DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (18)
By:
June 4, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
In May 1962’s Fantastic Four #4, the team’s adversary Sub-Mariner uses a magical conch-horn to summon Giganto, a colossal sea monster that he unleashes on New York City. Facing destruction, Ben Grimm/the Thing decides to strap a nuclear bomb to his back and allow himself to be swallowed by Giganto. Grimm assures teammate Sue Storm/the Invisible Girl that he will not really sacrifice himself, but that he will come back since he is no hero. And, then, one of my favorite heroes in the Marvel Universe marches through Giganto’s mouth into a different reality.
In an April 2013 episode of Adventure Time, Finn crawls into a pillow fort only to discover a pillow reality where he marries a pillow woman, has pillow children, becomes an old man, and dies.
After the trailers for the Fantastic Four: First Steps film came out, I revisited the team and read issue #4 for the first time since I was closer to the age of Finn’s viewers, reading the excellent Penguin Classics compilation of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original Fantastic Four run during the first half of 2024.
I was captivated by the eight panels in which the Thing walks around, fights a monster, and ignites the bomb inside Giganto. The first thing that caught my eye this time was the difference between the blue skies and urban setting outside and the darkness of the red and orange insides of the sea monster. In one panel, the Thing walks by a desolate graveyard of ancient and modern ships that were swallowed by Giganto. The colors do not only portray the insides of the behemoth, but of another reality that coexists outside the norms of sunlit conventions.
The decaying ships in the distance serve as a horizon to a world that is closer to the dimension that Finn finds. Even time in the pillow reality runs in a different way to Finn’s actual world since, after he dies as an old man, he comes out through the top of the pillow fort as a kid again only to find Jake and BMO waiting for him. Finn lived an entire life in less than thirty minutes, just as the Thing witnessed the ships that connected his world of the ’60s to those of civilizations of the past. Time works differently in a pillow fort and in the insides of a colossus.
Giganto’s insides are also plagued with sea monsters. Grimm fights and beats a roach-like creature that confronts him inside the bigger sea monster that he plans to defeat with the nuclear weapon. This mirror effect, this clash of realities between the inside and outside world, is reminiscent of the moment when in Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring) find the key and open the mysterious box. This action leads to a very different version of their story. Both stories have some connective tissue; the relationship between the two women, the mystery surrounding a possible murder, and the encounters in the diner. But the characters’ experiences and attitudes are somehow different, as is the Thing’s reality inside the belly of Giganto.
His reminder to Sue that he is not a hero stems from Grimm questioning his own humanity. Unlike the other recognizably normative members of the team, Ben’s transformation turned him into a stone creature. As he struggles to accept his new condition as a Thing (not a Man), Grimm confronts monsters within and without. The reality inside Giganto becomes an extension of Grimm’s psyche as he struggles with his new monstrous body. The destruction of Giganto when the bomb ignites is Grimm’s fight for his own humanity.
It is amazing what one can discover through a second experience of any text. Details that one may not, perhaps could not have noticed acquire a narrative importance. My second reading of the Fantastic Four threw light on the struggle of Grimm’s acceptance of himself within the belly of the beast.
DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | Mandy Keifetz on FAITH | Heather Quinlan on THE GRATEFUL DEAD | Carlo Rotella on SMOOTHER GROOVES | Art Wallace on MICHIGAN | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on TAYLOR SWIFT | Josh Glenn on ART | James Scott Maloy on BE-BOP DELUXE | Jake Zucker on LIGHT SLEEPER | Gabriela Pedranti on THE BIG BANG THEORY | Adam McGovern on DOGS | Tana Sirois on COLLABORATIVE EVOLUTION | Rani Som on LED ZEP | Holly Interlandi on HOT SAUCE | Jeff Lewonczyk on TWIN PEAKS | Nikhil Singh on PRE-TEEN DAVID LYNCH PROBLEMS | Christopher Rashee Stevenson on O’NEILL & THE SEA | Fran Pado on SHARKS | Juan Recondo on BEN GRIMM’S INNER LIFE | Miranda Mellis on KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD | Mimi Lipson on SOBRIETY | William Nericcio on ELYSIUM | Crockett Doob on SLEATER-KINNEY | Marlon Stern Lopez on PAT THE BUNNY | Crystal Durant on SEX AND THE CITY | Wendy Chin-Tanner on MY PARENTS’ ART STORE.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!