personality as a desirable state of being that
described a productively maladjusted stance toward contemporary gen-
der and sexual norms. First presented as a loud-mouthed, aggressively
masculine fighter pilot, Ben is soon revealed to be a deeply insecure
man unable to express affection without devolving into violence or self-
deprecating humor. Heckled by his former inner-city posse, the Yancy
Street Gang, and reminded of his physical ugliness by his teammate
Johnny Storm, Ben humorously employs the language of psychoanalysis
to deflect the thrust of these taunts. When Johnny tries to humiliate his
teammate by publicly announcing that Ben is a fan of The Mickey Mouse
Club, Ben yells, “Okay, okay! You tryin’ to give me an inferiority com-
plex?” In one telling encounter with the Yancy Street Gang, Ben walks to
his old neighborhood looking to settle a score over a derogatory drawing
of him they have sent to the team’s Manhattan headquarters, the Bax-
ter Building (figure 2.1). As Ben takes his stand on the corner of Yancy
Street, we see the image held tightly in his fist, a drawing of the Thing
in a tutu with a rose in his mouth. Across the top of the page is scrawled
“The Thing is a sissy!”26
By manifesting the normative personality of the “hardened,” mascu-
line male subject of postwar culture as a second skin, Ben is paradoxically
unable to perform the assumed functions of hard masculinity—obtain-
ing a job, getting married, having sex—which makes him a “sissy.”
Rather than a cautionary tale, however, it was the Thing’s neuroses
that audiences identified with, similarly encouraged by the logic of the
comic book to refuse identification with normative masculinity. In fact
the Thing’s seemingly flexible gender identity was invoked as a progres-
sive sign of the times. In a humorous scene, the Yancy Street Gang send
the Thing a gag gift in the form of a Beatles wig, presumably intend-
ing to compare the former football star to the androgynous and lilting

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78 / “flame on!”

figure 2.1. “The Thing is a sissy!” Stan Lee (writer) and Jack Kirby (pen-
ciller), “The Mad Thinker and His Awesome Android!,” Fantastic Four #15,
June 1963, reprinted in Fantastic Four Omnibus Vol. 1 (New York: Marvel
Comics, 2007), 375.

rockers. Attached to the package is a note: “A perfect gift for a man who
has nothing!” Rather than rage at their insult, the Thing gladly dons the
bowl-cut wig, claiming he’s “always wanted to try one.” Standing next
to his girlfriend, Alicia Masters, the Thing is indistinguishable as man,
woman, or living rock with a fake hairdo. Turning earlier cold war fears
about gender inversion and the emasculation of American men on their
head, the Thing joins the Beatles and other 1960s pop icons in celebrat-
ing androgyny and gender bending.27
Marvel Comics found in Ben Grimm an icon for a new generation of
superheroes whose powers rendered them sexual deviants and species

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 “flame on!” / 79

figure 2.2. Promotional materials for the Merry Marvel Marching Soci-
ety. Peter Sanderson, The Marvel Vault: A Museum-in-a-Book with Rare Collectibles
from the World of Marvel (New York: Running Press, 2007), 99.

outcasts. Ben’s psychological struggles to square his monstrous exterior

form with his internal sense of self catapulted him to stardom as readers’
most beloved and sympathetic character in the growing Marvel Com-
ics pantheon. When Marvel inaugurated its official company fan club,
the Merry Marvel Marching Society, in 1964, it would take the neurotic
Thing as its mascot. Creators emblazoned his mug shot on membership
cards as a latter-day Uncle Sam, pointing his rocky finger at potential
fans with the injunction, “THE M.M.M.S.WANTS YOU!” (figure 2.2).28
These potential “Marvelites” were hailed as self-made outsiders and
maladjusts to the norms of social acceptability through a rhetoric of
alternative belonging; as Marvel editor and writer Stan Lee explained to
readers, “You can’t describe the normal Marvel fan—nobody can! The
minute someone gets hooked on Marvel, he stops being normal!”29 If
Uncle Sam hailed citizens as a masculine father figure protecting the
universal values of the nation, the Thing’s androgynous visage spoke to
an audience of peers as fellow deviants bound by their symbolic (if not
actual) refusal of the gendered logic of cold war politics.
In the narrative proper, Ben struggled between impulses to resist or
embrace his abnormality. This psychic conflict was externally drama-
tized in a variety of scenes in which his rock-like body briefly morphs
back into his “normal” human form. In early issues of the series, Reed
works tirelessly to develop a serum to transform the Thing back into
Ben, occasionally succeeding at providing Ben with short-term returns
to his human form. Though Ben is initially ecstatic about regaining his

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80 / “flame on!”

human form in these brief instances of reconversion, he almost always

regrets the loss of his power when he realizes he is unable to join his
friends in combat or protect them from harm in his traditional body.
Ironically his transitions back to human form would reconsolidate
his gender, confirming his status as a full-fledged man—in the first of
these instances, Ben exclaims, “I’m human again!! I’m Ben Grimm at
last! . . . A man!! I’m a man!”—but would rob him of his extraordinary
abilities, which hinged on his gender indeterminacy. Thus Ben’s literal
transitions from human to rock form were also coded as transitions in
gender identity, while his feeling of being “trapped” in his mutated body
echoed emergent discourses of transsexual (and later transgender) iden-
tity, which increasingly used the leitmotif of being trapped in the wrong
body as a powerful description of the lived experience of transsexuality.
As Jay Prosser claims, “If the goal of transsexual transition is to align
the feeling of gendered embodiment with the material body, [then] body
image . . . clearly already has a material force for transsexuals. The image
of being trapped in the wrong body conveys this force.”30 In Ben comic
book creators imagined what it would mean to “transition” into a state
of indeterminacy or flux, hence their repeated visualization of his transi-
tions from human to rock form and between man and androgyne, while
exhibiting his powers. For Ben the concept of being trapped in the wrong
body did not convey the consolidating force of body image in underwrit-
ing his material form, as it did for those who identified as transsexual.
Rather it conveyed the productive failure of any body, especially the nor-
matively heterosexual male body, to capture an authentic sense of self. In
this way the comic book suggested that a variety of discourses of bodily
nonnormativity deployed to consolidate alternative sexual and gender
identities in the face of homophobia and transphobia (such as the trans-
sexual language of being “trapped in the wrong body”) could also be
used to destabilize normalizing structures like heterosexual masculinity.
It is here, in the body’s failure to present a specifically fixed gender
identification, both at the level of physical appearance and the direction
of its psychic desire, that the question of sexuality is made manifest on the
bodies of the Fantastic Four. Though at times the direction of the charac-
ters’ desires seems obviously normative (all four characters romantically
pursue members of the opposite sex), such desires are shot through with
“queer” feelings that attend the team’s more obviously abnormal bodies:
Ben’s desire for his own monstrous second skin; Reed’s split affections
for Sue and his scientific research; Sue’s equally split feelings for Reed
and for Prince Namor, the team’s on-again, off-again villain and king

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 “flame on!” / 81

of Atlantis—all pointed to the fact of heterosexual desire gone awry. I

use the term direction here to indicate the ways that the Fantastic Four
articulated questions of sexuality and desire in the visual rhetoric of
orientation or physical proximities between bodies and objects. Ahmed
posits, “To become straight means not only that we have to turn toward
the objects given to us by heterosexual culture but also that we must turn
away from objects that take us off this line. The queer subject within
straight culture deviates and is made socially present as a deviant.”31 The
members of the Fantastic Four become visually present on the comic
book page, and hence “socially present” to readers, as figures whose bod-
ies and desires “turn away” from the objects “given to us by heterosexual
culture” in every attempt to embrace them; this outcome identified the
four as deviants (and ecstatically so) and recast the structures of postwar
heterosexuality as amenable to deviation.
No character of The Fantastic Four exemplified deviation from sexual
norms more than Johnny Storm, the Human Torch. A youthful playboy
and lover of fast cars, Johnny seems at first glance to represent the het-
erosexual spirit of male teenage youth associated with the popular rebel
figure of the 1950s. At the same time, his bodily condition is consistently
presented as literally and figuratively overheating his sexual desires. In
this way Johnny’s blazing body functioned as both a visual expression
of excessive heterosexuality—the hypersexualized teenage rebel—as well
as its seeming opposite, the “flaming” homosexual of popular political
rhetoric. From the very first issue of The Fantastic Four, the flame that
the Torch loves derails his heterosexual attachments.
In his first appearance as the Human Torch, Johnny is in the front
seat of a hot rod he is remodeling with a friend (plate 4). “There’s only
one thing in the world that interests me more than cars!” he declares. In
the ensuing space between panels, the direction of his statement seems
destined to lead to “girls,” the obvious object of affection for all teen-
age boys. In the next panel, however, his thought is interrupted by the
sight of a fiery number 4 etched in the sky, Reed’s signal for the team to
assemble. Immediately Johnny begins to steam and blaze, exclaiming,
“Remember me saying there was only one thing that interests me more
than cars?! Well this is it!!” With this last statement, Johnny flies out
of the car’s roof at full burn, melting the vehicle in a puddle of metal
and rubber.32 Here the physical manifestation of Johnny’s flame symboli-
cally enacts a queer narcissism that reroutes his assumed heterosexual
desire for women toward a queer desire for an unruly, flaming body. In
the space between Johnny’s first appearance as an ordinary body and

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82 / “flame on!”

the last, as a human torch, the visual trajectory of the images on the
page disorients our expectations of a heterosexual outcome to his initial
statement. Instead both Johnny’s body and the flow of the comic book
narrative are made to “extend differently into space,” providing Johnny
and the reader with the possibility of an alternative, or queer, orientation
toward the self and the material world in the figure of his flaming body.33
In issue #2 Johnny’s transformations into the Human Torch became
paired with his now famous exclamation, “Flame On!,” a performative
utterance that brings into being the condition it describes. Couched in
the language of consumer durables—recalling increasingly ubiquitous
terms such as nylon and rayon—the force of its pronouncement both ref-
erences and refuses identification with these plastic textures and their
social realities, linked to domestic order, self-control, and the sublima-
tion of desire in material goods.34 Johnny’s powers point to the ordered
material world of consumer durables (including hot rods) only to ignite
them in chaotic flame, unhinging their structural integrity with a physi-
cal heat that functions as an orgasmic display of his equally charged
sexuality.35
As the team’s resident youth, Johnny circulates within another net-
work of meaning that positions him as the team’s link between 1950s
heterosexual youth culture and the politically antagonistic and sexually
polymorphous 1960s counterculture. It would be impossible to visu-
alize bodies aflame in the postwar period without invoking the fiery
death worlds of the Nazi final solution and the incinerated bodies of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moreover Johnny was directly tied to World
War II history by dint of being the second incarnation of the Human
Torch, Marvel Comics’ first wartime superhero invented in 1939, a
human android who deployed his extraordinary pyrotechnics to fight
the Nazis.36 Johnny’s teenage form brought the flame of his forebear
into the orbit of contemporary struggles of American youth against
the devastating moral storms of racism and the cultural and environ-
mental inferno that was the Vietnam War. On the one hand, Johnny’s
ecstatic joy in zooming through the stratosphere materialized images
of rocket flight and the pleasures of a technologically liberating future
central to the utopian vision of Kennedy’s New Frontier. Yet this image
of unbridled human flight into the cosmos was haunted by the specter
of modern bodies aflame in the global conflicts that attended cold war
politics. Alongside spectacular photographs of NASA’s rocket launches
into space, perhaps no contemporary image attended Johnny’s flaming
body more immediately than that of the Buddhist monk whose act of

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 “flame on!” / 83

self-immolation in 1963 shocked the world, one of the first public acts
of protest that would mark the decade into which The Fantastic Four
was unfolding with its readers. In the coming years the bodies of 1960s
youth would be literally and figuratively aflame, radically queered by the
sexual revolution, massacred by military violence, and incited to answer
affirmatively with Johnny’s claim “There’s only one thing in the world
that interests me more than cars!”: “the search for truly democratic alter-
natives to the present.”37

Object Lessons
We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for
reason, freedom, and love. In affirming these principles we are aware of countering
perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing
to be manipulated. . . . We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings
to the status of things.—students for a democratic society, The Port Huron
Statement (1962)
I ain’t Ben anymore—I’m what Susan called me—the Thing!—ben grimm,
The Fantastic Four #1 (November 1961)

Throughout the postwar period critics of the cold war culture of

conformity repeatedly identified consumerism and the valorization of
material wealth with a decline in democratic public life.38 The Fantastic
Four, however, argued that a willingness to be psychically and physically
transformed by commodities in nonnormative ways could be an avenue
for shaping a critical relationship between citizens and the products they
commonly took for granted. By relating the disorienting psychic life of
its characters to an equally unwieldy material object world presumed to
produce “normal” citizens, The Fantastic Four located consumer dura-
bles and their everyday somatic textures as legitimate sites for theorizing
an alternative or queer orientation toward self and society. Specifically
The Fantastic Four redirected the homophobic and sexist logic of anti-
communist political rhetoric by reframing the world of commodities as
a playground of queer pleasures that could provide tools for enacting
nonnormative performances of gender. As Ahmed argues, “If the sex-
ual involves the contingency of bodies coming into contact with other
bodies . . . then sexual disorientation slides quickly into social disori-
entation, as a disorientation in how things are arranged.”39 Across the
span of the series, the visual attention given to the tactility of Reed’s,
Ben’s, and Johnny’s physical forms encouraged readers to take pleasure
in the display of bodies and objects whose encounters disoriented the

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84 / “flame on!”

arrangement of normative heterosexuality, becoming a locus for unpre-

dictable, queer desires.
The Fantastic Four #14 offers an exemplary instance of such queer
encounters. In this issue Reed, Ben, and Johnny travel to the depths of
the Atlantic Ocean to confront Prince Namor after he kidnaps Sue. The
ensuing battle is visually staged as a series of encounters between the
chaotic bodies of the three superheroes and an array of tactile ocean
creatures that Namor deploys as weapons against his adversaries (plate
5).40 First, Namor takes on the Human Torch with a “flame eater,” a pole
capped with two giant sea anemones whose tentacles sap the heat from
Johnny’s flaming body. Next, Namor confronts the Thing, initially stall-
ing him with a “dagger-needle coral,” its sharp spines piercing the hero’s
rocky skin, then entrapping him in a fast-growing ocean fungus that
hardens into bone. Finally, Mr. Fantastic transforms his body into a liv-
ing net, extending his arms into a vast latticework that ensnares Namor
before he summons another weapon.
In this visually exuberant and entertaining scene, the battle between
the Fantastic Four and Namor is presented as a struggle between com-
peting material textures that carry the imprint of both natural and
man-made objects. The flame-eater resembles a household mop, the
dagger-needle coral a pincushion, and the fungus dishwashing foam.
Namor explicitly links his creatures to such products when he describes
the flame-eater as “absorbing the heat” from Johnny’s body like “a sponge
absorbs water.” The visual pleasure of the scene lies less in physical vio-
lence than in the bizarre encounters between the fantastic bodies of the
teammates and the unusual physical properties of Namor’s ocean crea-
tures. The scene elicits wonder in unexpected physical transformations
that result from the vulnerability of the putatively straight male super-
hero’s body to outside forces. Not only do Namor’s various sea creatures
appear as feminine domestic products; they also temporarily emasculate
the Human Torch and the Thing, the former brought to his knees by
the flame-eater’s enervating touch. Similarly, by using his own body to
subdue Namor, Reed simultaneously exercises his masculinity even as
the visual display of his soft and distended limbs implies his body’s loss
of specific gender. The gendered politics of the team, then, were impli-
cated in the proximities of bodies to particular kinds of objects and their
somatic experiences, both of which were situated in the historical speci-
ficities of postwar domestic material life.
Concurrent with the sensory political discourse of anticommunism
and the normalizing project of psychoanalysis, postwar American

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 “flame on!” / 85

culture was flooded with an array of consumer durables born in the age
of plastics, the synthetic revolution facilitated by wartime manufactur-
ing and extraordinary advances in the study of molecular engineering.
These innovations brought engineered substances like nylon, rayon,
and a variety of moldable hard plastics into daily proximity with the
bodies of ordinary citizens. By 1960 “baby boomers played with Wham-
O hula hoops [and] Barbie dolls . . . and their families experienced
Tupperware . . . laundry baskets . . . Saran Wrap” as part of everyday
life.41 The malleability of these inventions alongside an unprecedented
material durability figuratively captured the wider cultural contradic-
tions between the boundless possibilities of postwar economic and social
progress and desires to contain such possibilities within rigidly gendered
heterosexual spaces.
As we have seen in the three male figures of The Fantastic Four, the
series’ conceptual project was to offer the contradictions inherent in the
postwar discourses of anticommunism and psychological “normality”
as the very condition by which the body’s materiality took shape, by
dissolving the distinction between a private biological self and a public
world of consumer objects. This project took on its most radical expres-
sion in the series’ lead female character, Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl. In
her revolutionary 1963 polemic, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
identified the domestic housewife as a paragon of women’s social invis-
ibility, a figure whose professional ambitions and political influence
were rerouted toward the maintenance of normative family life. It would
be in performing that same role that Sue Storm would become a literal
invisible woman, capable of vanishing from sight at will. Unlike her
teammates, who fail to identify with normative masculinity, Sue is bet-
ter understood as disidentifying with proper femininity. According to
Muñoz, disidentification describes an attempt to transform the limits of
one’s subject position by performing it in unexpected or unpredictable
ways. To disidentify is neither to “buckle under the pressures of domi-
nant ideology” nor “to break free of its inescapable sphere” but rather
to rearticulate a set of norms to new meanings through spectacular and
critical performances of those norms.42 Just as contemporary feminist
thinkers sought to make visible the taken-for-granted structure of patri-
archy in the 1960s, Sue’s power similarly made the concept of women’s
social invisibility an object of visual critique by making invisible bod-
ies and objects conspicuous on the comic book page. When using her
powers, Sue commonly appears as a ghost-like outline clearly visible to
the reader, marking the very performance of invisibility as worthy of

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86 / “flame on!”

symbolic recognition. It is through invisibility, rather than an attempt

to escape the social stigma of being invisible and unrecognized, that Sue
would alter the meanings that attached to postwar women’s supposedly
docile, domestic bodies.
One strategy the series took to highlight Sue’s disidentification with
normative femininity was to show her powers evolving, granting her
two new abilities in issue #22: an invisible force shield and the ability to
extend her invisibility to other objects and bodies. These transformations
were the result of readers’ insistence that Sue model empowered woman-
hood in the 1960s. To induct her newfound abilities into the visual logic
of the comic book, a series of tests are presented by way of encounters
between the physical form of Sue’s shield and the textural surface of her
teammates’ bodies (plate 6). At first Sue’s shield recalls the structure of
weak plastic, softening under the pressure of Reed’s elastic arm. But
with concentration she soon wields a shield powerful enough to repel
the Thing, proving herself literally impenetrable to “hard” masculinity.
In this jocular scene Sue’s invisibility becomes not merely a social meta-
phor she struggles against but a tactile force that extends her disidenti-
fication with normative femininity into the world at large.43 As Judith
Butler writes, “It may be precisely through practices which underscore
disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference
is materialized that both feminist and queer politics are mobilized. Such
collective disidentification can facilitate a reconceptualization of which
bodies matter and which bodies are yet to emerge as critical matters of
concern.”44 By physically manifesting invisibility as a material skin, Sue
was forced to inhabit it—and the gendered norms it attached to—as a
condition of her claiming a self. The outcome was to make her body mat-
ter to audiences but also to matter forth on the page through the exten-
sion of her powerful body into space.
The transparent surfaces of Sue’s power carried a host of gendered
meanings. Her invisible force shield resembled the flexible hardness of
Tupperware and the translucent sheen of cellophane, two postwar inven-
tions that became household staples of suburbia’s invisible woman, yet its
spherical shape and impenetrable surface also referenced tools of wom-
en’s liberation, such as the diaphragm and the birth control pill.45 These
dual meanings would compete in Sue’s deployment of her powers both
as a powerful containment device and a flexible material extension of her
self-determination. Throughout the series Sue is called upon to employ
her shield as a powerful vacuum that helps contain air and water, its
edges capable of being raised and replaced like the famous Tupperware

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 “flame on!” / 87

seal. At other times it becomes a tool of self-expression and libidinal

pleasure. In one instance, when Sue becomes the central focus of a Life
magazine editorial on the Fantastic Four, she poses flirtatiously for the
cameraman, alternately making herself invisible from the waist down
and the waist up, making different parts of her body available for visual
consumption.46 Even as she is forced to work within the visual conven-
tions of the male gaze, she exploits her invisibility as a site of visual plea-
sure that highlights both her ability to control what the camera looks at
and the desirability of her body.
Sue’s exercise of her evolving powers and the subsequent transforma-
tions in personality that made her a more “visible” actor in the Fantas-
tic Four’s unfolding dramas were not merely willful acts of agency or a
simple refusal of the norms of womanhood, but were taken up in and
through the very act of performing “femaleness” that had once seemed
to make her invisible both socially and materially. This was made clear
in a 1963 Invisible Girl Pin-up Page that presented Sue in her Fantastic
Four costume waving to fans from the cockpit of the team’s “Fantasti-
car” high above the Manhattan skyline (figure 2.3).47 Sue’s pose is a direct
visual reference to Marilyn Monroe’s sultry wave in her famous cover
photo for the inaugural 1953 issue of Playboy. Sue’s bobbed hair and regal
manner, however, link her to the elegant femininity of Jacqueline Ken-
nedy. Sue performs these competing types of hyperfemininity within
the traditionally male role of a superheroic adventurer. Ironically, rather
than call attention to her femininity, the narrator’s note above her head
reads, “In answer to many requests, note the details in the control panel
of Sue’s section of the fabulous Fantasti-car!” These details can be see
through the translucent portion of Sue’s legs, implying that readers’ fan-
dom of Sue is as much linked to her femininity as to their interest in
the technologies of the space age, technologies that The Fantastic Four
articulated to an array of unwieldy, playful, and erotically charged bod-
ies across gendered types.
Certainly Sue’s powers did not liberate her from the meanings attached
to invisibility, and such displays as the Life magazine photo shoot and
the Fantasti-car pinup displayed the extent of objectification that could
result from the public performance of her powers. Yet these instances
of feminine performance also presented a playful working against the
normative underpinnings of the visibility of female bodies by displaying
Sue’s shifting skein of invisibility as a polymorphous surface of pleasure
that echoed new conceptions of women’s sexuality emerging in the mid-
1960s from the writings of radical feminists and popular sexologists. If

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figure 2.3. “Sue Storm, the Glamorous Invisible Girl.” Stan Lee (writer)
and Jack Kirby (penciller), “The Return of Doctor Doom,” Fantastic Four
#10, January 1963, reprinted in Fantastic Four Omnibus Vol. 1 (New York:
Marvel Comics, 2007), 266.

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 “flame on!” / 89

traditional conceptions of sexuality in the 1950s limited the locus of a

woman’s pleasure to the opposite sex, a new understanding of women
as capable of gaining autonomous bodily pleasure through interaction
with their own body (masturbatory or otherwise) became increasingly
popular in the wake of the Kinsey reports (1948, 1953) and the Masters
and Johnson study (1966) on human sexuality.48 In scenes like the Life
magazine photo shoot and the Fantasti-car pinup page, Sue’s body visu-
ally develops just such an autonomous female subject capable of com-
manding her own sexuality as well as the pleasures of those around her,
simultaneously laying bear and disidentifying with the visual conven-
tions of heterosexual desire. In Sue Storm The Fantastic Four attempted
to wed femininity with a queerly inflected feminism through a symbolic
restructuring of the relations between women’s bodies and the material
object world of postwar domesticity.

Unstable Molecules
In the early 1960s The Fantastic Four recast the superhero as a figure
of nonnormativity that functioned as a visual palimpsest for a host of
postwar discourses of normalization that would be radically undone by
the unstable physiology of the superhuman body. In each character the
series took on a primary narrative of postwar normalization—anticom-
munism, psychoanalysis, consumer society, domesticity—and used the
mutated biology of the superhero to alter or wholly upend the meanings
that attach to these regulatory regimes. This transformation in the sym-
bolic structures of normalization was effected by an equivalent rework-
ing of the gender and sexual identity of each character. Reed’s and Ben’s
physical softening and hardening rendered them unable to embody ideal
masculinity, Johnny’s flaming body destabilized his performance of
proper teenage male heterosexuality, and Sue’s shifting surface of invis-
ibility simultaneously identified her as a figure of hyperbolic femininity
and radical feminism. In this way The Fantastic Four worked within the
very ideological structures of cold war America to produce an array of
nonnormative or queer bodies that would be oriented toward a more
politically radical and sexually polymorphous future.
Yet, like any political project or ideology, these transformations
required an image to organize and direct the social relations that might
unfold from them. If Kennedy’s New Frontier took as its emblem the
sleek, phallic figure of the rocket flight into space, The Fantastic Four
found its greatest icon in the molecule, a miniature elastic world small

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90 / “flame on!”

enough to reside in human DNA but vast enough to form complex chains
that made up the synthetic materials of an external object world. The link
between the molecular structure of material objects and the most inti-
mate aspects of human biology was dramatized in the Fantastic Four’s
costumes, blue and white jumpsuits made of a synthetic variant of the
same unstable molecules that constituted the four heroes’ mutated bod-
ies. This allowed the suits to adapt to the teammates’ powers—stretch-
ing with Reed’s body or turning invisible at Sue’s command—because
of their shared molecular properties. Just as the teammates’ bodies were
physical manifestations of molecular structures gone haywire, they were
also enveloped by and in turn helped shape the contours of experimental
material substances.
As a physically bonded structure relying on varying degrees of solidar-
ity between individual atoms to produce increasingly complex molecular
chains, the molecule became a rich metaphor for dynamic human interac-
tions and affiliations. In The Fantastic Four the unstable molecule came
to stand in for both the instability of the distinction between human and
inhuman and the dysfunctional or volatile character of familial relations.
As The Fantastic Four developed in its first years of publication, the family
and the team became synonymous as a chosen kinship whose connections
were never assured but required reaffirmation through acts of willed soli-
darity. Rather than being the foundational unit of national community, as
it was understood by the rhetoric of cold war containment, the Fantastic
Four’s familial bond functioned as one site among many through which
cosmopolitan forms of affiliation could be developed. When the charac-
ters attempt to rely on idealized notions of family—including heterosexual
intimacy and gendered power relations—their sense of security is undone
as they realize that their “family” ties involve alternative forms of relation-
ality based on shared differences rather than the assumption of traditional
heterosexual familial roles.
The most visible heterosexual union of the foursome was that of Reed
and Sue, who were initially presented as fiancés. The team’s inaugural trip
to space derails their plans for marriage, while Sue’s expanding repertoire
of powers gives her a newfound sense of confidence to stand up to Reed’s
patronizing ways. The team’s many crossings with an expanding world
of superhumans further complicates their romance. When the Fantastic
Four first battle the Ocean King, Prince Namor, in a struggle to save New
York from his vengeful plans to flood the city, Namor is taken aback by
Sue’s beauty and compassion for someone whose life experiences seem
so different from her own.49 Though he often expressed his affections in

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 “flame on!” / 91

violent displays of machismo, Namor came to represent a compelling

alternative to Reed’s rigid, scientific worldview, as a dreamy, exotic, half-
naked ocean god. The incipient romance between Namor and Sue would
produce an interspecies love triangle that unfolded for nearly thirty issues
before Sue finally expressed her unwavering love for Reed. Even so, mar-
riage would not provide the Fantastic Four with a “normal” outcome to the
queer bonds they had forged. The marriage between Sue and Reed in the
1965 Fantastic Four Annual was a hyperbolic expression of domestic bliss,
undercut by its own theatricality and by the disruption of the ceremony by
countless villains attempting to destroy the foursome on the special occa-
sion.50 Moreover naïve gestures toward traditional matrimony surely rang
hollow to a teenage readership growing up in the midst of a burgeoning
sexual revolution. As though anticipating this fact, the creators gave their
audience the marriage they had been expecting, while depicting Reed and
Sue’s married life as highly dysfunctional in ensuing issues.
Simultaneously the team members’ wish to see one another achieve “nor-
mal,” happy lives in wedded bliss often conflicted with a shared attachment
to their alternative kinship. In the opening scene to issue #32, Reed unveils
a new device that he claims might permanently transform the Thing back
into his human form. Hearing the news, Johnny thinks out loud, “Then he
can marry Alicia . . . and settle down! It’s what he wants. . . . He’s my big
buddy . . . and I want him to be normal to marry the gal he loves . . . but
why can’t he be the Thing also??! He’s one of us . . . he belongs! Nuts! If
the experiment fails, I’ll be sorry for him . . . but if it works I’ll be sorry
for me! I don’t know what to hope for!” Johnny’s ambivalence over Ben’s
potentially permanent transformation into human form—his desire to
both retain the “queer” elements of Ben’s mutated body that makes him
an integral part of the team while acknowledging the normal heterosexual
life he could lead without them—speaks to a desire for a family that, like
an unstable molecule, could hold all of these possibilities within it. These
family dysfunctions and internal conflicts signaled a desire for queer bod-
ies within the space of the family form, a willful embrace of nonnormative
expressions of gender and sexuality that become the ground of alternative
modes of intimacy and affiliation.

***
Across the 1960s The Fantastic Four’s queer solidarity modeled on the
figure of the unstable molecule came to resonate with a countercultural
worldview that celebrated nonnormative kinship structures and alter-
native political alliances. This same worldview sought to create a new

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92 / “flame on!”

relationship between U.S. citizens and the products of postwar science

that was not based on exploitation, alienation, and violence. As I dis-
cuss in the next chapter, the overwhelmingly positive reader response
to the series’ radical reinvention of the superhero helped articulate The
Fantastic Four’s narrative and visual content to larger political realities
unfolding across the 1960s, including early feminist politics and cold
war geopolitics. In its early years The Fantastic Four was driven by the
question “What difference does it make what or who we are oriented
toward in the very direction of our desire?”51 By the mid-1960s its answer
would be worlds of difference. This world-centered mode of thinking was
made possible by The Fantastic Four’s recasting of the superhero as a par-
agon of nonnormative gender and sexual identity, a figure whose deviant
bodily morphology could open up the superhero to a universe of equally
deviant relations. A final image can help illuminate how The Fantastic
Four’s queering of the superhuman became a common trope extending
into the 1970s.
The attendees of the 1974 Comic Art Convention, an annual meeting of
the greatest creative talents and fans of the mainstream comic book indus-
try, were in for a humorous surprise when they opened their program
books that year. Amid black-and-white advertisements, interviews, and
convention venue logistics, Marvel Comics proudly displayed a double-
page spread of the Thing posing nude in the mode of a Playboy pinup (plate
7). Against a bright red background, the Thing reclines on a leopard-print
rug, the knee of his leg covering his presumably unrepresentable nether
regions. In his left hand he carries a cigar, while a rose sticks out from
behind his ear, his head coquettishly resting on his right arm as he winks
at his fans. “You were expectin’ maybe Burt Reynolds?” he intones, refer-
encing the provocative 1972 Cosmopolitan magazine spread of the sultry
movie star on which the image is based. Only months prior to the conven-
tion, Marvel had printed a special issue of its company fan magazine Foom
(Friends of Ol’ Marvel), dedicated to Benjamin Grimm. In contrast to the
eroticized Comic Art Convention pinup, the opening page of the main
article presented the Thing dressed in full cowboy regalia with two revolv-
ers pointed at the reader, stand-ins for the appendage so conspicuously
occluded in the later display (plate 8).52
Rather than solidify the hard-bodied stereotype of the superhero,
this hyperbolic performance of dual gender roles speaks to the ways the
Thing’s rock-like skin made his body open to erotic pleasure and semiotic
play, allowing his character to accommodate the varied gender identities
demanded by visual genres as diverse as the pinup and the western. In these

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 “flame on!” / 93

moments, so often enacted in the comic book itself, connotations of mas-

culine “hardness” and impenetrability commonly attached to Ben’s body
were made to articulate with softness, femininity, and eroticism. More
important, the sexualization of the Thing in such displays, particularly in
the scopophilic interest in the textures of his stony skin, suggests the ways
the narrative of the Fantastic Four opened up the body of the superhero
to the politics of sexuality and the relationship between postwar sexual
discourses and material culture.53 By 1974 sex and gender had indeed dra-
matically changed in the modern United States: that Burt Reynolds could
pose nude in a mainstream fashion periodical as an object of erotic visual
pleasure attested to the degree to which the regulatory regimes that had
guarded men’s bodies from visual display in American culture had been
deeply shaken by the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and the coun-
terculture. That the Thing could stand in for this transformation was evi-
dence of The Fantastic Four’s long-term investment in recasting the rigidly
defended body of the cold war citizen as an unpredictable and adaptable
surface of pleasure and transformation.
Such bodily fluidity and its material effects was not lost on the Fantas-
tic Four themselves, who were made fully aware of the deviant potential
of their genetic difference when the question of heterosexual reproduc-
tion took center stage. In 1968, on the eve of The Fantastic Four’s eighti-
eth issue, Sue would announce that she and Reed were going to have
a baby.54 Amid much celebration a lone soul grew increasingly anxious
about the biological consequences of bearing a child from genetically
mutated parents. This was one possibility Reed found he could not con-
trol, scientifically or otherwise. In a stunning display of rigid biologism
that foreshadowed debates about the existence of a “gay gene” and pre-
natal disability testing, Reed wondered to himself if the baby he and Sue
had conceived would be born a “freak.” Perhaps he had seen Life maga-
zine’s famous 1965 sequence of photographs charting the development
of a healthy human fetus; perhaps that same image of pristine humanity
was punctured by memories of his own fateful exclamation about the
team’s rocket ship years before, “She’s behaving like a baby! Everything
is perfect,” just before a hail of cosmic rays changed the Fantastic Four’s
lives forever. Though in the narrative proper Marvel’s first family pre-
pared for the birth of a potentially superpowered freak, no narrative act
of contrition could erase a basic fact: it was in the pages of The Fantastic
Four that the queer generation of superheroes was born.

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