Chalkdog

The legendary Mojave phone booth, in the middle of California’s Mojave desert, miles from anywhere. By Eyetwist [2048 X 1365]

Assuming there’s even a nominal need to explain it any further than “they were Jack Kirby’s main project for just shy of a decade,” or for that matter “it’s the team Ben Grimm’s on” or “they’re where Doctor Doom comes from,” it’s actually a little more complicated than it might seem, because it’s not quite a matter of them collectively being the best characters in comics. Ben’s right up there, and Reed’s great too in the right hands, but Johnny’s while fun still pretty one-note, and while Sue works in the context of the group, I still feel like after all these years people haven’t quite fully fleshed out her deal in the same way as the others. Pound-for-pound, they hardly match up to the Justice League. But a team is a lot more than the sum of its parts; it’s the dynamic, the context they’re framed in, and the scope of what you can do with them. And in those regards, no one else is even close.

Let’s cover the other major players. I like the Doom Patrol from what I’ve read (Morrison’s run and what there’s been so far of Way’s), but they seem really shifty in terms of lineup in spite of being a small group, making it tougher to build long-term stories around character dynamics, and most of their adventures seem to be them just trying to wrap their minds around what’s happening to them; like the Spirit, they’re the spectators, not the spectacle. The X-Men are…a whole piece in and of themselves, but long story short, as far as I’m concerned they’ve spent over 30 years coasting on a run that got by on trying *slightly* harder than its competition at the time and a strong if muddled central metaphor, with any attempts at doing anything actually interesting with them since then smothered as soon as they start to gather any steam. Ditto Teen Titans, without even the symbolic strength of the central concept; all they’ve got is the cartoon, and DC’s spent over a decade resolutely making sure absolutely none of what made that show work gets into the comics. The JSA is Fine, Just Fine, and Jay Garrick and Ted Knight are both great, but their integration into the main DCU was - aside from scrapping the multiverse - the biggest mistake DC ever made in terms of large-scale continuity reengineering, and aside from the pretty clearly failed Earth-2, everything with them for the last 30 years has been built on the back of that illusion that any of them are in any way anywhere near as important as Superman or Batman. I’ll cop the Legion of Superheroes might have more meat on the bone than I’ve seen, but I’m not willing to shell out however many thousands of dollars on archive editions I’d need to find out, and while I imagine the Defenders were great under Steve Gerber, that seems to have largely been it for them.

That leaves the big two. I’ve covered it before, so keeping it relatively short: the Justice League is the best team in terms of average character quality so long as we’re sticking to the Big Seven model, but because each of them is iconic and important enough that they all have their own stuff going on, the focus in their best runs is on big action, with character work necessarily taking a back seat. They try to shake it up sometimes with B-listers, presumably on the basis that that’s how the League was conceived of in the first place, but it never works; the minor characters in the beginning were elevated to the A-list by sheer dint of being on Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman’s team, and shortly afterwards the rules of that world and who was important in it were codified enough that you couldn’t really replicate that more than once in a blue moon with one or two characters. The Avengers meanwhile were originally more genuine B-listers - only truly elevated above that by the movies, or if you’re being generous Bendis - and as such the Avengers as a group was the most significant thing in any individual members’ life, turning it into a meaningful institution that made them more than the sum of their parts, while the Justice League has always been less than the sum of its own. But at the same time, while they can do more within the boundaries of being the big team than their distinguished competition, they themselves just aren’t as big a team, and can’t compete on those grounds. Maybe I’d have a different mindset if the Avengers were a big deal to me personally, but as far as the ‘classic’ members go, I maybe, generously, care about four or five of them at all.

The Fantastic Four on the other hand? For starters, they’re a pretty universally regarded perfect balance of powers and personalities - tough enough to get into some wild adventures but not so overwhelmingly so that they can’t be easily thrown in over their heads; arranged character-wise with personality quirks both complimentary and irreconcilable that let you just as easily show them hugging it out or at each others throats. But the deal-maker is that rather than a club, or a gathering of the big guns when they have time off from their solo adventures, or an after-school hangout, or a strikeforce, or a ragtag bunch of misfits, or about 938 backup dancers of varying degrees of quality lucky enough to have Wolverine and Emma Frost to carry them, they’re a family, both born and found, and moreover they’re a family of explorers. And that makes all the difference.

Obviously there’re other teams that work as families in reality or in spirit, but the FF work that way in terms of dynamic, even above their status as superheroes. Yes, if they hear about the Mad Thinker wrecking downtown they’ll go deal with that, so you can tell regular superhero stories with them. But at the same time, you don’t need any elaborate explanation to get them to the Savage Land or the Negative Zone, or even to Yancy Street; they’re as likely as not to head out there on vacation (or to stop Ben from tearing it down in the latter case). They’ll go do big, interesting things purely on the basis of going to do it together as a family, and when it’s a family that diverse in terms of interests and personal goals, that means you can organically throw them in a bunch of different directions. And because they’re science adventurers above all with superheroics as just one option on the table, that gives you all the justification needed to dish out any wild high concepts you like, on the simple basis that Reed’s interested and the rest will humor him if it means a fun afternoon. And when real danger finds them, they care for each other and argue with each other and worry about each other and keep each other on their feet the way family does, perpetually keeping the emotional stakes as high as possible.

So yeah. They play off each other perfectly, you can justify them going nearly anywhere and doing nearly anything, and at their heart they have the warmth and the bickering and the strength that comes with family. And Kirby threw everything he had at them, and they have Ben Grimm and fight Doctor Doom. That’s why they’re the best. And among Marvel’s myriad other problems at the moment, its world is always going to be the lesser and the lonelier for it whenever it’s missing The World’s Greatest Comics Magazine.