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The Fantastic Four and the Four Elements

If a group of superheroes provided the basis of a new construct - in this case, an altogether new and interconnected superheroic universe - we might see as appropriate that, in their design, they represent things or properties once held as the building blocks of all matter (and, hence, of the universe).

Way back in the primal days of the Silver Age (as far as it went for Marvel Comics), Lee and Kirby composed the bedrock concept for the first new superheroes they would publish since Timely days. The Fantastic Four, the product of this design, consisted of four superheroes with abilities keyed to the four primal elements as understood before chemistry became a science. Each of the four would enjoy some attribute of one of the theoretical building blocks of matter.

Once cast in this mold, Marvel's original superhero team remained remarkably stable, resistant to change in a way different from other teams. Substitutions happened in the short term, but these always reverted back to the original membership, altogether unlike groups with a more dynamic membership, such as the Avengers (through almost all of their history) or the X-Men (since 1974). The concept, perhaps, constrained them to a static membership, binding them both with the elemental concept and with the notion of a barely-extended nuclear family.

The cohesion and rightness of the original membership, as opposed to the temporary substitutions thrown into the Fantastic Four title occasionally for the purpose of a temporary variety, strongly imprint on readers, as one might decipher from the often-smug discourses of fans on the subject of possible membership changes. Substitutions do not serve as permanent replacements because like does not replace like; the set has three components satisfying the original model and one outside, different, item; and, as in the sequence when the Inhuman Madame Medusa filled an empty slot on the team, we can note that no stable model of the elements divided the universe into earth, fire, water, and hair.

The Theory of Four Elements

The theory that gave these heroes form comes from over two millennia ago. Sometime in the fifth century B.C. (or B.C.E.), a thinker named Empedokles speculated that a small number of components provide basic, irreducible building blocks for all matter. To his thinking, all tangible things consisted of some combination of earth, water, air, and fire.

Given an epistemology that disdained empirical experimentation, this explanation of matter satisfied thinkers long enough for it to become a calcified orthodoxy up until the research of alchemists and the paradigm shifts of the Renaissance came together to allow the development of a modern, experimental model of science. The idea had considerable appeal, both for the small number of components it used and for the implied symmetry of a four-element model. It fit well into numerological speculation with such a division; it furthermore mapped well to schemes of four such as the seasons of the year. The idea therefore had the kind of sticking power that, in the absence of concrete truth, can keep an idea rolling for an indefinite period.

Later Elaborations

Aristotle, not long after Empedokles, decided that four elements did not suffice to explain all observable objects. Based on his own intuitions about the contents of the heavens, Aristotle decided that heavenly bodies, in their perfection, could not contain imperfect, changeable matter; instead, he conceived a fifth element, the ether, as the principal constituent of stars and planets.

The Arab alchemist Geber elaborated somewhat on the classical theory of four humors by postulating that these elements essentially boiled down to combinations of two properties, a kind of reasoning superficially similar to the notion that all particles of an atom, in their variety, derive from combinations of only a few minimal subatomic components. For the humors, the properties broke down into two axes: hot / cold and wet / dry. Thus, the combination of cold and wet made water; cold and dry made earth; hot and wet made air; and hot and dry made fire.

Perhaps one of the more dubious derivative theories connected with the four elements attempted to ascribe to four bodily fluids the responsibility for defining personality or, by their imbalances, creating sickness. Blood, light bile, dark bile, and phlegm, then, became determinants of personality, as the model forced it into types: sanguine, choleric, melancholy, and phlegmatic. As late as the 1990s, certain personality tests base categories on this model, so we can assume that models of four - regardless of how dubious a set of four someone picks - tend to stick in the mind, both in the case of individuals and for cultures.

And, to return to the original point of this piece, in a comics publishing office somewhere in New York sometime around 1961, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would use this rather ancient notion to formulate an enduring team of superheroes.

Earth and the Thing

The Thing's color scheme somewhat confuses the issue of that character's place in a schema of philosophical elements, insofar as soil and stone generally do not approach his normal color scheme. One might find near misses in certain clays, some ferrous soils, and a few iron-bearing rocks; but keeping in mind that his creators selected his color more for visual appeal than for conceptual purity, we can overlook the fact that his original design did not deign to imbue him with a more typical brown or gray color.

Considering the Thing's other salient features, however, the model of an elemental relationship with earth - at least in the style of his powers - fits quite well. Originally, the Thing's complexion somewhat resembled a lump of earth, later on becoming the more conventional craggy interpretation; each, in turn, served the purpose of portraying a stony exterior, with the difference mainly in scale. The Thing originally appeared as a man made of rock; and he developed into something like a man made of rocks.

From this stony concept, we can adduce various properties, including a kind of indestructibility, exaggerated by the context of superhero comics. If a run-of-the-mill rock crumbles at the tap of a hammer, a superhero composed of peculiar orange stone need not yield to any force writers can contrive; and this kind of invulnerability traditionally travels in the company of an equivalent strength. These traits understood, we have a more-or-less complete description of the Thing's powers.

Water and Mister Fantastic

Of the four members of this team, perhaps Mister Fantastic falls furthest from the core notion of superheroes with powers based on the classical elements. Indeed, his powers implicate him more as an uncredited knock-off of Plastic Man, with elements of a Cold War science hero grafted onto it. His powers do not much relate to a superhero very much in tune with the concept of water, such as the Golden Age hero Hydroman, who could turn into water and travel through plumbing pipes.

However, if we, for a moment, ignore the fact that Mister Fantastic does not transform himself into water, and pause to consider properties of states of matter, we see that our logic need not hyperextend itself to see this character as a manifestation of properties of fluids.

Ignoring the more complicated chemical properties, matter exists in four states. Solids retain both shape and volume, regardless of the container. Liquids, like water in a particular range of temperatures and pressures, retain their volume but assume the shape of their containers. Gases assume both the shape and volume of their containers. Plasma, the fourth recognized state of matter, has properties requiring a more technical description, but the term "electrically charged gas" might do little damage to the truth here.

This essential liquid property - that of changing shape - provides the connection between Mister Fantastic's powers and the notion of water.

Air and the Invisible Girl

The Invisible Woman has a number of abilities beyond what she could demonstrate back in the days of Fantastic Four #1. In the early years of the title, she developed an ability to generate force fields; later, she would acquire the peculiar ability to make other force fields visible; but in the very beginning, back when she wore the moniker "Invisible Girl," her powers stopped with invisibility. She could make herself invisible, or others, completely or in part, but it ended there.

Since the elemental theme provided detail but not the core of the Fantastic Four notion, with the family relationships combined with the superheroic concept occupying a much more important place in the design of this team, needs of story and the desire to cast off the kind of helpless hostage role from Sue Storm both worked to beef her up, power-wise. Other powers could have increased her horsepower and remained truer to the aerial theme, but such might have presented a series of storytelling problems in attempting to contrive situations in which these would prove useful - once past borrowing the property of invisibility from the atmosphere, how does one find a way in which controlling air or making things air-like can prove handy, while simultaneously avoiding a direct pilferage from some contemporary or previous character?

Possibly, had Marvel editors so desired, they could have found a number of enhancements to her abilities in keeping with the original concept, including some kind of intangibility or form-changing into vapors, but the characters gelled from a very early stage in Fantastic Four, making changes to the powers less and less necessary after the establishment of a workable baseline; and by the time concept fatigue began to set in, perhaps ten years into the franchise, all four characters had become fixtures very difficult to modify. Note the very small changes in her powers since Kirby left the book at the dawn of the seventies: Byrne gave her the ability to make force fields visible (not a particularly essential power), and Chris Claremont had her using her force-fields as a kind of palpable energy not too different from Green Lantern's beam in one story where she created a spaceship chassis with her powers.

Fire and the Human Torch

Of two members of this team whose abilities strip-mined from Golden Age superheroes, Johnny Storm showed his derivative colors more bluntly. Carl Burgos created a superhero in 1939 called the Human Torch, with identical powers, and this character can stand as the first of the Timely superheroes, meaning the first Marvel superhero. Marvel had every right to recycle its own properties, especially before the revived World War Two heroes would become a self-justifying property under the influence of talents like Roy Thomas.

The Human Torch, though, also represents an inevitable role when we begin assigning powers based on four primal substances. Flying and generating lassos of flame seem unlikely fire-based abilities, but some ability to generate flame completes the tetrad. Had Lee and Kirby cared to differ from the Golden Age hero whose concept they borrowed here, making a character with the ability to start and control flames would have provided a minimum kernel; and, technically, Johnny Storm has demonstrated both abilities, though he seems able to perform the first only on his person and the second with fire he creates or fire he encounters.

Occasionally writers attempt to graft a scientific credibility onto a hero's powers, and this tendency does sometimes interfere with the functioning of the younger Human Torch. Never mind that (in pressures of one atmosphere) water must boil at certain temperatures, Storm doesn't cook his water-bearing tissues when he bursts into flames. Nor does this flame represent the symptom of the oxidation of some element or chemical. Nor does an obvious energy source fuel the outpouring of energy involved in great changes of temperature, bursts of light, and moving the mass of his body through the air. Nonetheless, in an attempt to make the character's abilities offend as little as possible given their manifest impossibility, writers impose upon him the limitation that his flame will not function in the absence of adequate oxygen, nor when smothered by water. No physicist would buy his pyrokinetic manifestations, with or without the oxygen constraint; so future writers might do well to waste little time attempting to graft pseudo-scientific detail onto his powers.

The Tetrad Dynamic

Sets of four seem to have a kind of psychological appeal, including, but not limited to, the theory of four elements. Modernist Gnostic thinking sometimes posits that trinitarian faiths (including, but not limited to, the familiar Christian Trinity) may have origins in older tetrad models; one mapping posits Father - Mother - Child - Demiurge.

Stepping aside from the risky business of bringing up religion, we can note that we postulate four seasons; we see four members as the appropriate minimal membership of a popular music group; we devise a calendar which tries, but can't quite impose four weeks on a lunar month; we divide directions into a neat set of four compass points; and use fours in enough ways to suggest that the hard-wiring of our brain may tend to favor such concepts.

This postulated, we might figure that a fourfold construction contributes to the mnemonic and possibly aesthetic appeal of an idea. This might help explain why the Fantastic Four concept proved so stable; like its elemental archetype, it rides on tendencies of the human mind to divide things into sets of four, and, in modifying either number or type of the components, an attempted dabbler creates something that will not work because it feels wrong.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 256. Completed 29-MAY-2001.