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FF1234 and the Book of Job

Grant Morrison has created, in FF1234 a drama where the players must muster powers of character where superhuman abilities spawned by cosmic rays fail them. Superhero comics, especially in the post-Kingdom Come era, often do treat the subject of character, though sometimes in a simplistic or shallow manner, moving beyond the simple manifestation of force typical of the very crudest pieces of the form. For example, works that trade in iconic heroes often show how to do the right thing when beginning with unlimited resources (such as typical inflated sets of super-powers) and a morally clear situation. In DC's Silver Age, in the years of Marvel's first frightening ascendancy in the business, readers began to see more and more stories exploring the way even a superhero might fail to adequately cope with morally troubling problems. In this step, the superhero came down to the level of the reader who lives in a world where gray moral areas make decisions difficult and where doing the right thing might remain outside available options.

The question of flawed human character can make the difference between flat characterization and lack of human development in a story and a piece that, in spite of countless impossibilities inherited from the host genre, becomes a credible and mature tale. Stories where men (in the generic sense of the term, which includes both sexes) face the imperfections of their character, as well as real material dangers, provide a theoretically limitless storytelling territory, but some approaches resonate more strongly than others. These then either enjoy a general dispersal as archetypes, or become the core of specific tales that act as archetypes. And, in FF1234, Grant Morrison seems to have explored one of the more compelling tales, one where a Tempter mines the moral weaknesses of prospective victims to find in them an angle to affect their ruination.

The best-known such stories in the culture of the west owe strongly to the Christian tradition, and include pieces such as the Faust legend (and derivative works like Dr. Faustus and Faust). It came to me in a moment of insight, however, precisely what work seemed the most likely nucleus for Morrison's re-interpretation through superheroic proxy. An older work, however, stands antecedent to these, perhaps going back as far as Homeric times; and Grant Morrison's piece seems most strongly to owe to this, the Old Testament's own Book of Job.

Annoying People Who Interpret Everything Biblically

Before the previous claim sends anyone screaming from the room in fear of a sermon, consider that writers do, from time to time, resort to the Bible as a source of artistic inspiration. One finds the like, for instance, through many important works by the author Philip Dick, himself not necessarily high among the councils of whatever religious body you might wish to absent itself from bombarding you with unsolicited preaching. He who argues that your VCR instruction manual contains a secret cipher citing Biblical material probably suffers from wishful and/or obsessive thinking; however, he who claims that no works owe to such an origin either lacks the background to recognize such references or strongly wishes to turn the conversation to another concept. Hopefully this presentation will not allow the subject to become too tiresome or overbearing.

Running another column, after all, that connects comics to Biblical concepts - of whichever Testament - runs the risk of having folks see this feature less as a comics-obsessed series of columns that occasionally touch on other elements of culture and more as a religion-obsessed piece that occasionally touches on comics. However, the pieces so identified in this feature usually implicate themselves strongly enough to lose a case in a court of law. Nonetheless, I can sympathize with the sensation some folks feel when the subject comes up, based on the memories I (and many of my peers) have of dealing with the like in the public schools of Texas in the 1970s.

Most of us from that generation can remember the one student in school who answered every question about meaning or symbolism with something from the Bible, and probably the students of the next decades have some similar experience from one side or another of that fence. In my own day, we snickered in self-congratulation at those who seemed to have no cultural literacy beyond Old and New Testaments, holding them unfairly in less esteem than such students as had never read any books at all. In other cases, we would roll our eyes in despair at the possibility of some kind of extemporaneous demonstration of faith, having suffered a few too many ad-libbed sermons from self-appointed missionaries who thought we had to listen to them. Such reactions, however, numbed us to the possibility that an answer drawn from such a source might provide exactly the right answer. We came to reject analyses that pointed in this direction without bothering to examine the question. In this, we projected our own interests on the culture in general, accepting as an a priori assumption the claim that nothing referred to some Biblical angle.

However, given Morrison's background - however achieved - in certain metaphysical concepts, demonstrated particularly in Invisibles - we can assume he has some familiarity with esoterica, and esoterica frequently speaks in the symbols of conventional religion even though it may carry these concepts to other places. In short, to believe that Morrison has familiarity with denser pieces of the Bible does not, to me, seem to put ideas into his head or words into his mouth that he has not admitted, through storytelling, to have run into previously. I would defeat myself in attempting to speculate about Morrison's belief system (beyond a suspicion that he would deliberately obfuscate it in order to entertain himself by watching observers make bad guesses on the clues he let out as disinformation), but we should consider his exposure to the Book of Job neither impossible nor even unlikely.

This work, after all, has received attention outside of simple lowest-common-denominator religious studies. Jungians and Cabalists analyze it for its deeper meanings; political thinkers mine it for symbols useful for giving a flesh to concepts such as the state; and, in various (usually heavily-modified) forms, storytellers borrow it as a concept, as in works such as the Dudley Moore and Peter Cook movie "Bedazzled." And, if one considers the ideas from the Book of Job, those who look below the surface to where literature comes from can see the nuclei of various potential tales. Morrison certainly demonstrates a similar ability.

The Message of Job

We may find justification for the fundamental claim made here, that FF1234 owes to a certain Old Testament piece, in the content of that work. The Book of Job essentially details a wager between God and Satan over the character of a Hebrew named Job. Job, in the early chapters of this distinctive Old Testament piece, enjoys the benefits both of prosperity and of piety, and God and Satan discuss the man's faith. The Devil, true to character, second-guesses anything resembling good behavior by the man, contending that his possession of a large and fine family and bountiful flocks allow him the luxury of a posture of faithfulness to justify his good fortune; and, acting as Accuser, he hints that Job's faith very likely would evaporate with a few solid blows to his luck. He hints that anyone can walk the walk of faith while things run his way and doubts that the legendary piety of the man would survive much hardship, a claim of bad faith, but not an entirely unlikely claim to assert given the elements of human nature that generally haven't changed since the day the Book of Job first saw light.

God takes the bait and works a series of calamities on the hapless Job, slaying his family and his livestock and afflicting him with boils so comprehensively that this experiment renders Job a bed-ridden invalid, yet Job at this stage still refuses to denounce God as the source of his troubles. Three friends - Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar - attempt, through various arguments, to advise and/or console him on his sickbed. Their arguments boil down to a claim that Job has incurred wrath through wrongdoing and that he might do well to acknowledge whatever secret fault he conceals; Job counters that rewards and punishments in the world do not neatly match what men deserve, and invites his visitors, who administer accusations as balm, to remain quiet.

A younger man, Elihu, at this point, reasserts that Job errs in his frequent claims of blamelessness, and a storm comes to dramatically offset Elihu's claims about the scale and scope of God; then God, in person, sweeps Job away to adjust his attitude by showing him a few things, including the poorly-understood Leviathan and Behemoth, to put matters in perspective. This shift of centers from which to measure himself against ambient surroundings takes Job, if memory serves, to the bottom of the sea ("the deep") and to a mountaintop, the latter vantage providing God a podium from which to reproach and instruct our much-weathered protagonist. Job, having acquired better perspective from these comparisons and shifts of context, repents from the arrogance implied by his assumption of having lived a blameless life, and God restores him with a new family and possessions (leaving some of the more skeptical among us wondering, perhaps, what about his dead children, since they do not seem to have fared well in the happy ending department).

And, though we recognize that Satan lost his bet, he never reappears in the story after the initial chapters where his sly slanders set the whole process rolling. In a pre-Anton Levay day, we would not expect Satan to enjoy either a principal role or a dramatic slant towards rigging the odds in his favor in the few tales in which he appears, so we can overlook this shift. A work filtered through the conventional mechanisms of publishing houses and editors might have a final scene where Satan gets his in some particularly embarassing or horrifying fashion, but this story gets its meanings across - the role of will and pride in confusing man as to his place in the universe, for instance - in spite of the odd absence of principal players from the beginning of the tale in its resolution.

The Superheroic Interpretation

Grafting the dense subtexts of Job to a superheroic interpretation will, we might expect, somewhat water down the original, and, indeed, some themes do not appear through this vehicle. Yet angles of the work definitely do resonate well. For example, Victor von Doom playing the role of Satan in the Book of Job rings true to one aspect of the von Doom character, particularly in his role as ruinator of others rather than World-Emperor in Training.

Dr. Doom, generally off-panel and musing in soliloquy, entertains a dialogue about the weaknesses of the soul through which he can infiltrate and destroy, inferring from this a method of ruining his historical enemies, the Fantastic Four. This obsession runs in many angles in the character, having presented a challenge to his power, his technique, and intellect. Thus, both psychological obsessions and simple, though twisted, intellectual curiosity help drive this compulsion to destroy. On one level, Doom simply desires to destroy them as man sought to split the atom: to demonstrate that human reason could achieve the hypothetical impossibility.

For each member of this team he finds some weak point through which to introduce destructive temptations, and, one by one, counters the members of the team. He begins with the Thing, whom he tempts with the restoration of his presumedly-lost humanity (which centers around Ben Grimm's troubles coping with body image as a being resembling a vaguely anthropomorphic sculpture of orange rock). Restored to conventional human form, Grimm realizes that no one knows or recognizes him any longer, and, in an incautious moment, falls to a hit-and-run driver, awakening as a rootless indigent, missing one arm, in a hospital.

Doom furthermore neutralizes the Storm siblings through angles with a sexual component; Johnny, in part via the well-recognized tendency in men to prove their worth through sexual conquests (after which, with their objects having proved conquerable, the object of lust quickly becomes a target of indifference), and Sue via the desire for the undivided attention of a lover, provided in the form of Prince Namor, who offers a kind of animal sensuality unavailable from a husband who locks himself indefinitely in a laboratory.

With three members of the Fantastic Four trapped in hopeless of their own making - for each actively decided to submit to Doom's traps - and Reed Richards seemingly comatose in his laboratory, Doom congratulates himself on his victory and begins moving various resources subject to his manipulation, including the generally-intractible Sub-Mariner and the frequently-ludicrous Mole Man. And, at this point, with a gigantic Doom-shaped golem busting things up in Manhattan, we enter the trap that seems to have ensnared Richards.

It comes clear, at this point, that Doom has delivered the team to a created reality he can manipulate, which for Dr. Richards takes the form of a history where Richards led an early double life as a murderer. Terrified by the dark side of his self, the Reed in this incarnation investigated magical means to separate out the evil components of his own personality, extracting a piece of himself which he disguised by naming it von Doom. However, Richards sees some flaw in this synthetic cosmos; and, furthermore, various players begin to deviate from Doom's plan as they come together.

Namor, always a risky ingredient in the context of those who attempt to manipulate him into doing their dirty work, decides not to play Doom's game; and, furthermore, in spite of their own particular ruinations, the remaining members of the team ignore their personal disgraces to act as a team against Doom. Even missing a limb and without superhuman abilities, Grimm resolves to resist Doom, and at this point the reader realizes Doom has lost on the level of character - as such, he has also lost the angle as conqueror. Using Doom's own technology and a handy prosthesis, Sue retransforms Grimm into the Thing, and, with Alicia Masters playing a surprise role in swaying the outcome, the team defeats the giant Doom golem. Insultingly, rather than allowing Doom the resolutions that conserve his dignity - escapes or false deaths - the team opt not even to clobber him. Instead, Sue gives him a blistering lecture about his wasted potential as a human being, compounding the insult of failing to recognize him as the kind of menace Doom desires to play.

Doom, in the end, proves to have defeated his own plan preemptively by failing to consider the team as a collective. Though his strategies do a great deal to undermine and subvert them as individuals, in the context of a team their own heroic natures impel them to rise above the theoretical ruination his schemings have brought about, much in the way that a nation somewhat divided by hostile regionalisms can set them aside long enough to confront and overcome a real menace on a greater scale.

Multiple Convergences

One might note as the most obvious difference between this work and the Book of Job the general absence of the metaphysical poles in the persons of God and Satan. Human (or superhuman) understudies substitute for these in this work.To catalogue where this work differs from Job could provide an exhaustive, and therefore exhausting (to both reader and writer) study.

Nonetheless, we have the following elements: an evil manipulator who attempts to use the moral flaws of supposedly-good people to affect their ruination; the serial temptations (expressed in Job by various pleaders making their case to him but in FF1234 by the various members of the team confronting their tailor-made lures to destruction); monologues by the tempting force (Doom instead of Satan) about the phony and superficial character of the pretensions to goodness of his targets; a trip under the sea; and confrontation with a giant creation, in this case the Doom-golem rather than the biblical Behemoth.

Like Satan, Doom finds himself undone by his underestimation of the moral capital upon which the Fantastic Four, even while embedded in troubled personal realities, had to draw. Unlike Job, Johnny, Sue, and Ben fall prey to various temptations; but, guided by a more significant purpose than self-actualization needs that their moral failings might easily undermine, they nonetheless resolve to work against Doom in spite of their troubled circumstances.

And, again, echoing Job, the undoing of the crisis depends less on human deeds - although FF1234 does somewhat resolve through (super)human intervention - than it does on a dawning of awareness based on a flawed identification of self. Job erroneously defined himself as without fault, deluded by his relative righteousness in comparison to ordinary men into believing he had some similar trait on a metaphysical level; the various members of the Fantastic Four, in like fashion, erred in thinking that their moral undoing neutralized their ability to resist and overcome the machinations of von Doom. Once these obstacles to perspective vanished, either through the coming of simply human insight (among the superheroes) or through revelation from God's own voice (for Job), the problems crumbled, and matters returned to their state prior to the intervention of the diabolical player (Satan or Doom), though now tempered with a greater wisdom among protagonists.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@yahoo.com.

Column 288. Completed 08-DEC-2001.