Antimatter is eating my youth.

...just wanting to talk to you for a second. It's been a while since we seen each other, or at least it really seems like a long time.

Remembering back to a church-sponsored skiiing trip in January of '85.  Mom let me stack up on comics at the grocery store and I picked up "Crisis on Infinite Earths #1." The issue was framed on each cover by a piece talking about how the DC Universe was too confusing and they were going to consolidate it and "nothing would ever be the same" again.

The story had what I felt at the time were a bunch of DC second-stringers, most of whom I didn't know and had to look up in "Who's Who: The Definitive Guide to the DC Universe" (an encyclopedia in monthly installments of all the DC characters and major concepts, but only Vol 1 had come out yet). A gothy looking dude named Pariah was flashing in and out of different universes in the multiverse, and everywhere he showed up, he'd be forced to watch white antimatter ate up the place and people until he would flash out and flash in to another. It was really creepy and ominous and I wondered how even Batman and Superman would stack up against this existential threat. Pariah would pop up and have to watch as this freaky white stuff ate up everything and there was nothing left and he'd head out and have to watch it all happen to some other group of people and their universe, again and again.

Cut to last week. I was working late (big surprise) and hit the NPR website and learned Adam Yauch had died. Lately, Whitney Houston ate it and it doesn't seem too long since Michael Jackson kicked off. This stuff happens and, no offense to them, but they were pretty easy to shrug off either b/c they were on borrowed time anyhow or they had squandered their talent and mismanaged their lives and creatively speaking...well, nevermind b/c it's really mean so I won't even say it. You know where I'm going and let's just leave it at that.

But losing MCA almost moved me to tears.  I didn't know the guy and never really obsessed about him at all in any sort of youthful hero-worship sort of way, but I just felt that something was lost that will never be here again.  I mean, all of these dead celebrities are people and they leave folks behind that actually do know them and will mourn them, but this guy was different.

I was never the world's biggest Beastie Boys fan as some of my pals were, but they really did mean something to me. I wore out "License to Ill" in seventh grade in my Walkman and at summer camp. We could rap every song.  When Paul's Boutique came out, the new aesthetic blew my mind and I initially rejected it, but after a while I came to see it as the superior work that it was, and a step toward creative freedom and more importantly, a jail-break out of a very narrow and self-limiting sort of young white male persona into an infinite one, one that could grow and shift as you got older. And of course, by the time Check Your Head came out, I was a believer and admirer forever more.

They consciously made the jump from snarky meatheads to young men actively trying to create a culture, and to me that's the real boon of hip hop (not the macho swagger that gets mistaken for it). On PB, they recovered a lot of the pop culture artifacts from their childhood. It wasn't coherent, but they were creating the context of their own existence, referring to this, referring to that.

I learned that Adam was studying Tibetan Buddhism around the same time that I was studying Zen and Daoism rather intensely (though it's hard to be a Daoist in the Army) and there was some validation there. Certainly it was a jump from the beer guzzling lady-harassing dude he presented himself to be initially.  They started putting instrumentals on their albums. I'm sure there were other instances, but these guys showed you could be who you wanted to be. You could be a Jewish kid from Brooklyn but also be into hiphop; you could be a loudmouth jerk and morph into a Buddhist; you could take all the "crap" that you wasted your time on as a kid (comic books, sports, tv shows, etc.) and that really meant something to you, though you were told and sort of knew it was junk culture, and hold it close, work with it, extract the good stuff from it, and use it to make something new that expressed how you felt.  Even though it was '89, I think the 90s began the day Paul's Boutique was released. I'm not the only one who had to let it sit for a while before I could get into it, but it gave middle class white kids a new paradigm from which to live, and those of us who haven't lost our souls to work and life and all that's happened over the intervening years, it's because on some level we still live that way. I'm reading too much into it? 

Sure.

That's the whole point.

So when I read the NPR post, selfish as it was, I knew I'd never get a new Beastie Boys album again and I was sad. It was,with apologies to Hemingway, the end of something.

I hadn't bought the last two BB albums, much less even bothered to listen to them. Yep, I'm one of those people that make me cringe...not appreciating anything until it's gone and only then I celebrate it to the stars. It all rubs rawer the wound of recently losing a beloved stepfather who I know I didn't appreciate as much as I should have before he was gone, and now I'll never go over to his house and watch TV or drink a glass of sweet tea with him again. I think that's what it's really about, but it's all the same thing.

It's got me thinking about all those other 90s staples who moved me in a permanent way who I "outgrew"...the Chili Peppers, Pavement, Beck, all staples of that new paradigm of looking at the world, about as far from the Stones and the Beatles and the hippies as you can get, yet incorporating a lot of the stuff they discovered and moving beyond it into the new.  With me, it's all about the new and interesting concept, but you can't think about all this without thinking about how you need to honor the old stuff that made you, too.

And it got me thinking about you. I haven't talked to you in a while. Sometimes sheer inertia keeps me away; I'm ashamed, because it's been so long and I know it will probably be awkward and a bit painful at first. I keep waiting for the right time, for when things settle down and we're less busy, when I have something good to say to you. But I don't want to wait anymore. Let's make some time for each other.  If I don't call you, please call me and tackle me and tell me how it's all going. I miss you and all the stuff we use to laugh about, and I want to know you're ok b/c as much you might think I'm aloof and dodging you like I owe you money, I really do think about you all the time. I hope you're doing OK.

By the time January of '86 came around, they figured out how to deal with the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" and the series wrapped.  Some stuff was just plain lost forever. But a lot of stuff from the various universes/old multiverse was recovered and they slammed it into one big chaotic universe and it was in this weird state of reboot/"same old, same old." A completely new place, but with the past as prologue

I don't know if it can really work that way, but I'll talk to you soon.  Please look after yourself until then.

Reed Richards is Not a ---k: Hickman's Fantastic Voyage Part One

"It's okay to be afraid.  It's ok to fail.  But to say that you're not even willing to try...that's unacceptable..."

-Nathaniel Richards to his young son, Reed-

Jonathan Hickman has only been in the industry for a few years now, but his stories are the big, big type that are why I still bother to read comics--tales of secret histories, utopias, about characters taking initiative and boldly building a future, any future, rather than meekly sitting on their hands and protecting the status quo. Not all of his stories finish as satisfyingly as they begin, but all that I have read are incredibly interesting and thought provoking.  Knowing Hickman was a "big idea" guy (having read The Nightly News and Pax Romana) and also a high detail writer (his legendary "notebook" treatments are dwarfed only by apocryphal tales of those of Moore and Morrison), I was quite looking forward to his take on that quintessential Lee/Kirby collaboration, Fantastic Four.

Fantastic Four is a historically important though periodically stagnant title.  Its importance stems from the fact that it is Marvel's initial superhero title of the modern era, and so the successful run of Lee and Kirby--the longest continuous run on any title until just recently (102 consecutive monthly issues of the same writer/artist team--somewhere in the neighborhood of ten years, if you count annuals), and certainly the most creatively prolific--ensured that Marvel would become an ongoing concern.

That seminal run established the M.O. for Marvel--the idea that heroes could have distinct personalities and conflicting interests and points of view turned the dramatic dial up a few notches for what had been a sleepy children's lit subgenre, and Kirby's all-out 200 miles-per-hour visuals set the bar for the next twenty years. Since that run ended, there have been a few brilliant and fun stretches (Byrne's, Simonson's, and the Waid/Werringo run spring immediately to mind), but rarely have the creative teams recaptured the spirit of optimism and adventure of a science-loving, cosmos-exploring family in the atomic age, each one so larger than life that none can occupy the same space without high drama ensuing. 

Other than John Byrne's run in the 80s when the man had the midas touch (coming off of his Uncanny X-Men collaboration with Claremont), I never read the book much.  It always seemed based on an incredibly outdated and corny worldview. Optimism wasn't "in" in the grim 'n gritty 80s, when The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and all things Wolverine were king. Having since gone back and read much of the Kirby run, I'm astounded by how much of what's important, enduring, and distinctive about the Marvel Universe was laid down in those initial 100 or so issues.

I could never find a way "in" for the patriarch of the team, Reed Richards. He was old. (He had graying temples even in his first appearance, and smoked a pipe.) He was sort of jerky and condescending to everyone else in the book. He had stupid low-rent Plastic Man-style powers. Not only that, but he seemed more or less a living, breathing deus ex machina, as his brilliance was the solution to every problem.  And all apologies, but a guy who neglects his friends and family because his idea of fun is to slave away in a lab will likely never be cool to the young.  Like the narrative engineer he is, Hickman sets about solving this problem with a very "Reed-centric" story.

Things begin at the point of the Marvel Universe's "Dark Reign" baseline (i.e., immediately following the "Secret Invasion" event).  The bad guys are in charge of things and looking to use their advantage to smear the reputations of all the good guys and take them out of the equation.  Tony Stark is discredited, Nick Fury has disappeared, Captain America is dead, and evil nutjob Norman Osborne is running law enforcement.  Reed is at an all-time low.  He feels responsible, as he had a great deal of input leading up to this point, and based on outcomes, decisions he made in good faith made things worse rather than better.  That's not how supergeniuses are supposed to work.

[SPOILERS GALORE AHEAD--PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK]

Try as he might, he cannot see how he could have come to any better conclusions than he did.  The solution: to build a machine that gathers data from alternate realities, and pipe it into a device that extrapolates desirable and adverse outcomes, and their causes.   The data leads him to a conclusion that is disturbing. Reed has discovered that in the timestreams where he collaborated with others, disaster ensued; in the ones where/when he acted unilaterally, positive outcomes were created, without exception.  This puts a character already known for hubris in a bad spot.  Whereas he'd be inclined to compromise with others to build consensus, he now has a moral imperative not to, as false humility on his part can cause loss of life on a massive scale.

He finds out that Reeds from 140 other realities have arrived at the same conclusion. In what seems like a sure nod to Alan Moore's run on Supreme, he discovers the Council--a place where these 141 Reeds meet and solve problems on a multiversal level.

At this part, I'll just take a moment to step back and acknowledge the scale of all of this.  If Reed Richards is, as he describes himself, "the most brilliant mind in the universe," imagine the sheer brain power teaming with 140 other instances of himself would yield!  The ambition of the story  is well beyond any previous run that I have read on the book and approaches utopian fare like Miracleman and The Authority (not slight praise, I know!) Richards is going well beyond superheroics into universe building.  Together, the Council can take care of Galactus (i.e., the Marvel Universe's analog for God) problems before lunch.  Poverty and energy problems are things of the past, and with effort, they can save entire solar systems from extinction.

But as you'd expect there are flaws, and some pretty big ones at that.  For example, all members of the Council handle their Dr. Dooms in essentially the same way. Not wanting to toy with such a potentially destructive force, the solution is to lobotomize them and put them in captivity.  If that weren't enough to make Reed re-think his affiliation with them, he discovers something else they all have in common.  True enough, each version of Reed has set about the goal of "solving everything," but with that each has also made the judgement that the only way to do so is abdicating their role in their family.  As one member of the Council explains, "The work will consume you. How can we think about little things like our personal lives when the fate of all we know lies in the balance? Susan will stop understanding.  Her patience will run out as she's forced to raise the family all alone...Doesn't she deserve better? Ben and Johnny will get angry and eventually move on...Your children will resent you because you work too much and love too little..All you will have left is this."  It is then clear that "[t]he cost of solving everything is everything."  And in a character-defining moment, Reed decides this is not his way, and he leaves the Council to go back home to his wife.  The story ends with a very moving image: he returns and Sue, wearily, is still waiting for him.

Hickman has done his work and now I can really identify with Reed at this stage of my life. Certainly his is a talent not to be wasted.  However, the events in this story have calibrated the character's priorities.  There is work to be done, yes.  He will be tugged this way and that, and even though he wants to hunker down and just do what he does best and see the results, there are others he must answer to as well. Unlike his peers on the Council and unlike his own father (who makes appearances in several interludes throughout the story), Reed won't accept the compromises and expediencies that become the excuses we diminish ourselves with.  He won't take shortcuts (like lobotomizing Doom, or sacrificing time with his family for the sake of a greater sense of personal achievement).  Most importantly, he won't accept the false dichotomy of either being Great (in the sense of achievement) or being good (in the moral sense).  We can be very forgiving of this Reed. He carries a great weight, and even if he screws up by being aloof, or a workaholic, or short tempered, we know he's trying. He's trying to  do the "have it all" thing, which we know is impossible but the trying of it is worth it nonetheless.

Later in Hickman's FF macrostory, other characters take their turns at center stage (as they should in an ensemble book). Throughout, though, Reed Richards is depicted as a mature man who shoulders the burdens of responsibility but stays young by embracing possibility.  His family grows as he takes into his home those who need his help. He sees that through work and family he is building the future.  We might think, "Man, I wish I had a Dad like that."  But the far better thought is "I want to be a Dad like that."

Here's to you, Reed Richards.  You're the man.