Wednesday 3 October 2018

DOOM WATCH...


Images copyright MARVEL COMICS

Behold - DOCTOR DOOM - whose image The FANTASTIC FOUR (well, three of them anyway) can see by means of a spherical screen, transmitted from elsewhere in the Latverian monarch's castle stronghold.  Got that?  It's a TV pic, yet there's REED RICHARDS, supposedly the brightest man on the planet, stretching out for that image and saying "I've got to reach him!"  Why?  What good would it do for Reed to touch the televised visage of the villain who's trying to destroy them?  No good at all, surely.

Is Reed hallucinating in his oxygen-bereft state?  Does he think that he sees the real Doom before him - even if it's only a giant head and shoulders shot of the evil arch-fiend?  The picture as dialogued just doesn't make any sense.  Ah, but that means it's the dialogue that's at fault, which suggests STAN LEE is to blame for the absurdity, not JACK KIRBY, you say.  Well, Stan's merely giving voice to what Jack drew, which is Reed reaching out to touch a giant, globular television screen, so Jack's equally culpable in this instance.

Or, I suppose, we could say it's merely symbolic and therefore not meant to be taken literally and let it go at that.  Oh, I dunno though...

What do you think?   

8 comments:

Terranova47 said...

I think I'm now beginning to doubt that Desperate Dan shaved with a blowtorch. Another idol bites the dust!

Kid said...

Nah, the FF are made up, T47 - Dan is real! And he wipes his @rse with sandpaper, not Andrex.

Anonymous said...

Ah, takes me back to The Complete Fantastic Four in 1977. Those early covers were so wordy!

And it's not just Reed - the Torch has had a go at the TV screen too.

Kid said...

And The Thing is ready to hurl a chunk of concrete at it, no doubt ripped from the floor just out of our sight. Reed, however, is the only one who explains his intentions. Just think, if Reed had died, that would have left Susie for me. (What's that? They're not real, remember? Oh, that's right - I forgot.)

Dave S said...

Maybe Reed means 'reach' in the sense of his words reaching him emotionally and reasoning with Ol' Vic?

Having said that though, the rest of his line and his outstretched arm do suggest that he means 'reach' in the emotional sense, so I'm probably talking rubbage.

Kid said...

And if you were, I'd be far too polite to tell you, DS. Imaginative try though.

Dave S said...

Mistake in my last post, Kid, I should have said Reed's outstretched arm suggests he means reach in the PHYSICAL sense. Oops!

Kid said...

I noticed, but I knew what you meant to say, so I let it pass. (Didn't I say I was polite?)



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