Challengers of the Unknown = The Fantastic Four / Chris Tolworthy

Challengers of the Unknown = The Fantastic Four

Chris Tolworthy

Jack Kirby wrote Challengers of the Unknown up to and including Issue 8 in 1959. His story continues in The Fantastic Four No. 1 in 1961.

First I will look at the similarities, then at what Jack Kirby intended, and then point out how they are the same characters,

The Same Concept

Both the Challengers and the Fantastic Four are a team of four adventurers who explore the unknown. Here is the first view we get of each team; even the design is the same:

The Same Origin

Both series begins with four friends surviving a plane (or rocket) crash and then dedicating their lives to doing good.

The Challengers’ crash made them friends, and the FF’s crash gave them powers.

The Same Costumes

Here are two (non-sequential) panels from the final Challengers story by Kirby (Challengers of the Unknown No. 8):

And here are two (non-sequential) panels from the first Fantastic Four story (The Fantastic Four No. 1):

The Same Headquarters

In the early years, the Challengers’ headquarters and the FF headquarters looked the same. When pictured at their home bases, the two teams even stood in the same poses!

The Same Themes

The first Challengers story (in Showcase No. 6) is about mind control: the giant is in the mind, and the energy globe communicates in the mind.

In the next issue, the giant robot communicates and controls through the mind. Fantastic Four No. 3 is about mind control and another red monster who is defeated when they realise he is all in the mind.

Fantastic Four Nos. 7 and 8 also rely on mind control.

The Same Enemy

Both the Challengers’ and the FF’s main enemy is a sorcerer...

...who wears a hooded cloak, and possesses incredible inventions.

He lives in a castle... in America!

He is associated with Merlin, and his goal is to obtain magical jewels that make him immortal or invincible:

At the end, Morelian appears to die, but he was wearing a ring that gave him immortality, so it is very likely that his mind would simply transfer to another body. Dr Doom gained this same power in FF #10, though Annual No. 2 hints that he may have already had something like it.

The Same Locations

Both the Challengers and the FF explore the Earth’s underground and its oceans, visit outer space, and every other exotic location. The first Challengers story has them fly to a remote island where they find a monster. The first Fantastic Four story has them fly to Monster Isle.

The Same Technology

We see the same advanced technology in each series: from the radically redesigned helicopter...

...to the aliens falling in low gravity in order to reach their underground city:

The Same Powers

In Challengers of the Unknown No. 3, Rocky gains the powers associated with the Fantastic Four: flame, invisibility, great strength, and the ability to change his body size.

(The small print: Although Mr Fantastic’s superpower is thought of as stretching, not growing, he actually changes volume. He just chooses to enlarge or reduce only sections of his body. And whereas in Rocky’s example we might think his strength comes from his size, a being that large would not even be able to stand up. So strength is part of it.)

The Challengers exist to challenge the unknown. So it is natural that the rest of them would explore gaining the same powers. And they do, in Fantastic Four No. 1.

The Same Infighting between Team Members

Something about Rocky’s trip in Challengers #3 must have been extremely painful or distressing. Because when he came back he violently attacked anybody associated with taking him into space—not just ‘Ace’ (the example above) and the professor (below), but also the men involved in the space programme.

However, he did not attack ordinary people, or June, who was not directly involved in causing what had happened:

We can explain this as a kind of madness, or of him losing his memory. But that is just opinion. All we know for sure is that the exact same thing happened in the Fantastic Four. Here I have removed Stan Lee’s dialogue, so we can more clearly see Kirby’s intent: changing makes the men angry and violent.

The alien process gave them whatever powers they needed at the time. Ben wanted to hit Reed, and Reed wanted to tie up Ben. So Ben gained strength, and Reed gained the ability to stretch. That is exactly as explained in Challengers #3. However, Reed (who planned the space flight) was not an expert on powers, so they didn’t get general-purpose abilities: they were stuck with the first power they experienced.

What made the Fantastic Four a Hit

This anger between Ben and the others was probably the biggest thing that made The Fantastic Four stand out from other comics. Yet it comes straight from the Challengers.

In summary, the angry fighting between team members is classic Kirby, and arises naturally from the situation (i.e., unknown radiation can change people) that Kirby had set up in the Challengers stories.

Fantastic Four No. 1 relies on Challengers of the Unknown No. 3

The first issue of Fantastic Four contains a number of serious problems. But each of these is resolved when we see FF #1 as a continuation of Challengers.

1. Why did Reed take his girlfriend and her kid brother along? Because together they were the Challengers of the Unknown, the four people best suited in all the world to this task.

2. Why was Ben so concerned about shielding when the others were not? Because he had previously suffered the results.

3. Why was Ben’s appearance changed? And why was he unable to turn back? Because he was getting a second dose (possibly third, if we count the alien liquid and radiation as separate doses).

4. Why didn’t the team get the same powers, or all powers? In Challengers #3 it was shown that a liquid plus radiation is needed for all powers. The monkey who received only the liquid exhibited only one power—an immunity to flame.

5. Why did they get those specific powers? This is explained in Challengers #3: the process is designed by aliens, to magnify existing tendencies, in order to let beings survive hostile environments. So the hothead got flame, the non-violent person got invisibility, and the mentally stretching person got physical stretching.

What Did Jack Kirby Intend?

Kirby: The FF is based on the Challengers

Kirby intended the Fantastic Four to be “a derivative” of the Challengers. That is, based on it. The following is from a legal deposition by Jack Kirby’s son, Neil Kirby:

Q: What information, if any, do you have concerning the creation of The Fantastic Four?

A: In discussions with my father The Fantastic Four basically was a derivative of the, from what he told me, basically he came up with the idea just as a derivative from the Challengers of the Unknown that he had done several years earlier.

Kirby: “The Challengers are us”

GROTH: Can you tell me how you came about creating Challengers of the Unknown?

KIRBY: Challengers of the Unknown was a movie to me. The science fiction pictures were beginning to break, and I felt that the Challengers of the Unknown were part of that genre. I began to think about three words which have always puzzled me: What’s out there? OK? What’s out there? I didn’t care about the East Side any more. I didn’t care about Earth or anything like that. I thought, what’s really out there? Then I began to draw characters from outer space, characters from beneath the earth, characters from anywhere that we couldn’t think of. The Challengers were us contending with these very strange people. A guy would suddenly make a potion that would render him into a superman and he would begin knocking down buildings with his bare fists. How do you contend with a guy like that? How do you stop him?

(The Comics Journal No. 134, February 1990)

This is important. People sometimes complain that the Challengers don’t have distinctive personalities. This is partly true, because they are deliberately blank slates: their purpose is to represent the readers, to see how we would solve a problem. They did not develop distinctive personalities until the launch of The Fantastic Four.

Kirby: The Challengers “were always precursors to the Fantastic Four”

The Challengers dealt with radiation and its effects (e.g. in Showcase #6, Challengers #3, Challengers #8, etc.). It is only natural that the next step focused on individual characters.

GROTH: Looking back on it, do you see the Challengers as a precursor to the Fantastic Four?

KIRBY: Yes, there were always precursors to the Fantastic Four—except the Fantastic Four were mutations. When people began talking about the bomb and its possible effect on human beings, they began talking about mutations because that’s a distinct possibility. And I said, “That’s a great idea.” That’s how the Fantastic Four began, with an atomic explosion and its effect on the characters. Ben Grimm who was a college man and a fine looking man suddenly became the Thing. Susan Storm became invisible because of the atomic effects on her body. Reed Richards became flexible and became a character that I could work with in various ways. And there were others—mutation effects didn’t only affect heroes, it affected villains too. So I had a grand time with the atomic bomb. [Laughter.] (Ibid.)

The challengers were generic, but the Fantastic Four brought them into focus as individuals with individual differences.

Kirby: the FF is about the radiation, “not the characters”

Kirby saw the FF as about the effects of radiation, not the characters. The characters only became important later, as people grew used to them.

KIRBY: [...] The idea for the F.F. was my idea. My own anger against radiation. Radiation was the big subject at that time, because we still don’t know what radiation can do to people. [...] The element of truth in the Fantastic Four is the radiation—not the characters. And that’s what people relate to, and that’s what we all fight about today. [...]

PITTS: You think people relate more to the radiation aspect than to the characters?

KIRBY: No… Now, they relate to the characters because time has passed and the characters are important.

(‘1986/7 Jack Kirby Interview’, conducted by Leonard Pitts, Jr.; the Kirby Kinetics journal at the Kirby Museum website, 6 August 2012)

We see this in the Challengers as well. The second Showcase issue is about how radiation gave a machine incredible intelligence.

In the final Kirby-drawn issue (Challengers #8), we see similar radiation from space, again giving super intelligence to robots.

Did you notice that wording in each case? The radiation from space gave fantastic powers.

The same word was used to describe the super-powered monkey that led to Rocky gaining flame power, invisibility, stretching and strength.

What if all four team members gained these fantastic powers? What would they call themselves?

Kirby: I “allow the reader to interpret it his way”

There is no correct way to interpret the Challengers, or any Kirby story:

“I was presenting my views to the reader and saying ‘what do YOU think?’ I think that’s an imperative for any writer. In other words, no writer should feel that he has the last word on any subject. Because he hasn’t got the capacity. He doesn’t know! I don’t know, see, I’m guessing as well as you [do], except I may be a little more descriptive, that’s all. [...] I put enough chinks into the story to allow the reader to interpret it his way. Because I’ve always respected the reader. [...] I sold the best stories I could. But I didn’t present my stories as the final word.”

(Mondo Kirby: Jack Kirby Interview, conducted by Andrew Mayer with Randolph Hoppe, in the Kirbys’ hotel room at the San Diego Comic Con, 14 August 1992)

So if we want to say that the Challengers become the Fantastic Four, I think Kirby would be perfectly happy with that.

All of this is to show that, in Kirby’s mind, The Challengers of the Unknown and The Fantastic Four were about the same things. The difference is that in The Fantastic Four the characters were given more detailed personalities. Now let us look at what we know of the barely defined Challenger personalities:

The Same Characters

The Fantastic Four fills the gaps

Fiction always has gaps. We do not know every detail about a person and their life; we just see the most interesting parts. This is especially true of the Challengers: most of their life and characterisation is not defined. The Fantastic Four neatly fills those gaps. For example, the Challengers stories do not tell us Red’s background. The Fantastic Four reveals that he is June’s brother. Since they are gaps, they could be filled in other ways. For example, the Challengers would also fit with fan fiction where Red is no relation to June. There are multiple ways to fill the gaps! But The Fantastic Four fits very neatly.

‘Ace’ became Mr Fantastic

The nickname Ace means the same as Mr Fantastic: this guy loves himself! He worked on the top-secret military space programme, so we can extrapolate that ‘Morgan’ was probably an alias to keep his real name (Richards) private.

‘Ace’ naturally takes on the role of leader of each team, even though they are in theory equals. His big goal is to enter space. Remember, this was 1958, when the United States and Russia were racing to be the first in space, and when ‘the space programme’ was merely the high altitude part of the air force. In Fantastic Four No. 1, Ace succeeds. That was 1961, the year when in the real world man also entered space.

‘Ace’ looks older and thinner in Fantastic Four No. 1. This can be explained by the youth serum in the ‘previous issue’, Challengers #8.

After using the youth serum, one’s age is supposed to return to normal. But the Challengers are dedicated to exploring the unknown, and repeated usage could easily cause a person’s age to rebound too far. But after the first few issues Reed’s age did return to Ace’s age, and his appearance to Ace’s general appearance, but the grey-ish hair remained.

‘Rocky’ became Ben Grimm

This is the most obvious parallel. A fighter who calls himself Rocky ends up covered in rocks. The Fantastic Four reveals that ‘Rocky’ was a pilot during the war, and became a test pilot thereafter. This explains how Rocky (Ben) and Ace (Reed) met and became friends. But Reed was far more obsessive about pushing the edge of space, so it looks like Ben chose a second career as a wrestler. In Fantastic Four No. 15, when the Thinker tries to break up the Fantastic Four, he knows that a ‘return’ to wrestling is the best way to attract Ben/Rocky. (At first Ben resists, but he is soon persuaded.)

‘Red’ became Johnny

Ryan, the “circus daredevil”, is clearly the youngster of the group: he is always shown as shorter than the others, and the others take the lead. World-class circus acrobats do have to be young.

Possibly his age was further reduced after experiments with the youth serum.

Johnny Storm comes from a circus family. Stan’s added dialogue in the panels below (from FF #15) implies that Johnny was new to the circus, but Kirby’s art says otherwise: his face is relaxed, as if this is familiar territory. I follow Kirby’s FF, and not Lee’s.

‘Red Ryan’ sounds like a circus stage name. ‘Johnny Storm’ could also be a code name, but seems to be used as his real name.

Johnny’s distinctive hairstyle remains the same. The change from orange to yellow can be easily explained by the comic-book printing technology of the time.

June became Sue

June is the least powerful member of the team, and the last to join.

As time goes on, June looks more like Sue. This depends of course on Sue’s hairstyle and who is inking: the earlier Fantastic Four inkers were often rushed.

June/Sue is an expert on computers, as demonstrated in Challengers #2. In Fantastic Four No. 5, she is able to short-circuit Doom’s computer in a second, with her hands tied behind her back.

A cut-off switch does not normally cause a computer to explode! Clearly she understood exactly how the machine worked. Note that her skill was in 1950s-era computers: this skill became obsolete once the team gained access to the more advanced computers from Planet X in FF #7.

June/Sue makes up for her lack of physical power with her intelligence and bravery. This is often obscured by Stan Lee’s dialogue, but Kirby’s art and plotting makes it clear: June/Sue is a match for any of the boys (e.g., in FF #3).

Further Speculation

A Failed Marriage?

When we first meet Sue, she is June Robbins. But soon after she is June Walker and has dyed her hair blonde. This implies a marriage to an unspecified Mr Walker, and possible insecurity. This insecurity is supported by her first appearance, where the Challengers are amazed to find a woman in a demanding role – i.e., she has to fight 1950s sexism all the time. We don’t know ‘Mr Walker’, but ‘Patsy Walker’ appeared in the FF Annual #3, and had a large extended family in her own comic. Patsy began in Miss America magazine in the early 1940s, published by Timely when Jack Kirby was working there; so he would have been familiar with the name. Note that Patsy had a younger brother, Michael ‘Mickey’ Walker, who would certainly have been old enough to marry June Robbins in 1958. Of course, June could have married a different Walker.

So we can read between the lines: Sue/June had been married to one of the Walker clan. This explains why she was not romantically interested in the Challengers, despite them being the most alpha of alpha males and her having so much in common with them (she became an honourary Challenger based on her own skills).

No doubt meeting the Challengers contributed to her failed marriage: in Challengers #2 she would have been engaged to one of the Patsy Walker family, not known for their high intellect. The Challengers were clearly her soul mates – how could she be happy married to one of ditzy Patsy’s family? She had made a terrible mistake. We don’t know the details of the divorce; she is clearly a very private person. But once divorced, she was free to become romantically involved again. Ace and Rocky were the natural leaders of the pack, but who would she choose?

Professor Haley Leaves?

Of all the team members, Professor Haley seems the least at ease. He is the odd one out, using his title and real name. When the others look excited and interested, Haley seems cautious or uncomfortable. While the others love action and fighting, Haley prefers to study his books, and enjoys the relative silence and peace of the oceans. Once June had joined the team, it was natural that Professor Haley would retire.

Professor Haley is the perfect person to uncover the mysteries of the oceans. It is tempting to imagine him being involved in the discovery of Prince Namor (in FF #4). Was it really an accident? Who is the skinny man with limp hair who was always nearby, hidden by a wide brimmed hat? :)

Super-powers Explained

The Challengers stories explain the origin of the team’s super powers: aliens use a specially designed liquid to heighten their abilities as needed. An ancient human civilisation managed to create a crude version that could (at least) turn people into giants. Sorcerers down through the ages have managed to create simpler versions with limited abilities; e.g., making a person’s body young. But they are clearly variations on the same liquid. Note how the de-aging liquid is in the form of a mist – the Inhumans also used a mist to change their DNA.

Panels taken from Challengers of the Unknown No. 3 (top), Showcase No. 12 (middle), and Challengers of the Unknown No. 8 (bottom)

Footnote: Atomic Bombs – not just Cosmic Rays

KIRBY: When people began talking about the bomb and its possible effect on human beings, they began talking about mutations because that’s a distinct possibility. And I said, “That’s a great idea.” That’s how the Fantastic Four began, with an atomic explosion and its effect on the characters. [...] And there were others—mutation effects didn’t only affect heroes, it affected villains too. So I had a grand time with the atomic bomb. [Laughter.]

(The Comics Journal No. 134, February 1990)

Note how Kirby recalls the Fantastic Four in terms of the Atomic Bomb. This was changed in Stan Lee’s dialogue, which only refers to cosmic rays. But Kirby’s art specifically points us to atomic bombs. Let’s refresh our memories:

In the story, Reed Richards has his own seismograph. At the time, thanks to the 1958 Geneva Convention, there was a network of 150 seismograph stations dotted around the world, designed to detect atomic tests.

Bomb tests often took place underground, and no doubt this was why the Mole Man destroyed nuclear plants in revenge.

The story in Issue 1 ends when Mr Fantastic or the Human Torch sets off an atomic explosion. The dialogue indicates that the Mole Man did it, but that makes no sense: why blow up your own house? The art seems to indicate that Reed set off a bomb after Johnny sealed the entrance. This is confirmed by the Mole Man’s dialogue when they next return: Reed set off the bomb.

How does this link to outer space? In the Challengers stories, mutations were caused by radiation in space, and that radiation got there due to man-made bombs:

Where did this idea come from? In 1958, when Kirby was writing Challengers, the Americans had just discovered the Van Allen radiation belts.

The American military were planning to explode a hydrogen bomb in space to understand how they interact. The planned explosion eventually took place in 1962, producing a spectacular light show. (Check out Robert Krulwich’s ‘A Very Scary Light Show: Exploding H-Bombs in Space’, or google ‘Starfish Prime’.)

So when the Fantastic Four entered the Van Allen radiation belts above Earth it was just as Kirby said: it was linked to man’s experiments with the atom bomb, and humans did not know what that radiation would do.