Superheroes Behaving Badly XI: Reed Richards

If people only thought about it, all superheroes would enjoy this kind of bad attention, and they would have Reed Richards to blame. Not for the usual reasons that New Yorkers sometimes have for periodically turning against the Fantastic Four; the editorials of J. Jonah Jameson would need play no part here, and the whole matter would center around something Reed Richards actually did.

Reed Richards, as Lee and Kirby conceived him, combines in his overachieving person the virtues of a genius-level intellect, a first-rate scientific education, and the motivation necessary to play the roles of cutting-edge inventor and first-rate hero. It need not surprise us, then, that when a hero like Reed Richards goes astray, he should outdo any of his peers.

Richards did this, and did more. In a story twenty years ago, Richards willingly became an accessory to mass murder on a scale impossible outside of comic books.

An Opportunity Lost

What could Mister Fantastic, the idol of dozens of surviving comics fans, actually have done that would warrant the previous statements? To comprehend, we need to pose a hypothetical question, one that deals with ethics, life, death and consequences. In essence, we need to ask: "If you had a time machine and a mail-order rifle and a clear shot at Hitler before he committed most of his murders and related atrocities, would you take the shot?" A number of people would answer this one "Yes," including not a few folks otherwise disinclined to violence in any of its forms.

Richards did worse than letting a murderer of millions walk. He enlisted the aid of the finest heroes of New York (and, probably, the world) to rescue Galactus, the casual murder of billions, and did it while, all along, mouthing moralistic platitudes about the sanctity of life.

Imagine what this involves. Galactus exists as a blight that threatens all worlds that contain life. Galactus must devour worlds to survive. If Galactus would live, billions - over and over again - must die.

Let us modify our original question a bit, then, to make it reflect Galactus' situation. "If you could allow Galactus to die, and thereby prevent the routine destruction of billions of lives per episode of an endless series of interplanetary genocides, would you do it?"

We look at this question here in the abstract, but at the turn of the seventies, Reed Richards faced such a question. His purportedly genius-level intellect yielded just exactly the wrong answer, showing that something seriously stunted his moral sensibilities.

The Nature of Galactus

Offering a being like Galactus mercy does not represent the decision of a lucid mind, in the same way that creating a refuge for rabies as an endangered species does not represent the decision of sane reasoning. In neither case can we expect the recipient of mercy to benefit thereby, reassess its behavior, and Sin No More. Rather each of these entities would take the opportunity to create a new beachhead and return, twice as destructive as before.

Granted, that Galactus, by his nature, must consume worlds or perish. And granted, he can present a broody and introspective front in which he sometimes appears to regret this particular problem.

However, a Kirby pedigree, a big helmet, and cool melodramatic angst do little to change the fundamental ethical question here. Should Galactus live?, we could ask, and, in the process, consider the possible scenarios where Galactus survives and where he does not.

The Window of Opportunity

Galactus, though possessed of godlike (destructive) powers, nonetheless has some limitations. His need to feed often outstrips his ability to locate a new food supply. To deal with this problem, he traditionally utilizes a herald (though one might better describe these figures as scouts) who locate worlds for him to devour. Most of these heralds get sick of the job for one reason or another, sometimes based on the ethics of working for a cosmic dirtbag of his magnitude.

After a decade and a half of Galactus stories, however, Byrne thought of a new twist on the idea. What would happen, Byrne asked, if Galactus couldn't get any planets to eat?

Therefore, Byrne crafted a tale in which Terrax, one of Galactus' more sociopathic heralds, decided to turn against his master in a kind of celestial coup. This rebellion took the form of leading Galactus to no food and watching him waste away. Driven to desperation by hunger, Galactus decided to ignore his oath to leave earth alone (or perhaps a previous story had released him from this oath, but it doesn't really matter; once you have Galactus, like herpes, he will always come back).

So Manhattan found itself in the middle of a domestic dispute between Galactus and his herald, and Galactus stood very close to death from starvation. In his weakened state, most of the heroes that Byrne had ever drawn came together and defeated him, and the Devourer of Worlds, literally reduced in stature, lay helpless on the streets of that island community. At this point, the assembled heroes could have solved the Galactus problem altogether.

Reed Richards, however, had other ideas. He decided, in full compos mentis, to restore Galactus to his earlier vitality. Somehow Richards made a rhetorical leap from the sanctity of life to we must save Galactus, and the world might still wonder how he did it.

Corruption That Spreads

A bad idea will stick and spread like chewing gum on the pavement in the summer. Note Captain America's espousal of an invalid consensus he seems to help create here. Why - and again, why - would Captain America take this position about an imaginary need to protect Galactus' life?

Given Captain America's unique historical role as a player in the Second World War, one might find him somewhat more critical of key players in mass murder. Research will probably yield no stories where Captain America might (say) travel to South America to protect the likes of an expatriate Josef Mengele, and rightly so.

Paying the Piper

A later story would place the Fantastic Four on trial for Richards' contagious and damning lapse of ethical insight. However, inasmuch as the Fantastic Four still appears in print (rather than, say, the Fantastic No One Left after the Executions), we can conclude that it ended in some kind of deus ex machina, slap on the wrist, or silly plea bargain of the sort that frequently intrude into political debates about the failings of modern jurisprudence.

Given the scope of his crimes - on a level that renders the malfeasance of most other superheroes completely insignificant - one might consider this story sequence an excellent candidate for a retroactive continuity fix. Such a retcon could solve the problem of the need for the remaining, uneaten worlds to produce the interplanetary equivalents of tar, feathers, and a scaffold in order to deal with an offender who left the rest of the universe at the mercy of an insatiable destructive force.

The logic of a continuous shared comics universe forces such a choice. At some point, Richards must come to pay for this crime - such things tend to out eventually in planetary politics, so we should assume that interplanetary politics could well work the same way - or Marvel should somehow dispense with this story's role in the ongoing canon of Fantastic Four stories.

Escape, Parole, or Absolution

If we dare criticize other superheroes, such as Hal Jordan, the second and most tenured Green Lantern, for trivial affronts like the mere murder of only thousands of thinking beings, how can we ignore Reed Richards' role as an accessory before and after the fact?

Comics fans might grumble about Cyclops or Yellowjacket, whose offenses take a more personal, and therefore more comprehensible character. They committed offenses on a strictly human scale, with a handful of recognizable victims.

One could easily look at 1,000,000,000 deaths as 100 deaths with some zeroes added to it, because the human mind does not easily grasp such figures. Reed Richards, however, comics scientist - a role that combines teacher, inventor, researcher, physicist, engineer, mathematician, astronomer, chemist, mechanic, author, pundit, biologist, archaeologist, historian, lawyer, paramedic, and a few dozen specialties as well - certainly would comprehend big numbers, Avagadro's number, transfinite numbers, and the kind of gigadeaths that amounted to business-as-usual for Galactus.

Note that Galactus fails to understand Richards' deeds, just as many readers did. Galactus, though Machiavellian in action, nonetheless enjoys an extremely rational mind; such rationality makes ordinary men dangerous when detached from a moral sensibility, and Galactus demonstrates this principle on a cosmic scale. To Galactus, as to us, saving his life did not, and can not, make sense. What did Byrne intend by this story, a piece that made Richards cast his lot with one of the most loathsome beings ever spawned by the Marvel cosmos?

Virtue as Excess

Byrne may have intended something here about principles - how, perhaps, we should apply them evenhandedly and in spite of the circumstances. In this, we should perhaps forgive him a bit in the bizarre outcome of this story, with Reed Richards enjoying a warm and fuzzy moment with one of the most relentless mass murderers produced by the comics of the Silver Age.

This story, in context, appeared in a day in which the anti-hero enjoyed an ascendant role; within a short span, readers would see the Punisher and Wolverine play the role of most-admired-hero, in no small part because they seldom fretted over disposing of human life. With this backdrop in place, one might view Byrne's eccentric tale as something of a protest or refutation of the view that one should measure a hero by his body count.

That notwithstanding, the story simply doesn't make sense if you sit down to think about it. Some pieces beg for the hand of an editor to wave them away into the mysterious Land of Retcon, and such would represent a more palatable choice than believing that a hero could trifle with billions of lives just to demonstrate how precious he found a single life.

We might, perhaps, give Byrne some credit for even daring to consider a story that posed such an ethical question, even if a combination of comic-book morals and no one-knows-what produced the surreal and nonsensical ending where Galactus lived and everyone wandered into the sunset of a happy ending. Those things do not belong together, just as heroes and mass murderers do not make likely friends.