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Nodding to Popular Culture: "Fantastic Voyage" and Avengers

Derivative comics, as some previous examples in this column have mentioned, do not always borrow from other comics. The inward-looking aspect of comics, indeed, has become more pronounced in recent decades than in previous ones; and where a comic borrowed, in days past, one might expect it to look to referents well known to those who participate in the larger culture. Thus, it might borrow from politics, sports, movies, or folk tales (or, even, religious documents) for source material.

In 1966, the movie "Fantastic Voyage" hit theaters, a science-fiction piece which confronted microscopic human beings, in a similarly-proportioned submarine, against the monstrous perils represented by a human body enlarged to giant size.

Depending upon the familiarity of the source material and the saliency of the subsequent interpretation within another story, imitative content in comics can offer at least some kind of guilty pleasure of mutual recognition, and at best a feeling of a common connection to a common culture shared by the talent who make comics and the folks outside of the production food stream who consume them.

Referent elements in comics, after all, exist to make the material more fun through the shared joke between creator and consumer of a common recognition of something both have seen. And, as well, the artist can embed tributes to things that impressed him in the concept of a comic book, sometimes creating a derivative piece of greater aesthetic merit than the work that inspired it. Perhaps we have such a case in the homage to "Fantastic Voyage" that appeared within the pages of Avengers at the dawn of the seventies.

The "Fantastic Voyage" Concept

The fundamental premise of "Fantastic Voyage" centered around the notion of a submarineful of doctors/scientists, reduced to microbe size, and then injected into the bloodstream of a human body in order to perform a kind of microsurgery generally unavailable in the age before laser-surgery. Since lasers already existed and the matter-reduction technology assumed in "Fantastic Voyage" do not (and will not), one might note that this story attempts to substitute an impossible never-to-occur technology for a nascent one already developing; but we find much of this in science fiction over the decades and across the centuries where it has spawned tales of achievements of a possible (or impossible) future science.

The unlikely premise balanced against the surreal and visual aspect one could expect from such a setting. Not only could one transform the mundane residents of a microscope slide into big gooey monsters with such an idea, but also one had the notion that the "world" and "seas" the submarine craft sailed represented components of a gigantic living being the heroes and heroine sought to save.

This drastic resort occurs when a key politician receives an injury that causes a blood clot to his brain. He represents a unique security concern adequate to induce the government to violate a number of laws of physics to preserve his life, and therefore we find a team of scientists (including Raquel Welch with an unlikely sixties hairdo) in wetsuits manning a smaller-than-capillary craft injected into his bloodstream to combat the blood clot.

This allows a number of encounters with various tissues of the body, rendered in Technicolor scenery and plastic attack-cells, including a scene where several male scientists attempt to pry an attacking antibody or white blood cell from Raquel Welch's secondary sexual characteristics.

While the special effects garnered some acclaim in 1966, the technology of computer-generated imagery, silicon goo, and foam-rubber casting began, by the seventies, making the hanging pennants and pancake-shaped plastic thingies from this particular movie seem somewhat ludicrous. However, this movie definitely left an impression on audiences in its day; and it has to its credit the very clever notion of inverting the fundamental concept of the space program itself in having an airtight craft explore the domains of the human anatomy, i.e. inner space.

The Treatment in Avengers

How, you might ask, do we get from a science fiction movie from the era of paleo-special effects to a comic-book homage in Avengers? Well, the linkage came via the talented duo of Neal Adams and Roy Thomas (with heroic page finishes by the solid and somber Tom Palmer).

We have as pretext a malfunction of the synthezoid Vision, a being whose body sometimes consists of electronic components, sometimes consists of human-style tissues made of synthetic materials, and sometimes consists of whatever hardware fits the needs of the story. Thomas and Adams, for this opportunity, opted for something fantastical and not necessarily predictably mechanical or biosynthetic.

In the absence of a handy Radio Shack technician to provide the solution to a malfunction that rendered the Vision inert and insensate, the Avengers realize that some drastic intervention must occur lest they (possibly) lose their red-faced companion of the last three years. And, in an homage to the recently-departed (from Marvel) Jack Kirby, Thomas and Adams returned Dr. Henry Pym to his persona of Ant-Man to send him to the task of finding out what troubled the synthezoid Avenger.

Without suitable schematics or design documents, then, Ant-Man reduced himself to small enough dimensions to infiltrate the Vision's physical substance and attempt to follow the crippling disturbance to its source.

Quirks and Deviations

Comics, as a rule, enjoys less limitations based on the scope of the special effects a story intends to use. A fleet of spaceships, after all, need not require more graphite and ink to depict than a dull suburban scene. The imagination of the artist (and, of course, the writer) provide the limiting factors here rather than budgets or special-effects technology.

This, in short, means that a good artist can make the scenario much wilder than the special effects techs who worked on "Fantastic Voyage" could. So Ant-Man encountered, within the material substance of his comrade the Vision various bizarre manifestations of a simulated metabolism and immune system.

Clear green tentacles played a role not too dissimilar from that of white blood cells (or, perhaps, given the location of that confrontation somewhere near the Vision's synthetic uvula, that of tonsils); floating swarms of attack-crazy rectangular metal plates served the role of antibodies; and clouds of spherical force-bubbles condensed inside of the Vision to enable his power of intangibility.

From an early moment in his intrusion into the synthezoid's innards, Ant-Man found himself running afoul of that body's synthetic defenses, and he quickly dispatched his surviving ants to the Great Outside so that they would not become a kind of formic pate through unhappy encounters with a synthetic immune system. This left Ant-Man to his own devices (literally), with a jet-pack and an oxygen mask allowing him to pass through the liquid tissues and into a place in the cerebral cavities/sinuses of the Vision's brain.

At that point, the relentless onslaught of the Vision's mechanical antibodies inspires Ant-Man to partake of the better part of valor (and, therefore, take to his heels); but as his own incessant blather indicates, he ultimately figures a way to use the Vision's own internal systems against each other to allow an escape. Immersing himself in the cloud of intangibility bubbles, Ant-Man passes through the mechanical equivalent of the Vision's blood-brain barrier, leaving the antibodies banging against some kind of clear plastic barrier as he makes his way to the brain to reawaken the synthezoid hero.

Second-Generation Echoes

Through an act of derivation, Thomas and Adams managed to create one of the classic Avengers stories, a piece that stuck in the memory perhaps better than the material that inspired it. And we would, slightly over twenty years later, see an homage paid to this piece within the pages of the title Heroes for Hire. As with many multiple-generation duplications, this one had less impact than its prototype.

Nonetheless, even in this iteration one can find considerable charm. Heroes for Hire took a particularly casualty-laden mission as its starting point, with Iron Fist and Jim Hammond - the original Human Torch - incapacitated. Fist's therapy involved a wry and mildly derisive appearance of Brother Voodoo as attending physician (perhaps as a jab against the generation of Marvel Comics Blaxploitation characters of the seventies in general, since some of these labored under large burdens of silliness).

Hammond, on the other hand, required a kind of internal maintenance, so his companions deduced, that some heroic soul might best accomplish by reducing himself in size and entering his person to perform an on-site repair. Since in the aftermath of a kind of remote-control attempt by a villain had left Hammond in the same essential condition that the 1971 Avengers found the Vision - flat-out and inert - the nouveau Ant-Man from 1979 opted towards a similar intervention. The similar approach owed to a point of Marvel Comics canon which established a relationship of manufacture between the Vision and the Human Torch, since between 1971 and sometime in the eighties Marvel proposed that retrofitting had built the Vision from the material remains of the original Human Torch. From there it got more involved, with the Torch's revival in the eighties and the events of Avengers Forever.

By the time that the theme recurred here, however, the movie "Fantastic Voyage" had faded into obsolescence and obscurity, becoming the material of Saturday television matinees for unafilliated local stations. The piece itself had, to some extent, become a target of derision; generations of special effects had passed onto the ash heap of history, and frequently audiences submit works of the past to the standards of the present as if anyone even knew today's standards in an earlier day.

The source material having faded significantly from the public consciousness, when Heroes for Hire brought back the scenario for a tribute, the reader encountered something that considered itself a first-generation homage rather than a second-generation echo.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 230. Completed 23-FEB-2001.