Apparently I'm on a ten-year cycle when it comes to John Byrne's widely acclaimed run on Fantastic Four. I read and generally enjoyed what issues I could find when they first came out in the early 1980s. In 1994, desperate to read the conclusions to two particular stories - Dr. Doom's alliance with Terrax and the trial of Reed Richards - I bought a handful of back issues and, I recall, was faintly disappointed. They sat in my longboxes until the past week, when, inspired by Matt Rossi's column on Byrne and the Legion of Super-Heroes, I decided to dig them out and look again.
Twenty years may be enough to turn even the most cherished comics to vinegar, but these stories really didn't weather the decades. The worst casualty is the issue I was once most eager to read, Fantastic Four #262, the grand finale in which Reed Richards justifies his saving the life of Galactus to a jury of the great devourer's victims. Twenty years ago this was an unfound issue that loomed large in my imagination. Ten years ago it was a prolix flop that couldn't answer any of the questions it raised. But today... today, it just may be downright offensive.
Some of its flaws are merely stylistic, like Byrne's unnecessary insertion of himself into the issue or his equally egotistical need to demean anything former creative partner Chris Claremont ever touched (something that would have quite eluded me at the age of eleven).
The serious moral and philosophical problems begin when Reed offers his defense for sparing the life of Galactus, a planet-killer who has since devoured a world of seven billion beings:
When Galactus first came to Earth all those long years ago we were told by the Watcher that he was not evil - that Galactus is in fact beyond good and evil. That is a statement which has long troubled me, for if a being is truly neither good nor evil he is by definition neutral.
Apparently Reed's been reading the Player's Handbook.
Incidentally, I reread the original Lee/Kirby Galactus story this morning - a far more pleasant diversion than wallowing through Byrne's run - and Byrne doesn't quite seem to get it. The Watcher does say in FF #50 that "Galactus is not evil! He is above good... or evil! He does what he must... for he is Galactus!" But when the Thing complains that "Baldy decides ta turn philosopher!", the Watcher answers, "One must understand a problem before one may combat it!" Just because he comprehends Galactus's rationale for his actions does not mean he isn't obligated to resist them. This point eludes both Reed and Uatu in Byrne's issue.
All kidding aside, perhaps the problem does boil down to Byrne's Gary Gygax-inspired view of the universe; existing beyond the scale of human life doesn't make Galactus "neutral" and doesn't remove his actions from human moral judgment, especially when they result in the deaths of billions of humans or equivalent sentient beings. Reed himself recognizes, in FF 262, that there can be nothing neutral about Galactus.
And so Byrne decides he must be good. Reed argues,
Albert Einstein once said that 'God does not play at dice.'
...or something like that.
He meant that there is an order of things in our universe. And it does not require any belief in a supreme being to realize that Galactus must somehow be part of that order - and, I suspect, an important part. For if he is truly to be considered neutral then the apparent evil of his actions must, in the end result, not be evil. And so, they must be part of some greater good. I cannot believe he would be allowed to exist, if this were not the case.
This sparked one of the most beloved runs in Fantastic Four history as Dr. Richards, an eager young Johnny Storm, and their native guide Wyatt Wingfoot embarked on a series of amazing adventures around the globe. By turns hilarious and moving, sardonic and deadly serious, these journeys took the characters from brutal Latverian wars to the magical paradise of Attilan, with Reed maintaining all the while that the tragedies they suffered served a higher purpose.
The run was not universally acclaimed, however. Some fans flatly refused to accept that Reed's contraction of syphilis served the greater good of space exploration; others mourned Ben Grimm's tragic drowning in the Sea of Lisbon. An angry minority objected vocally to Susan Richards's repeated subjection to rape, torture, sexual slavery, and, in one particularly memorable episode, the consumption of her left buttock by a starving Annihilus. Byrne cheerfully reminded these humorless feminists that his Sue was a "liberated" woman and that these torments provided opportunities for her to showcase new uses of her force-field powers, thus confirming that all was for the best in this, the best of...
Okay, I can't keep this up any longer. Needless to say, as both a comic book reader and a literature professor who frequently teaches Voltaire's Candide, I was deeply dissatisfied by Reed's use of his placid faith in a higher power to justify planetary-scale genocide.
Notice how, over the course of Reed's speech, Galactus slips from "beyond good and evil" to "neutral" to "part of some greater good," all for no better reason than Reed "cannot believe he would be allowed to exist" otherwise (this in spite of his disclaimer that "it does not require belief in any supreme being" to accept his reasoning).
Lilandra, whom Byrne (Byrne!) calls an "arrogant witch" and yet who with each rereading looks more and more like the only sane person in this comic, demands to know "Where then is your proof? Proof that the deaths of uncounted billions work toward a greater good?" Reed's answer:
Ultimately I have no proof, Majestrix. I have only logic... logic and faith.
Logic without any connection to real-world observation or experience - in other words, exactly what lands Pangloss and his pupil in so much trouble. The theory about Galactus's greater good is just Reed's guesswork, stemming from his assumptions that there is a supreme order of the universe and that such an order must necessarily work for the ultimate benefit of all.
He uses these assumptions to justify Galactus's destruction of inhabited worlds, a disturbingly complacent philosophy for an ostensible superhero. Worse yet, he also uses them to justify his own saving of Galactus's life, as if he had no agency in that decision. (His initial, nobler reason for saving Galactus, because he was a sentient being who deserved saving, is curiously absent from this issue - perhaps because Galactus has just ended seven billion other sentient lives.) Yet the Watcher, as sycophantic as any Kurt Busiek character, says,
Measure now the power of the intellect of this lone Earth-man. For he has reasoned order out of chaos. And he has reasoned correctly, as will be shown with the testimony of my second witness...
The second witness at this interstellar trial is the Norse god Odin, who retells the origin of Galactus (hey, you know what most John Byrne comics need? more exposition) and explains his purpose in the universe:
Thus was born into the new universe a new natural force. Like the solar wind, like the super-nova... like the roiling seas that tested our viking worshippers. Tested them, and made them strong. Such is the function of Galactus. To each world in time he comes and his very coming is a test. Those that pass the test are strengthened by it, and made more worthy of that great fate which is the promised end of our universe. Those that fail, fail totally, and are forever expunged, wiped from the slate of time and space.The actions of Reed Richards were in no way criminal. Let this trial be at an end! SO SPEAKS ODIN!!
And then the fucker disappears without so much as a cross-examination, depriving the court of its due process:
LILANDRA: All-Father, you say you heard the story of Galactus from your son, Thor.ODIN: Aye, it be so!!!
LILANDRA: Then why isn't he here to tell us himself?
ODIN: Forsooth, my son doth recover from grevious wounds sustained in the field of battle. [*in THOR 339, on sale now! - Jurisprudent Jim]
LILANDRA: I see. And could you tell the court the nature of these wounds?
ODIN: Brought low he was by an alien champion who did vie with him for the awesome power of Mjolnir!
LILANDRA: Mm hmm. Now correct me if I am wrong, All-Seeing One, but cannot Mjolnir be wielded only by the worthy?
ODIN: Aye...
LILANDRA: And if this alien champion has somehow wrested Mjolnir from your son's control, might that not impugn Thor's merit?
ODIN: What? No!!! This be not mine intent--
LILANDRA: --And does that not cast doubts upon his credibility? How do we know the Thunder God even heard the tale of Galactus's origins? Isn't your entire story just hearsay?
ODIN: WOMAN, YOU TWIST MY WORDS!!
LILANDRA: I hope the court will take note of the witness's outburst...
ODIN: Odin is sorry.
LILANDRA: Thank you. Now, can you please tell the court how you lost your eye?
No, instead Byrne wheels out a procession of literal dei ex machina - Odin, Galactus, then Eternity himself - to show up, tell the court Reed was right for little or no reason beyond their own authority, and then blow away. So much for Reed's reliance upon the "most perfect legal system in the galaxy" - which, by the way, depends upon a unanimous not guilty verdict that's measured by the emotions of the accused, witnesses, lawyers, audience, etc. I'm guessing the M'ndavians have a 100% conviction rate and a highly active death penalty.
This nonsensical justice system actually sums up Byrne's story pretty well. He makes repeated praise of Richards's logic, of the perfection of M'ndavian justice, of the place of Galactus in the cosmos, yet all of those rational constructs turn out to be shams, founded on blind faith, divine authority, and an unquestioned assumption that whatever is, is right. Richards and Byrne make the same mistake Pangloss did, rationalizing a system of belief that can be used to justify any suffering, no matter how evil or senseless, if it might be part of some inscrutable plan.
Byrne, as if realizing these implications, attempts to back out of this fatalist dead end on the last page of the issue. He asks the Watcher,
What about Galactus, Watcher? Is his task ended now? Or will everyone just have to content themselves with watching happily the next time he consumes a world?
Which is, if you think about it, pretty much what the Watchers do, unless it's Earth. Uatu's answer:
To render things thus would be to rob life-kind of free will, and in all the cosmos but one being is deprived of that freedom:
Reed Richards and every single other creature at the trial?
Galactus.
Oh.
The Watcher assures Byrne that
Galactus will go on. The testing will continue, until that distant day he finds a world with enough power to stop him, to end for all time his cosmic hunger.
Would that day be Fantastic Four #50, May 1966? Or maybe Fantastic Four #243, June 1982? Or any one of the dozen other times he got his purple ass kicked - including, that very month, by Aunt May, Franklin Richards, and a box of Twinkies? (Okay, so that turned out to be a series of bad dreams. Hey, it was published during Assistant Editor's Month - so was this, and at least the Marvel Team-Up was trying to suck.)
Here Byrne's already flaccid argument falls apart like soggy newspaper. If Galactus's ultimate purpose is to test species in some pseudo-Darwinian mechanism until he dies, then the Fantastic Four have interfered with that mechanism countless times. Moreover, if Lilandra's court is supposed to let nature take its course when Galactus eliminates the Skrulls, why isn't the same true for Reed when humanity has a chance to eliminate Galactus?
On some level I can respect what Byrne was trying to do here - use a couple of Silver Age comics characters to stage a metaphysical debate about suffering and evil and fate. Galactus, originally created by Jack Kirby as an analogue for God, might have proven well-suited to the task of asking why God allows terrible tragedies to happen. The Galactus of Fantastic Four #49, who asks, "What import are brief, nameless lives... to Galactus?", is not so different from the God of Candide, of whom a Turkish wise man says, "When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt, do you suppose he worries whether the ship's mice are comfortable or not?"
The allegory doesn't work perfectly - Galactus is only a destroyer, not a creator, and part of the same moral plane as his victims - and by the time Byrne strips him down to a weak Darwinian winnowing mechanism that potential is lost. If you were really going to do Candide in a comic book, a) hopefully you wouldn't endorse Pangloss, and b) you would make God God, not some hapless demiurge. This Galactus isn't God at all, he's the Lisbon earthquake - and who wouldn't want to prevent that, if given the chance?
But Byrne, unwilling and unable to do any lasting damage to Marvel's first franchise by sentencing Reed or Galactus to death (although he's perfectly happy to kill off Roy Thomas's Skrull characters), turns to Panglossianism as a hamfisted justification for his maintenance of the Marvel status quo. It isn't enough for him to restore things to the typical Fantastic Four state of grace; he also has to convince us that the characters were right, and he is right, to do so. And that may be the most pernicious rationalization of all.
Posted by Marc at May 18, 2004 7:28 PM