Fantastic Four #4

The Coming of the Sub-Mariner

By Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Sol Brodsky

Villains: none

Guest Appearances: Namor

So, What Happens?

The team is distraught that Johnny seems to be going through with his plan to leave them and never come back. They separate to look for him in various places he has been known to frequent although Sue and Reed are a little worried that the Thing plans on continuing his feud with the Torch if he is the one who finds him.

Despite their concern Reed and Sue’s searching methods need some refinement. Sue goes to a coffee shop and invisibly drinks a coke, scaring the customers, while Reed pulls random passers-by from the backs of speeding motorcycles to ask them if they have seen the torch. They haven’t.

Ben does manage to track Johnny down to a motor repair shop. Knowing the Torch can’t flame on around gasoline Ben threatens to smash him with a car and wants to show him what he will do to deserters. Ben’s rage seems to trigger a change and he momentarily returns to a human form. This allows Johnny to escape and Ben then breaks down as his skin yet again hardens to its orange rocky form.

Feeling that the team is out for his blood Johnny wanders the Bowery, getting lost among all the other derelicts. He tries to spend the night in a flophouse but the local down-and-outs insist on teasing one of their number who is apparently as strong as the long lost Sub-Mariner. The drifter easily throws off his attackers and the torch uses a flame to burn away his beard and reveal the Sub-Mariner. The Torch carries Namor to the nearby bay and throws him into the water, curing his amnesia and sending him off at high speed towards Atlantis.

He arrives to find it in ruins, with a radioactive glow still evident. His people are long gone. While he knows they won’t have been harmed by radiation Namor is still angry over the damage done and vows to attack the surface. He returns to New York and Johnny and tells him of his plans for revenge before heading back to the sea to wake a sea monster to lead the attack. Johnny promptly signals his teammates.

The giant monster Namor unleashes destroys a fishing boat and heads straight for New York. The Governor immediately gives the order to evacuate the city. The FF stay and attempt to turn it back but Johnny is soon doused with water and knocked out of the fight and the monster climbs onto land and starts to ravage the city. The Thing volunteers to carry a nuclear warhead into the stomach of the beast. He barely escapes back out through its mouth before the bomb explodes and kills the monster. The blast manages to also knock out the Thing who gets carried away by his newly grateful teammates.

Namor merely vows to summon more monsters and starts to blow the horn that will bring them to the city. Sue invisibly steals it away from him but Namor soon catches her and when she returns to visibility he instantly falls for her. After he threatens a constant wave of monster attacks on America’s cities Sue agrees to be his bride. The men however are having none of it and attack with the Torch flying fast enough to create a tornado that dumps Namor and his dead monster back in the sea and separates him from his monster summoning horn into the bargain.

So is it any good?:

I enjoyed it, even though it has dated a lot. In the scale of the attack on New York and the large role played by Johnny it owes a lot to the Namor/Human Torch battles of the 1940s. It also finds time for Ben to earn some genuine sympathy. There is a real malice in his attack on the Torch, to the point that the pathos of his flipping back and forth between rock and flesh doesn’t earn him much credit but the scenes of him carrying the bomb into the maw of the monster are possibly the first heroic acts we have seen from him in the title and Kirby squeezes a lot out of them. Similarly Johnny is starting to be more recognisable, he is more handsome and looks less like an annoying kid brother than in previous issues and by running away from the team’s ill-treatment but returning to save the day he too gets his first moments of heroism.

In previous issues it has seemed like Reed was the audience identification figure but here your sympathies are with Johnny and explicitly as a misunderstood but brave teen, something the core audience was more likely to understand. He and the Thing are starting to shape up as the two break out characters of the title.

Sue at least tries to get involved by stealing Namor’s horn but she is soon caught and with the villain swooning over her is ready to follow him into the sea and marry him if it will save the day. Brave in a way but quite a weak, reactive way. The frisson between her and Namor would pass for characterisation for both of them for quite a while. It’s not a good issue for Reed, apart from using his stretchable body in a few pointlessly extravagant ways while searching for Johnny he doesn’t get to do very much at all.

Namor is drawn in quite a 1940s style but, while he doesn’t do much more than demand his revenge and assert his royalty, he has more charisma than the previous antagonists and it is clear that we, like Sue, are supposed to see something admirable in him. Despite his strength and power he, like the Mole Man and Miracle Man, largely battles the team by sending monsters against them. This issue features a big battle in as much as the scenery gets damaged but we still haven’t seen much of slugfest against a bad guy.

Are there any goofy moments?

The US military seemingly have depots within New York City which contain nuclear weapons that they would leave unattended during the city’s evacuation.

Namor’s monstrous bipedal whale has a blowhole. Something that whales use to breath oxygen. I’m not sure how the creature managed to do this during its ‘ages long slumber’ on the sea bed. The Torch also goes out of his way to take the monster with Namor in his huge water spout despite it already being pronounced dead.

Trivia:

Namor’s amnesia prior to this story was revealed to be caused by Destine and his Helmet of Power (the disguised Serpent Crown). He was eventually revealed in the Iron Man and Sub-Mariner one shot and featured heavily in the first year of Namor’s own title.

Namor’s kingdom was apparently never referred to as Atlantis prior to this story.

Despite this issue promising that Namor’s horn (eventually named as the Horn of Proteus) being lost forever it was in fact found by Captain Barracuda in Fantastic Four 219

Is it a landmark?:

Yes, the reintroduction of the Sub-Mariner would be a landmark in itself but the way that it tied the series to the 1940s Timely comics was even more important from the point of view of the creation of a shared universe.

Where can I read it?:

The first Fantastic Four Essentials and Masterworks and Omnibus volumes.