So in our last installment, I wrote about some of the new villains John Byrne created during his Fantastic Four run that never really seemed to go much of anywhere. Someone responded in the comments that Malice, AKA “Dark Invisible Woman,” was one that Byrne came up with and popped up again and again over the decades. Granted, I probably should have mentioned her in that particular post, but I did discuss Malice, and mention her current usage, in Part Three of “My Fantastic Four-ay,” so I didn’t forget her completely!

And to really get right down to it, strictly speaking it’s more a remixing of a character created by someone else, in this case Stan Lee and Jack Kirby their own selves, rather than a whole new person. But that’s splitting hairs a bit…I mean, who created Nightwing? Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, who in the 1980s put Dick Grayson into that outfit and gave him that name, or whoever it was Bob Kane took the credit from when Dick Grayson was introduced way back in Detective Comics #38?

Regardless, it’s a new take on a preexisting character, and I suppose that’s close enough for horseshoes, as nobody younger than me says.

But anyway, in that same vein, let’s talk about Frankie Raye.

Frankie Raye was a supporting character in the Fantastic Four title starting with issue #164, by Roy Thomas and George Pérez, published in 1975 and several years before I started reading the book on a regular basis. Frankie becomes Johnny “Human Torch” Storm’s girlfriend, despite her apparent fear of fire. Natch, they broke up, but she was reintroduced into the book early in Byrne’s run, making her one of the few non-Lee/Kirby FF elements to return in his “Back to Basics” run (along with Terrax, discussed in Part One).

Like those early Terrax stories, I never read any of Frankie’s appearances in the title prior to this Byrne run. She was just another story element that emphasized to me that the Marvel Universe was an ever-growing, ever-self-referential thing, and that while I was tempted to go back and pick up those prior appearances so that these stories I was reading were “complete,” I think even then I realized the futility of doing so. The soap opera and subplot-ridden storylines would make it impossible to ever pick out a completely clean “starting point,” unless I was willing to buy all the way back to Fantastic Four #1, which maybe I would have been but my pocketbook would likely have argued against that course of action.

So that was likely an early lesson taught to me by Byrne’s run on this book…just let his first issue (#232) suffice as close to a clean break as may be possible from what has gone before, and let any previous elements worked back in be explained as they need explaining.

And that’s what we got here. Frankie Raye shows back up, reconnects with Johnny, we’re told enough about the two’s backstory, but then Mr. Byrne pulls one of these on us in issue #237:

What’s this? Frankie Raye — completely in the altogether? Look, we’ve all read Byrne comics, we know that could totally have happened, but instead we have to wait a month and in issue #238, we see what’s really going on:

She goes on to explain that this costume only appears when she’s otherwise naked, for you “this is a fetish for someone” fans, and she reveals some suddenly awakened memories of her past. Like, for example, helping her stepdad move some barrels of dangerous chemicals:

…and after the accident, she finds herself alive, but burning:

…and in response steppop hypnotizes her into forgetting the whole incident and the fact that she apparently has superpowers, out of guilt or whatever:

Hence that previously mentioned fear-of-flame, you know.

Now as it turns out, her stepdad was Professor Phineas Horton, creator of the original android Human Torch during World War II, and the chemicals he and Frankie were moving around were like those that gave the android its flame powers. Strikes me as a plot contrivance they couldn’t get away with now, given WWII is 40+ more years in the past than when this comic was originally published. Horton being a teen girl’s 100-year-old stepfather now seems unlikely…or even an 85-year-old one, if you want to work it into a flashback timeframe. Just sayin’ Frankie Raye’s backstory is probably one they’d have to adjust if they ever referred to it again.

So anyway, Horton mailed her this costume some years later to help her contain her powers, though via post-hypnotic suggestion or something via a cassette tape included with the costume, she was made to immediately forget that she put it on and to destroy the tape and forget that too. Okay, that cassette would be an MP3 file now, but let’s not quibble.

Regardless of all this backstory, the upshot is Frankie Raye is also a Human Torch-type character now, and she goes on adventures and such with the Fantastic Four and everything is hunky-dory.

Except…a couple of times she used excessive force in her superheroing, showing little to no consideration for what she’s done. And that’s foreshadowing for what happens in issue #244, the conclusion of Byrne’s first major Galactus storyline.

As you can see by that cover there, something drastic is about to go down, and given the subject of today’s post, it’s probably not a shock to discover that’s Frankie depicted on the cover there.

Near the conclusion of this storyline, for assorted reasons Frankie makes the offer to Galactus to be his new herald, à la his former servant the Silver Surfer.

Reed of course tries to talk her out of it, telling her what she’d have to do in this role, and her response is surprising:

…though maybe not so surprising, given her attitude on display during those foreshadowing events I mentioned earlier.

Galactus, for his part, has a pragmatic reaction:

And the deed is done: she’s transformed by Galactus (see the cover above), and leaps into the new role, forsaking everything earthly for her new job:

Johnny clearly has no impact on her anymore, even after being a couple again for a bit, and his reaction is genuinely affecting in the face of Frankie’s (or rather, Nova’s, to use her new name) faded humanity.

And that’s that. Frankie turns up once or twice more during Byrne’s run, notably leading Galactus to the Skrull Homeworld. But also notably, we get the beginnings of a long-running subplot in future Marvel comics that Nova may be developing feelings for Galactus.

By “future comics” I mean mostly Silver Surfer, where that aspect of her relationship with Galactus is touched upon, and she also has some romance with the Surfer himself. We do get a follow-up to Nova’s disregard to the lives of “bug-eyed monsters,” and we also learn that Galactus himself may have had…something approaching stronger feelings for Nova than he let on, especially in the wake of her death.

Yes, I said “death,” the character dies in Silver Surfer, though she came back in some form, in the Mighty Marvel Manner, in the Heralds mini, but I hadn’t read it so I don’t know what she was up to there, or lately.

I didn’t even get into her appearance in the alternaute future “The Last Galactus Story” that was serialized, but never completed, in Epic Illustrated. But I think it’s safe to say, like Malice, Frankie “Nova” Raye was one of his reworkings of an established character that did have legs, did continue to have an impact, not just on the Fantastic Four title, but on the Marvel Universe at large.

And farther still, as the “Frankie becomes Nova” story make it, in condensed form, into an episode of a 1990s Fantastic Four cartoon. The character makes other animated and live action appearances as well.

What really struck me most about Frankie Raye is her amoral stance in regards to non-terrestrial life, as presented in #244. That surprised me as a reader still relatively new to the Marvel Universe, presenting a complexity in a character that we identify as “hero,” did heroic things, and had the readers’ sympathy. But she had that one flaw, one that would basically put her in the “villain” category, that made us question any specific attachment we may have had to her. And on top of that, throwing away her humanity, discarding her relationships in exchange for power…that would also be marked as villain behavior in a more black-and-white milieu, but reads as hopelessly tragic in Marvel’s longstanding “characters with problems” foundation. It’s a move that impressed me then, and still, all these years later, even after everything that’s been done with the character since, impresses me now.

So the topic of John Byrne’s mid-’80s reboot of the Superman line came up on Bluesky, where, among other topics, the new villains Byrne introduced was discussed. By and large Byrne took the probably-editorially-mandated approach of retooling some of the old Superman adversaries into something a little more modern-feeling, but between making Mr. Mxyzptlk unpleasant and making Metallo unpleasant, some new creations entered the mix.

…Aaaaand…dropped out of the mix, as for the most part, the new opponents had little to no staying power, or were used only sporadically until mostly just fading away. Like, say, Skyhook, or Dreadnought and Psi-Phon, whatever that one robot mummy thing was called, or even, God help us, Sleez (who apparently appeared about three or so times, which is four more than I expected). Even Bloodsport, who got a little play when a version of the character was used in a Suicide Squad movie, is mostly underutilized.

The one villain Byrne introduced who actually kinda/sorta got over, is Silver Banshee, probably more because of her striking appearance than anything else. Other creators took a liking to her and started developing her presence, and she also made the jump to other media (remember when she was on Smallville? She certainly was!). She was even showing up in the Superman comics relatively recently,

Which is a long way of saying that Byrne seemed to have more luck doing memorable stories with the established characters here than he did creating brand new villains for Superman to fight. But, really, that’s okay…superhero comics are littered with one-shot wonders who show up to fight the hero for an issue, gets sent down the river to do a nickel in the gray bar hotel, and are never heard from again. Byrne cooking up one villain (maaaaaybe two, if you want to count Bloodsport) that manage to make the grade out of however many he attempted isn’t a bad ratio.. I mean, it’s no Lee/Kirby cranking out legendary character after legendary character, but who could ever match those guys.

And that brings me to >Fantastic Four, as I’m sure you were expecting, given the title of this post an’ all. Byrne’s overall goal to his run on the Fantastic Four was that all-too-familiar phrase of “back to basics.” Byrne stripped the title back down to the Stan ‘n’ Jack days, focusing mainly on their creations as adversaries for the early issues, building on their foundation rather than much of what gone on in issues prior to Byrne’s takeover. (One exception was bringing back Terrax the Tamer, a cocreation with Marv Wolfman from Byrne’s previous run on the title, and who had his own measure of staying power).

Which isn’t to say that Byrne didn’t make some attempts at introducing new antagonists to the title. In #237, be brought in Spinerette:

…an interesting-looking lady with the power to induce vertigo-like effects:

…I mean, she got a “super-villain” name, she had an interesting look, but far as I can tell, only appeared this one time. Misunderstandings were resolved, she left the planet with her people, and that was that.

In #239, we get some critters that have been pestering a smal Arizona town:

…only it turns out they’re pals with a young girl that had been helping the FF throughout the issue:

There’s a lot goin’ on in this issue that I’m glossing over, but, even though Reed Richards his own self implies that these beings could appear again, far as I can tell, they never do.

In #266, one of the few issues during Byrne’s tenure that wasn’t mostly drawn by him (Kerry Gammill doing the honors, with Byrne pencilling a couple pages at the beginning and end of the issue, but inking throughout), we got Karisma:

…a villian with mesmerizing powers, shown here putting the whammy on the Thing:

…and she apparently turns up again fighting Captain America at some point, but she’s only had a couple of appearances altogether.

And then there’s the big one (literally). Terminus! I seem to recall Byrne stating somewhere that the intention was to create a Fantastic Four villain that would stand with the other classic FF bad guys, and, well, what we got was a riff on Galactus:

In Amazing Heroes #39, Byrne is quoted as saying

“The whole thrust behind Terminus […] is to introduce a cosmic bad guy who is a cosmic bad guy. Terminus is an extremely powerful menace, but he is not as powerful as Galactus, nor does he have Galactus’s nobility or important role to play in the workings of the universe. […] He’s not beyond good and evil [as Galactus is said to be]. He’s evil and he likes it. I don’t want a character with even a hint of nobility this time. He’s scuzzy. Every time he comes back, he’s going to be nastier. He’s basically out to have a good time, which he defines looting, pillaging, raping, murdering. He’s a kind of cosmic Attila the Hun.”

So, a giant bad guy who destroys planets but, unlike Galactus, is kind of an asshole about it. He’s sort of the answer to “oh, you think Galactus is a ‘bad guy,’ here’s what an actual Bad Guy Galactus would be like.” Terminus even has his own little companion who helps him track down worlds:

…and in contrast to whenever Galactus was defeated and driven away from the Earth, Terminus’s defeat results in him becoming trapped inside the Earth:

Interestingly, in an Amazing Heroes interview some years later, Byrne says

“…I had created Terminus for Marvel, and he was originally created to be a Darkseid-type character, although he evolved into something different.”

Of the FF villains Byrne created, Terminus seems to be the one closest to having the goods, though I believe Byrne only used him the once. He later turned up in an Avengers story by Roger Stern, John Buscema, and Tom Palmer, then was the focus of a crossover among a handful of 1990 annuals. He (or his armor) have made a handful of appearances over the years, making him at the very least a minor villanous player in the Marvel universe, if not the major recurring threat that Byrne had planned.

When I started reading Fantastic Four comics, I think even then I could feel the difference between an established villain and a new creation, why one had staying power and why the other did not. I enjoying reading the Spinnerette story, but I wasn’t left with a feeling of “I can’t wait to see her again,” or “this is the beginning of a long history with this character.” She was a short-term puzzle to be solved for this one story, with no real reason to return to her.

Terminus at least has some apparent depth to him, despite his one note purpose as “cosmic thug.” He’d clearly been around a bit, he had taken a helper from a previous world, his defeat left the promise of a return. This felt like a character with some legs, even if it would be under other creators, at least for a time.

Whereas, for example, Diablo, or the Puppet Master, two villains that turned up very eary in Byrne’s run, felt like guys who were absolutely part of the Marvel universe (because, well, they were) with understandable motivations and histories, and possibilities for further stories. These guys weren’t created as one-offs, they could be plot machines for many stories to come.

Not to say that Byrne’s new villains, aside from Terminus, couldn’t have been. Who knows what those little demon critters from #239 could have evolved into. Or what allegorical purpose Karisma could have served? But they were ultimately minor villains who existed to serve that one story and nobody felt inspired to dig them up again (or at leaset to dig them up too often). Again, that’s fine…not every character can be the Joker or Doctor Doom. And Byrne was hardly the only creator to contibute a new villain to the FF cause that made his or her one stand and was never seen again. Lee and Kirby are hard acts to follow, after all.

So as you might imagine, even this far out from (some version of) the character’s appearance on the silver screen, I’ve had an upswell of demand for comics featuring Doctor Doom. And not too long ago, a young man, probably 12 or 13, fished a couple appearances out of the Fantastic Four boxes and purchased them, one of which being issue #278 from 1985:

Technically, this isn’t Doom in this issue, but rather his young ward Kristoff, whose mind was reprogrammed with Doom’s memories upon the Doctor’s apparent “death.” Comics, everyone! But it’s a fun adventure (continued into the next issue, with a cover blurb referencing artist/writer John Byrne’s early work for Charlton).

Anyway, an hour or three after that kid bought his comic and left, it occurred to me that a particular subplot appeared in that #278, setting up a story a couple of issues later. Johnny “Human Torch” Storm, with his girlfriend Alicia Masters (which will take some explaining, which I plan to do later in this series of posts) are out for a walk, when Johnny notices someone’s been applying offensive stickers to posters advertising an equality rally:

And just so we’re clear, that panel above is the version you’ll see on Marvel’s digital comic platform, with That Word obscured. It was not obscured in the original publication, in the issues I bought off the stands myself 41 years ago. I can only wonder what that young customer of mine thought when he hit that page in the comic after taking it home that day, and frankly I’m still expecting the phone call at the shop from a parent.

I’m trying to recall my own reaction to the usage in the comic. I was a 15/16-year old white kid reading this, and I think I was…maybe a little surprised to see it, but I could see it was there to Make A Point About Racism and therefore this was leading up to some Important Comics.

Looking at it now, I can see it as an attempt at making (spoiler, this is the villain behind it all) the Psycho-Man and his emotion-manipulating powers having a more “real world” relevant impact. And using That Word was absolutely there for the shock value, which was apparently a big year for it because it pops up in Uncanny X-Men just a couple of months after this. As that 15/16-year-old kid back then, and as the 57-year-old white guy I am now, I’m not in a position to say “sure, this was okay to do.” I mean, I think hearts were in the right place, judging by this please-don’t-write-us-letters editorial box on the letters page for #278:

(And just so you all know…I looked to see what reactions this issue generated in later Fantastic Four letter columns, and I found one with letters for #277, and another with a page for letters about #279, but none for #278. Not sure what to make of that.)

In a postscript in #279, That Word gets dropped again as a set-up for the next issue. And, once we get to issue #280, with this admittedly striking cover:

…where this storyline starts in earnest, things get scaled back a little bit, with a policeman under Psycho-Man’s influence harasses an elderly Jewish man, and assaults Wyatt Wingfoot, the FF’s Native American friend. Plus, we get a panel showing an anti-mutant protest:

…which has been, and still is, Marvel’s mainstay allegory for real world racism, feeling a little odd contrasted with the real world racism the comic has been presenting for a couple of issues now.

When all is said and done, the entire point of the slurs and the racism and the violence is to show what a character like the Psycho-Man, and his control over people’s hate and fear, would do in a “realistic” setting. Yes, racism is real, and someone like Psycho-Man would take advantage of it, stirring it up for his own ends, even if his own ends are just causing more hatred and violence for its own sake. But the contrast between a very real-world slur and, well, the inherent comic book ridiculousness of Psycho-Man makes for, at best, a rough fit, resulting in a presentation that feels more like “look what we can do!” than “We Have Something Important to Say.”

The real goal of this storyline is two-fold, and has nothing to do with the racism in the set-up. It’s all about Susan Richards, the Invisible Woman, and redefining her character. In short, under Psycho-Man’s control, and SPOILERS once more for a four-decade-old story, she emerges in the new costumed identity of Malice:

…where she quickly demolishes the other members of the FF with innovative usage of her force field powers. And while the Malice identity, at least during Byrne’s run on the book, departs after the conclusion of this storyline, the character has quite the long tail, appearing and reappearing in one form or another in later creators’ runs, up to Fantastic Four comics being released even as I type this.

The demonstration of Sue’s powers unleashed, combined with her eventual torture at the hands of Psycho-Man and her off-panel presumably-gruesome revenge on the villain, are all part of Byrne’s attempts at “strengthening” her, resulting in this concluding panel in #284:

Despite being a little harder to say out loud than “Invisible Girl,” the “Invisible Woman” moniker has survived to this day. And, largely because of this story, she is still often referred to as the most powerful member of the team.

Which of course is a wild way to wrap up a tale that began with That Word being printed in the comic, in front of God an’ everybody. It’s one of the very few examples of Byrne setting up a story element that doesn’t really come to anything…something similar (though with fewer bad words) occurs in that story with Reed’s father from about a year prior to this, which I’ll probably get to later. It’s just there to show just bad the villain can be, and, well, yes, that’s pretty bad indeed, thanks John.

Again, going back to what I, reading this new in 1985, thought of it…well, I’m sure I didn’t think much about the conclusions I’m drawing here today. I probably thought of it as “comics have really matured if they can make storytelling choices like this!” Or maybe I wasn’t thinking anything of it at all, since I was also reading old undergrounds an’ such at the time, which tended to be a little freer with the language than their four-color counterparts.

I mean, ultimately it’s good to show Our Heroes Hate Racism (a point that now seems sadly lost on some of those who purport to be comic fans), but casually throwing That Word out there in a regular ol’ superhero comic, an edgy move then, is certainly off-putting to modern eyes, regardless of intent.