Plot: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Writer: Sean McKeever
Artist: Joe Dodd
Editor: C. B. Cebulski

Remakes make the world go around. From toys to movies to comic books, we are surrounded by remade products in our popular culture. (In high art, it’s called re-interpretation or forgery, depending on whether the new artist acknowledges their creation.)

In the toy world, we apparently want to own the toys of our youth or, at least, given them to our children. This is perhaps the most explicable since toys wear out (we’ll pretend that everyone actually plays with the toys they buy and never places them in a display case). Like any other useful item, a good toy (or tool or whatever) may not go out of fashion. Consider the fork, the chair, the potted plant.

At the other logical extreme, we recreate movies. The traditional arguments in favor of this behavior are: 1) updating an original for modern tastes; and 2) improving an inappropriate/poor original. (Sometimes an original is redone as a means of making a separate, unrelated point, such as Mario Van Peebles just-released remake of his father’s [b]Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song[/b]. These works are making something entirely new.)

Comics have a long history of remaking popular tales. Most commonly, superhero origins are re-visited to fit modern tastes or plot requirements. Wolverine’s claws and Green Lantern’s power ring change with the stroke of a pen. Even with the re-envisioning, it is not so common to restart a comic series from the beginning. DC’s Year 1 explorations might be viewed as such. Marvel’s Ultimate line continues to plumb the same territory. Marvel Age is the first series, however, to take the actual plots and follow along issue by issue. It is an interesting experiment, but it does beg the question of why Marvel does not simply re-publish the original issues at user-friendly prices. Throughout their history, Marvel has had whole series of reprints, ensuring that new readers could catch on to current happenings.

So, we are to gather the original required improvement, if only for the sake of modern audiences. It can not be because the original issue was inappropriate for all ages. That was the whole point of comic books in 1962. If the child was interested in the comic book based on the cover, then it was appropriate for them, especially if it featured superheroes.

So, the remake is to fit the current world and modern tastes require new artwork and fewer words? I’d like to believe that it is not true, but I’ll grant that it may be. But doesn’t a remake need to remain true to the original and what made it special?

This issue is a re-make of Fantastic Four #3 from March, 1962. That issue introduced the team’s costumes, their “skyscraper hideout”, and the Fantasti-Car. They also confronted Miracle Man for the first time. Miracle Man was a lousy villain and the plot involving him was mediocre. The cool stuff in the story involved sub-plots and technical details. The Baxter Building is mapped out within the original issue. The uniforms provide wacky entertainment. The Marvel Age issue focuses too much on Miracle Man and not enough on the cool stuff. The Skrull issue did a delightful job updating the original with a heaping dose of humor. MA FF #3 started in the same vein, but faded down the stretch until my co-reader and I grimaced at the lame ending. And the soap opera cliff-hanger was no masterpiece forty years ago either.

All in all, though, I still think that you should be giving Marvel Age comics to every child on your shopping list. They don’t need to see Spiderman 2. They need to read the $6 trade paperback collecting Marvel Age Fantastic Four.

July, 2004