Fantastic Four: "The Red Ghost And His Indescribable Super-Apes!"

Fantastic Four #13 (1963)

By Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko

So, What Happens? At the FF's lab, Reed has discovered a booster fuel powerful enough to win the space race and send a manned rocket to the Moon. Since the fuel came from a meteor similar to the one that fell in Siberia some time before, Reed fears the Soviets are close to achieving the same results and wants to build the rocket as soon as possible to reach the Moon and explore its mysterious Blue Area, but Ben convinces him to take the entire team along. Unbeknown to the Fantastic Four, a Soviet scientist named Ivan Kragoff is about to undertake the same journey together with his three trained primates: a strong gorilla, a baboon capable of using firearms and a orangutan who can use and repair machines. The two spaceships depart at the same time, but Kragoff has purposely neglected to equip his with radiation shields so that he and the monkeys can be bombarded with cosmic rays and get powers like those of the Fantastic Four. In space, the FF see the Soviet ship and the Torch flies off to investigate, discovering that the cosmic rays have indeed been effective, giving superstrength to the gorilla, the ability to morph into almost anything to the baboon and magnetic rays to the orangutan. The latter sees the Torch and uses his powers to hurl him back to Reed's ship, where he reports to the rest of the team. However there is little time to ponder as both ships are about to land on the Moon, where they immediately discover that the Blue Area is an ancient abandoned city, built by some long-gone civilization and with a breathable atmosphere. Whilst Reed, Sue and Johnny go off to investigate, the Thing is left behind and attacked by the apes and Kragoff, who has discovered the power to turn intangible at will and now calls himself the Red Ghost. However the battle is interrupted by the powerful and mysterious Watcher, a gigantic alien living in the Blue Area and belonging to a race of observers pledged to watch but never interfere. Refusing to let America and the Soviet Union bring their war to the Moon, the Watcher orders the conflict to be limited to the FF and the Red Ghost. As soon as Ben has started explaining the situation to the rest of his team, the Watcher transports them all in the abandoned city and a battle begins, with the Red Ghost proving victorious thanks to the powers of his apes and kidnapping Sue. However, the Invisible Girl manages to turn the tables, feeding the ravenous monkeys and breaking Kragoff's hold on them just in time to save the rest of her team from a trap. The Red Ghost flees into the Watcher's house, but is angrily expelled by the powerful alien, who crowns the Fantastic Four the victors and before departing promises human beings will never be alone in the vastness of the universe. While Kragoff tries to escape his apes, the FF return on Earth.


Notes: Despite leaving at the end of the issue, the Watcher will remain on the Moon and be known as Uatu. The Blue Area will eventually be revealed to have been created by the Skrulls a million years ago as testing site. The Siberian meteor is probably a reference to the Tunguska event.

Something Silly This Way Comes: In what she assumes to be a compliment, Sue compares the super-apes to the communist masses "enslaved by their evil leaders". Ben traps Reed inside a test tube at one point.

Review: When does a title hit its stride? When an entire company? Fantastic Four #13 is when everything really clicked together and Marvel finally became the House of Ideas, not coincidentally in a story by its three greatest guns, with Stan Lee writing, Jack Kirby pencilling and Steve Ditko inking. Imagine being a kid in 1963, at the height of the space race and six years before the Apollo 11 landing, buying a comic book off the rack and seeing not only the FF winning said race, but finding an ancient alien city on the Moon where they meet a near omnipotent being who promises an age of discoveries and leaves behind a message of hope. It would have been easy for Stan to make the team find and fight some kind of space monster on the Moon, but instead he creates what, deep down, people must have hoped to really find up there, at least in a symbolic way: the beginning of a new age. In a less cynical society than today's, this meeting must have been the stuff dreams are made of.

Discoveries and exploration are central to this story, and more in general to what the Fantastic Four are at their core. The quartet had already met and battled aliens, but the Skrulls were the typical little green men embodying the classic sci-fi "they hide among us" theme. The Watcher is something else altogether, a godlike being welcoming the human race to the stars, putting in perspective the dangerous and yet trivial conflict between the USA and the Soviets. Indeed, the propaganda side of the story is probably its weakest element, but thankfully the Red Ghost doesn't stress it too much and once you look past the symbolic difference between a quartet of friends being there for each other and a despot exploiting three unknowing apes, the tale flows quite well. Speaking of the apes, super-primates are more of a DC thing, but for all the apparent goofiness of the concept they work quite well here, as their inability to speak adds an edge of menace whilst managing not to slow the story down with unnecessary bits of monologuing.

It's also interesting to note how much the Four have evolved only 15 months after their debut. In my review for Fantastic Four #2 I mentioned how back then everything was still a work in progress, especially with regards to the Thing, who was belligerant to the point of being dangerous to his team-mates. Now Ben Grimm has become a gruff yet clearly good character, who no longer resents Reed for the accident that turned him (he doesn't even mention it when insisting to go along on the Moon), playfully closes him into a test tube and even enjoys the lack of gravity inside the ship. After addressing some letters of complaints about the Invisible Girl in the previous few issues, Stan is also clearly trying to let her have a bigger impact, but the very passive nature of her powers doesn't help and despite his best efforts it will take a while longer before she can really throw her weight around in a fight.

I don't know of many Fantastic Four Kirby stories inked by Ditko, who makes the Torch a little skinnier than usual and the Thing bulkier and not quite as refined as Ayers'. However I really like the extra lines he adds to Kragoff and the apes, the latter looking especially dynamic and creepy.

Final Verdict: The nascent Marvel Universe at its best. 5/5