Fantastic Four #3

The Menace of the Miracle Man

By Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Sol Brodsky

Villains: Miracle Man

So, What Happens?

The team are having a night out watching a stage magician, the Miracle Man. He mystifies them with illusions and seemingly beats the Thing in a contest of strength as well as harmlessly taking a punch from him. Reed muses that they might be unable to deal with him if he ever turned to crime.

As the Fantastic Four return to their new Baxter Building headquarters the Miracle Man has worked out that he can use a giant monster statue promoting a new film to aid a villainous master plan.

The next day Sue unveils some new matching costumes for the team but their free time is ended when they see a news report of the monster statue terrorising the city. As they get ready to investigate the Police receive a message from the Miracle Man promising he will conquer the earth.

Reed attempts to block the huge statue by stretching himself into a net across the street but the Miracle Man downs Reed by throwing a house brick at his head.

As Reed apologises to the Police commissioner for his failings the Torch takes his turn to attack the statue. The Torch manages to burn it to the ground before it can steal an army prototype tank but the military still turn their guns on the Torch. The Thing at least gets to attack the Miracle Man but he is defeated with a single gesture which sends Ben to his knees. Seemingly triumphant the Miracle Man escapes with the tank, not knowing he is being followed by the invisible Sue.

The three male heroes argue over who was to blame for their defeats and Johnny touches a nerve when he mocks the Thing’s new rocky appearance.

Sue reaches the Miracle Man’s hideout but is detected by his guard dog. The villain soon hypnotises her and has her summon the other members of the team. When they arrive they are easily held off with a machine gun and the Miracle man, despite summoning them, runs away again. With their helicopter damaged they follow in a vintage car. Malleable Reed taking the place of a missing tyre.

Johnny manages to fly on ahead and let out a blast of white hot flame, blinding the Miracle Man and seemingly robbing him of his ability to hypnotise.

The villain dealt with the Torch and Thing return to their argument and Johnny flies off vowing never to return.

So is it any good?:

Not as such, but it contains the first sight of a lot of things that make up the classic FF.

It is the first issue with a cliffhanger ending, previewing the soap opera component that played such a large role in the classic Marvel feel. Presumably this is what prompted Roy Thomas to write a letter praising its ‘continuity’ that would be published two issues later.

The team wear costumes for the first time and the Baxter Building and Fantasticar are introduced, as in a tiny cameo is the Pogo Plane.

The story involves the team using their powers and acting as super heroes far more than in previous issues. Reed stretches himself across the street and the villain is finally beaten when Johnny burns in a bright flash to blind him. The Thing's power is still mainly directed at his teammates particularly Johnny.

Issue 1 featured the team encountering monsters in a far off land and fleeing, hoping they would be hidden forever. Issue 2 featured a plucky Reed tricking the alien invaders to save the Earth. Both staples of the stories from Strange Tales or Journey into Mystery. Here the team tries to stop a villain’s crimes using their powers and with the co-operation of the authorities. It is far more recognisably a super hero tale. It was also nice to see Sue acting alone and following the villain after Ben had told her to keep out of danger. She was captured by a dog and immediately hypnotised but at least she was taking an active role.

Unfortunately the issue features a fairly poor villain who is revealed as being simply a hypnotist. Even his design is stereotypical and could have come from the 1940s. While the team makes heavy going of defeating him, each threat is revealed to be far less than they thought, something which sucks a lot of the drama from the story.

How many of the threats they faced were actually real and in how much danger were they? Lee still doesn’t quite have faith in the idea of telling a super hero story seriously as high drama in the way that would mark the best points of his and Kirby’s run on the title.

Kirby does a lot of good design work here and was clearly having fun with both the monstrous statue and the classic cars. His Thing mask is discarded within a few pages but the rest of the team’s uniforms have stood the test of time. His Johnny is still very young looking, he is not quite the dashing teen sensation of later years but more like the goofy kid sidekick of a dozen 40s and 50s Kirby titles.

Are there any goofy moments?

The cutaway diagram of the Baxter Building includes a ‘Giant Map Room’ for the team to store all of their Giant Maps.

The Miracle Man relies on a tossed brick to deal with Reed. Despite all the ‘Atomic Tanks’ some things remain low-tech.

The whole section with the vintage cars reads like Kirby throwing in a bizarre interlude just because he fancies drawing jalopies. Reed taking the place of one of the tyres feels a lot more like Plastic Man than anything you would see in the FF a few years later.

Trivia:

The Mask that Ben briefly wears in this issue was intended to be accompanied by domino masks for the other members. An idea that was discarded after the initial pencils tried it out and it was found to look silly. The Thing returned to his face mask during Tom DeFalco’s run after his face was injured by Wolverine.

The Miracle Man was never used again by Lee or Kirby but did return, with real powers, during Gerry Conway’s run in issue 138, he appeared in a variety of other titles before being killed by the Scourge of the Underworld. He wasn’t quite the only Kirby villain to meet that fate (the Ant-Man foe the Hijacker was also on the list as was the Vamp from Kirby’s late 70s Cap run) but he was by far the victim with the longest history in the MU.

Is it a landmark?:

It’s the first appearance of the team’s costumes, the Fantasticar and the Baxter Building, the Miracle Man is less important.

Where can I read it?:

The first Fantastic Four Essentials and Masterworks and Omnibus volumes.