Fantastic Four #8

Prisoners of the Puppet Master

By Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers

Villains: The Puppet Master

Guest Appearances: none

So, What Happens?

The team wants to keep the Thing out of the lab while Reed works and this prompts yet another temper tantrum from Ben who storms off into the city. Sue follows him invisibly and together they spot a man about to leap from the top of a bridge. The FF flare brings Johnny to the scene and he manages to rescue the, seemingly entranced, man before he falls to his death.

The would be suicide had been the work of the Puppet Master who, after carving likenesses of people from radioactive clay, had the power to make them live out the little stories he played out on miniature sets.

He quickly builds a Thing puppet and seizing control of him, brings the original to the apartment where he lives with his step daughter Alicia. Blind Alicia senses that the Thing hadn’t come alone and the Puppet Master fills the apartment with Ether to knock out the invisible Sue.

Noting Alicia’s resemblance to Sue he has her cut her hair in Sue’s style and dresses her in her uniform before sending the mind controlled Thing, and the puzzled Alicia back to the Baxter Building to deal with the rest of the FF. While this is going on the Puppet Master seizes control of a prisoner at the high security jail and stages a break out.

The Thing causes havoc at the Baxter Building but eventually crashes through Reed’s latest experiment, covering himself in a solution that turns him back to Ben Grim and breaking the Puppet Master’s control. As they ponder what to do next Ben comforts the confused Alicia and she continues to hug him as the solution dries and he turns back to the Thing.

The team regroups and heads to Master’s apartment to rescue Sue. Despite the presence of a huge robot and the villain himself fleeing on a flying horse they manage to retrieve her and then head to the prison where they deal with the jailbreak.

His plans in tatters the Puppet Master returns to his apartment where he confronts the tearful Alicia and unveils a new puppet, himself as a world leader. He struggles with his step daughter and as the puppet of himself is thrown to the floor he trips and falls out of the window to the street below. The FF arrive to comfort Alicia with the menace seemingly defeated.

So is it any good?:

One of the things I wondered about when I started this process was whether there were ever any good Puppet Master or Mad Thinker stories, they seemed like villains who got wheeled out the most for rather ineffective, repetitive stories. This is perhaps more true of the seventies and eighties than Marvel’s earliest days so I wanted to see if they were ever effective, challenging villains. I was pleasantly surprised by this story, or at least half of it.

The first half of the Puppet Master’s plan, the bits before it involves the FF, are very effectively told. His grotesque, marionette like appearance and the idea of him insanely slaving away over tiny detailed models in an apartment somewhere combine very well and the sections of his unnamed victim climbing up the bridge and about to throw himself off are excellent. You get a real sense of twisted evil from him here.

It is just about held up through the sections where he grabs control of the Thing and the way he uses Alicia’s resemblance to Sue (although why he didn’t just also take control of Sue is a good questions) and also in the way he lashes out when Alicia calls him father.

That damaged relationship with Alicia is obviously key to any drama in the character, particularly when she becomes more important to the team.

The ending, while telegraphed, is also quite powerful and I liked the final panel wondering whether he had fallen to his doom from the window or whether it had something to do with the treatment of his own, bizarre, Puppet Master puppet.

The story loses its power a little once the Puppet Master has to be given a series of weapons and devices that allow him to actually battle or escape the FF physically. Why does he have a huge, powerful robot in his apartment? It might be modelled on a puppet but it doesn’t have anything to do with his radioactive clay or the powers that come from it. This straying from the concept, half way through his first appearance, shows the limitations of the character despite his creepy power.

He, like the Thinker, only really works in the obsessive planning stage of a story, once things have slipped from his control he doesn’t really offer much dramatically. However there is a lot to like in his depiction here, he is a very grubby little villain and I liked that his fantasies for world power basically amounted to being fed meals while wearing ermine robes.

There is something quite stunted about the character as if to say that yes, he can make puppets that control anyone and as such is fairly powerful, but his power is just as limited and oddball as he was in real life.

The other major introduction, Alicia, is l argely important for her reaction to the Thing. The idea that a blind person could see into people’s hearts and be immune to prejudice is pretty clichéd, it was used a lot in earnest 60s movies about racism, but it works here because this issue, like so many before it, had started with the Thing lashing out at his teammates for their own inability to see the man within.

He even picks up on the fact that they only call him ‘Ben’ when they want things from him. There hadn’t in truth been much sign of nobility from the Thing in preceding issues but his pain at his transformation had been expressed well and you can see the appeal of a character who likes him for what he is, particularly in a scene that has him returning to his orange state, crushed as normal, but also wondering if he has to change back because Alicia prefers him that way. This would be dealt with a lot in later years but is there right from Alicia’s first appearance.

So it’s not a great story, it lacks the courage to continue with the tone of its first section, possibly because a truly evil villain with total control of people was hard to show in a comics code approved book in 1962. His plans had to become more cartoony in the climactic sections, but at the very least they do create a chilling villain in that first half and the story does deal with the Thing in an interesting way and have Sue actually playing a fairly active role. A good issue.

Are there any goofy moments?

How exactly can the ability to command anyone he models in radioactive clay translate to the ability to create a jet powered flying horse?

I’m also not that sure what the point of creating a puppet of himself, dressed as a King, was? Would it allow him to control himself or would it somehow make the world leaders he had modelled treat him as a king? If so why bother with a prison break and throwing people off the Brooklyn Bridge?

Similarly why create a puppet of a prisoner who was trusted to go into the warden’s office rather than of the warden himself?

Trivia:

The Puppet Master eventually got the fitting name of Philip Masters and an origin tying his clay, here just radioactive, to the mystical mountain of Wundagore in Transia. Aside from all the monsters and weapons retroactively tied into Kirby’s Eternals and Deviants Transia and Wundagore must have the record for being tied up in the most origin stories in the Marvel Universe.

Alicia isn’t a sculptress in this story, or at least her job isn’t revealed at all.

Is it a landmark?:

Yes, both the Puppet Master and Alicia went on to play large roles in the title.