Yesterday, the world got it’s first look at the Ben Grimm, aka The Thing, for Josh Trank’s upcoming Fantastic Four movie. One thing about The Thing is that he always kind of looks the same. He is a human man who, by the power of a cosmic ray storm, turned to orange rock. What’s interesting about The Thing is not his appearance as much as what’s going on underneath that orange rock skin.
With Grimm, it turns out, there’s a lot going on in there.
The Thing first appeared in Fantastic Four #1, in 1961. He bounced around FF and other books for two decades, before he got his own eponymous book, in 1983. The first run of The Thing was written by John Byrne, whose introspective and poetic narration makes him the perfect writer for a character like Ben Grimm. Byrne’s ability to turn the outward monsters inward with depth and beauty marks his work and makes him one of my all time favorite comics writers (see also Byrne’s time on The Incredible Hulk, Sensational She-Hulk).
The first issues of The Thing highlight the beginnings of Ben Grimm’s life. Issue 1 has him re-visiting the haunts of his youth. He grew up on the lower-east side of New York, on Yancy Street. He was in the local gang and saw his brother stabbed to death by local rivals. He was a poor Jewish kid, eventually orphaned. Issue 2 tells the story of Ben’s first love, and her turning him away for the sake of her career (that story’s subtext might be about an abortion, actually. A question for another time).
It was John Byrne, then who wrote The Thing #3, which tells of Crystal the Inhuman seeking the help of Ben Grimm in protecting her child from her own husband, Quicksilver. These are the kind of stories that define Ben Grimm. He is a Frankenstein-a monster on the outside (unlike the other members of FF he cannot change his appearance), but on the inside he is a compassionate and tender man.
Here’s how he ends up protecting a mother and daughter’s right to self-determination.
Grimm is at the hospital visiting his girlfriend Alicia when Crystal and her giant teleporting Dog-like friend Lockjaw enter the scene. She is desperate and afraid and knows nowhere else to turn.
Ben is gentle, a stone man made of compassion and kindness for the people he loves, and embraces her, and carries her, and hears her story.
I love this panel. Such strange balance and shape with Lockjaw and Ben. Crystal in the center of two beasts who love her and will do anything to help her recover her child.
She is an inhuman and her husband, Quicksilver is a human mutant. They have had a daughter, Luna, and she is without powers-she is just a human girl. This is unacceptable to Quicksilver, who plans to subject Luna to the mists that provide inhumans with their powers. As the father of Luna, this decision resides solely with Quicksilver. Crystal opposes this. She wants her child to live as she was born rather than be subjected to the unknown effects of the ‘terrain mists.’
She will not risk her child’s life. But her husband does not care .
So Ben travels to the center of the earth’s moon (where the inhumans live) in an attempt to protect Luna from her father. He meets the inhumans, allies of the Fantastic Four but not accepting of Ben’s plan to interfere with their traditions.
Medusa, the only woman among them and Crystal’s sister, is moved by Ben’s attempt to protect Crystal choice. But she can do nothing. “As the father, it’s his choice,” Gorgon tells Ben and Medusa, “not hers.”
Medusa doesn’t stop what’s happening. But her turmoil is clear. Byrne adds that linguistic flourish of his, as Black Bolt touches her “as gentle as soft rain upon her shoulder.” But she leaves, upset. Byrne ends the scene with a powerful statement of tradition in flux. “Something important seems to have died here.”
Eventually, Ben Grimm confronts Quicksilver. The two men discuss the right of the father to determine the fate of his daughter, and do not come to terms.
Crystal returns, determined to save her child from a father unwilling to listen to his wife.
But still Quicksilver refuses to quit.
He claims again that it is his right to determine the fate of his child. That tradition makes it so. Not Crystal, nor Ben Grimm, nor any other human or inhuman as the right to take that tradition from him.
He claims that “anything would be preferable” to a human, powerless, girl. It is right, under “inhuman law” to determine his child’s future.
In the end, it’s Lockjaw, the transporting Dog-like inhuman who saves the day. He reveals that he is what he is because of the terrain mists that Quicksilver wants to subject his daughter to. Looking around the room, Ben Grimm sees a fish-man, a dog-creature, and a number of other inhumans. He sees in Luna a child “who has a chance fer something that’s been taken from” Ben Grimm.
Nobody has the right, Grimm says, to take away Luna’s chance to be a human. He lost his own, and he knows the cost of losing one’s capacity to choose a life for yourself. Tradition be damned.
Ben Grimm, you’re a good man.
