I am curious about the "ghosting" thing Johnny has with his girlfriends. "The guy who loves women doesn't spend his free time with them" or "seems to run away from them?" Do you have your guesses/theories on why this is so frequent for him? I'm guessing this has happened over the span of many decades, if not how it's always been. My first guess was "maybe they didn't want to show their teenage hero being too out there in the 60s" but that's just not it either, is it? He dated most people after that
sorry, anon, I fucked up and deleted the initial answer to this ask, but luckily I was writing in a doc, so let's try this again.
So for me, this is where "Johnny is in the closet" holds a lot of merit, even separate from the word of author (Marjorie Liu) confirmation that he had a sexual relationship with a man. You can't make gay jokes in the text about a character for years and years without it getting a little, like, is that what we're doing here. The "light in the asbestos loafers" comment, Julie Angel's "with my luck, he's probably gay -- oh, hi, Johnny!" line, Kat Farrell asking if he hooked up with Eminem, Ben commenting about his crush on Spider-Man, a villain literally named Makhizmo calling him "an effeminate -- these are all things that happened in canon. So for me, when you combine that with the less than stellar dating history here, I'm kind of like -- the homophobic dog meme factors in.
(FF #251) John Byrne when I catch you.
(Before anyone sends me hate mail about it again, I've gone back and forth on how I think about Johnny's sexuality over the years, whether he's gay or bi, and I'm not saying I don't think he's bisexual, but I think there's a strong reading of the canon that he prefers men. Anyway, none of it matters because Marvel doesn't acknowledge him as anything other than straight at the time of this post. I will break out the I Do Not Control How People Label the Human Torch's Sexuality reaction image if anyone tries it.)
Honestly, I think Johnny's relationship history is really interesting. There's a lot to analyze and explore, in a very different way than a character like Peter, who has really good romantic chemistry generally. But if we want to look at when and where Johnny ghosted hard, there's kind of three examples that come to mind. The first is admittedly the weakest, and I think the sliding timescale and generational attitudes on dating come into play here, but Dorrie Evans, Johnny's high school girlfriend, broke up with him because he stopped paying attention to her.
Johnny and Dorrie are always kind of an interesting case. They were never a melodramatic romance with highs and lows the way, say, Peter's first romance with Betty Brant played out -- Johnny and Dorrie's main drama was that she disliked him "flaming on" all the time. She didn't want to date a superhero, and wanted Johnny to be more mature. (She does literally compare him to Peter here, who she met once when he returned her wallet.) But Peter was prepared to marry Betty at the rich age of eighteen, and Johnny and Dorrie never have that intensity. When they break up, they remain friends, and he falls in love with Crystal in the same issue at basically first sight. I don't think Johnny ghosts Dorrie so much as that they fizzle, but it does kind of set the groundwork here. Johnny only has two relationships in the '60s, by the way, first with Dorrie and then with Crystal, so I don't think the decade had anything to do with it. The bigger cases (Nita and Psionics) came significantly later, both in the 2000s.
Johnny's romances post-Dorrie are I would say more typical, and I think he's in them, for the most part, up until his marriage. He really loves Crystal, and he and Frankie have some compelling drama and interesting differences that never really get a chance to shine because she dumps him to become Galactus' herald. I think the first time we start to see him kind of pull away from a woman's advances is when Sharon Selleck, a friend of Frankie's, tries to initiate a relationship with him after Frankie's departure, when Johnny is pursuing a girl named Julie Angel. (That also goes nowhere.) She kisses him, coming onto him, and he visibly panics about it. (FF #259)
Again, notably, he and Sharon stay friends, although she later falls off the page. Iirc, I don't believe we've seen her since Byrne's run, which is a shame because I liked her. But anyway, we don't really see a shift in Johnny's relationships until after his marriage. I've talked about this before, but Johnny doesn't have "celebrity" relationships before his marriage. How I'm defining those are that they are relationships with someone else with a high celebrity profile, where at least part of the draw is their combined profiles. These aren't quite sham relationships for the press -- but they're relationships built at least partially on the attention that Johnny and the other person receive from being seen together. In the case of the first one, Namorita Prentiss, that's something she and Johnny actually discuss before they start dating.
Johnny and Nita attended Johnny's movie premier together, were photographed together, and apparently liked each other -- or so it seemed, until Johnny started ghosting her hard enough that other characters commented on it. (FF v3 #55) "'Scuze me -- I had this funny idea a guy was supposed to spend time with his girlfriend." Get him, Ben.
Johnny and Nita later broke up off page. There was an attempt to kind of explain the breakup in Human Torch (2003) #11, but it again kind of depends on the author inventing stuff we don't see, like Johnny allegedly wanting Nita to move into the Baxter Building. I can believe it, actually -- I think Johnny not wanting to spend time with his girlfriend but simultaneously attempting to play house with her in a bad mimicry of Reed and Sue, or Ben and Alicia, makes a certain amount of sense. But we don't see it on page, it's just addressed afterwards. (And then Nita was killed in the Stanford Incident, and Johnny was beaten into a coma during Civil War.)
Johnny's other celebrity relationships are Kourtney, a supermodel, who he had an on-again, off-again thing with that's kind of interesting. They have moments of genuine affection for each other, but they're also pretty clearly both using each other for their image, which y'know. It's interesting. Darla Deering, a popstar turned superhero who I like a lot, dumped Johnny for Scott Lang. Johnny wasn't broken up about it at all and was happy for her. Interestingly, again, he acknowledges he was more into her lifestyle than he was into her.
Then there's Psionics, a relationship that was troubled from the start. Millar's run came out right after Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, so I think there was some attempt to kind of capitalize on the movie characterization and image of Johnny. Psionics is really Johnny's only "bad girl" love interest -- a superpowered bank robber who turned out to be with a group of individuals from the future looking to use Johnny and Doom as a Galactus battery to save themselves. So she does kidnap him, and would have seen him dead if it fulfilled her goals. But Johnny doesn't die, and when Psionics kisses him after everything, he just kind of stands there.
(FF #562) Admittedly, I don't find Hitch to be a particularly passionate artist, and there's mitigating circumstances here, like the fact that she kidnapped him and also that they're at a funeral for a future Sue. But he does say he'll come visit her, and then he does not do that even remotely. The next time he sees Psionics, she'll kill one of his friends in front of him and then also be murdered in front of him. It's like, one of my least favorite parts of Hickman's run. I think Psionics is a pretty interesting character (I love women behaving badly), honestly, although not a good love interest, and I would have loved to see another author explore her ruthless side in other contexts, but unfortunately that's not what we got. Again, like, a certain amount of this is chalked up to the art -- would that kiss have looked different with another artist? Maybe. But as it is, he just stands there and then he makes no effort to see her until the aforementioned double murder. And since we were talking previously about the Lyja arc, I think Psionics kind of figures in there in that she approaches Johnny with ulterior motives and then later is involved in a scheme to literally drain him like a battery. Like, there's interesting stuff going on there, but it's not romantic.
Anyway, those are my big three examples. Given Johnny doesn't have that many canon romances, three is a pretty significant percentage. I just think it's an interesting little habit he's got there. Would love someone writing Fantastic Four to investigate it. Instead of just perpetuating it and then tweeting inaccurately about canon. Slott.
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