Communists of the Marvel Universe #003: The Red Ghost

(Part three of an ongoing series analyzing the role of communists in the early Marvel Universe and how they have been adapted - or, in some cases, how they glaringly haven’t been adapted - by comics creators in a post Cold War climate.)


That’s the Red Ghost as in “The Red Ghost and his Super Apes,” of course. He turns intangible - hence the “Ghost” bit in his name - as a result of flying through a cosmic ray storm in order to recreate the circumstances under which the Fantastic Four got their powers, except he used a spaceship with no shielding in order to increase the exposure. Started out as an FF villain and has become sort of an all-purpose Marvel baddie.

Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say.

Ivan Kragoff was born in Leningrad, in what was at the time the Soviet Union. Before becoming the Red Ghost, Ivan was a Soviet scientist bent on beating the Americans to the moon and claiming it for the Communist empire. He assembled a crew of three trained apes — Mikhlo the Gorilla, Igor the Baboon, and Peotr the Orangutan — which he subjected to specialized training regimens of his own design, then took off on his lunar rocket trip on behalf of the USSR...

Hell, I got this one, you guys:

Ivan Kragoff was born in Leningrad, in what was at the time the Soviet Union. Before becoming the Red Ghost, Ivan was a Soviet scientist bent on beating the Americans to the moon and claiming it for the Communist empire. He assembled a crew of three trained apes — Mikhlo the Gorilla, Igor the Baboon, and Peotr the Orangutan — which he subjected to specialized training regimens of his own design, then took off on his lunar rocket trip on behalf of the USSR...

Right, that’s wrapped up! (Checks watch.) Hm, and quicker than usual…

Actually, no joke, in most of the Red Ghost’s appearances, I think that’s all you really need to do. Most of the times I've ever seen the Red Ghost in a comic, it’s not because the guys who were doing the story needed a commie bad guy, it’s that he’s a.) an evil genius, b.) a guy who turns intangible, and c.) OH MY GOD YOU GUYS MONKEYS AWESOME. If you’re going to do Spider-Man or the Hulk fights the Red Ghost in a contemporary comic book, it’s no sweat, there’s no need to bring up all that messy communist stuff; he's a mad scientist who happens to be Russian.

The messy communist stuff is, however, acutely important in his first appearance.

If you haven’t read Fantastic Four #13 … well, you should. Ditko inks Kirby (it results in a magnificently monstrous Thing), and you get this panel, which in black and white is absolutely stunning:

But anyway, here’s a summary. Reed Richards is again trying to get to the moon before the Soviets do, and he finds a new fuel source (Tunguska-derived, it appears – that’s right, Warren Ellis, Stan Lee totally beat you to this one!) with which to accomplish this. However, the Red Ghost and his simian crew also blast off at that very moment to conquer the moon in the name of Mother Russia. They both make it to the moon and start to fight, when suddenly, The Watcher makes his first appearance. He does his whole “I am bound never to interfere in mortals’ affairs, except this time” speech because the US/USSR conflict, no longer confined to Earth, now potentially threatens the rest of the universe. So he transports them to the Blue Area of the Moon where there’s breathable atmosphere and the ruins of an ancient civilization (it’s where the X-Men fought the Imperial Guard at the climax of the Dark Phoenix Saga, you’ll recall) and says to fight it out there, and whoever wins will win the space race for their side. The Fantastic Four, of course, beat the Red Ghost and claim the moon for freedom and democracy. “Space is your heritage,” the Watcher tells them. “See that you prove worthy of such a glorious gift!”

Okay, so right off, Marvel Time makes the “first men on the moon” thing an anachronism (though I guess we haven’t actually had a woman or apes up there yet). As for the Red Ghost himself, we can’t just cross out the communist references because they’re actually important in this case. The Red Ghost here isn’t just any mad scientist to fight, he has to represent something that the Fantastic Four would oppose ideologically; otherwise, it’s just another supercharacter scuffle and not the event of cosmic significance that Lee and Kirby are trying to sell us on in this story.

So to that end, we can ask, “What is it that ‘Soviet-ness’ represents here that the audience is to be repulsed by?” In other words, what exactly is Stan Lee’s beef with communism (other than that he’s an American citizen in the early 1960s)?

Well, it turns out in the story that the Red Ghost treats those apes pretty badly. He calls the gorilla “My monsterous slave,” and in the next panel shouts, “No food for you yet, comrade baboon! It is important to me that you remain hungry – I want you to be mean, vicious, dangerous!”

Later in the story, the Red Ghost captures Sue and imprisons her behind a force field guarded by his Super-Apes, and she thinks, “If I could only find a way to eliminate this force field – to free the Super-Apes! I would take my chacnes with them, rather than the Red Ghost, for they are like the communist masses, innocently enslaved by their evil leaders!” Sue manages to knock the force field out of commission, but they don’t attack her. “Just as I expected! They’re so ravenously hungry that they don’t even notice me in their frantic attempt to get the food which Kragoff had left on the other side of the force screen!” The gorilla punches out a wall. “And now,” Sue thinks, “no longer under the Red Ghost’s mental control, they want their freedom!

At the story’s end, they leave the Red Ghost on the moon to the mercies of the Super-Apes, who have rebelled against their cruel master. “Wait!” Kragoff says. “Why are you staring at me that way? Aiming the [paralysis] ray at me?? Your eyes – they’re gleaming with hatred – with vengeance!”

So stripped of era-specific politics, what “Soviet-ness” seems to mean for Stan Lee here (and elsewhere, notably in a Captain America/Hawkeye/Quicksilver/Scarlet Witch Avengers story with a Vietnam analogue) is exploitation, and that’s something you can always find a relevant outlet for. In fact, it’s interesting to see how Marvel’s anticommunist themes of the early 60s morph into the antiestablishment themes of the late 60s – they’re both about taking a stand against The Man, whether that Man is an American establishment figure or the Soviet high command keeping the little guy (or ape) down.

So there are any number of ways you could make this story relevant, to find a new way for the Red Ghost to be The Man. Perhaps the most mischevious would be to take the Soviet boogeyman and turn him relatively seamlessly into a ruthless, total free-market industrialist. Maybe he’s headed to the moon to strip it of its resources, to ransack the wonders of the Blue Area – you could play this as a guy who wants to own the moon, who wants to privatize Earth’s satellite. The Super-Apes are, as you will, his corporate drones or his underfed and underpaid working class. The FF, then, fight him to protect the moon from being divvied up like it was just another chunk of unclaimed geography; that space exploration is about something finer, something to bring humankind together, despite whatever differences we might have had on Earth. All that idealistic 60s Star Trek stuff, right? There’s a philosophical/ethical/ideological conflict that would make this important and not just another bad-guy fight, worthy of the Watcher’s interference.

Well, whatever way you do it (I'm sure there's a better way I haven’t thought of), again, it generally doesn’t matter for 99% of the Red Ghost appearances past, present and future. But then again, if you committed to the Red Ghost as a symbol of exploitation, maybe you could get more out of the character than just a mad monkey wrangler...

Communists of the Marvel Universe #002: The Chameleon

(Part two of an ongoing series analyzing the role of communists in the early Marvel Universe and how they have been adapted - or, in some cases, how they glaringly haven’t been adapted - by comics creators in a post Cold War climate.)

The Chameleon, master of disguise, debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #1 as the first villain Spider-Man ever fought. (Chronologically in publication, at least; Kurt Busiek retconned in one or two between Amazing Fantasy #15 and ASM #1, did he not?) He appears here as a spy planning to steal U.S. missile defense plans, and it’s made explicit he’s selling them to the Soviets (“The Iron Curtain countries will pay a fortune for these plans!” he says, and he has a rendezvous at one point with a submarine bearing the hammer and sickle). He decides to impersonate Spider-Man and frame him for the theft, but is eventually apprehended.

If you believe the standard line about alien shapechangers and body snatchers (like the Skrulls Stan Lee introduced not long before this issue in Fantastic Four #2, and the Space Phantom which would come a couple months later in Avengers #2) being a symbol of Cold War paranoia – spies and invasion, your neighbors turning against you, all that stuff - what’s interesting about the Chameleon is that he’s a much more literal take on this theme; he’s not an alien that's supposed to represent the Soviet Union, he’s actually a spy who can make himself look just like you.

The Chameleon is in many ways a very good adversary for Spider-Man. One of the many things Peter Parker represents is our neuroses and paranoia, but of course, in the comic book world, everybody really is out to get him. Since the public at large could be said to be one of Spider-Man’s archenemies, the Chameleon is effective because he can be anyone in that public. The Chameleon can pose as Spider-Man, commit some crimes, then pose as Jameson and write an editorial condemning Spider-Man for the crimes, then pose as civilians demanding he be brought to justice, then pose as the chief of police and declare Spider-Man a wanted criminal, etc. etc. The Chameleon never seems to go that far, but the point is that he could, and there’s got to be a part of Peter Parker’s brain at his most paranoid wondering, “What if they’re all the Chameleon? Every person who’s ever made it tough for Spider-Man and Peter Parker … what if it’s all been one guy all along playing all the parts?”

There’s mileage to be gotten out of the Chameleon, you know!

But while the Chameleon is a moderately popular Spider-Man enemy, he’s never been quite in the A-list for a couple of reasons. For one, he’s not a hand-to-hand fighter, so you can’t fall back on that crutch of just having the good guy and the bad guy punch it out at the end of your story. For another, shapeshifters and face-changers are numerous in a comic book universe, and I suspect many people have the impression that there’s not much that’s unique about the Chameleon (a notion I intend to explode momentarily, just you wait for it). And third, the Chameleon’s motivations are very different than most of Spider-Man’s other enemies. When Spider-Man rips off the door to the fleeing Chameleon’s helicopter and shouts “End of the line for you, commie!” it feels a bit out of place, doesn’t it? Similar to how Spidey rarely fights aliens the way he does in Amazing #2; Lee and Ditko were still toying with the new characters and hadn’t hit upon the now-standard formula of Spider-Man’s adversaries being motivated by base, ugly, selfish desires – money or power or revenge - as opposed to a political cause.

So we’ve got two problems here – the Chameleon is an enemy rooted in politics, which is not the Spider-Man series’ strong suit, and those politics now belong to a bygone era.

Ah, but Stan Lee has helped us out possibly without even knowing it! Look again at the line “The Iron Curtain countries will pay a fortune for these plans!” Why, he’s not an enemy agent doing his duty after all, he’s in this for the money. Neophyte, naïve Spidey is wrong - The Chameleon’s not a “commie,” he’s a freelancer!

Which brings me to my point about what makes the Chameleon unique in a universe of villains who do the same thing as him. It’s because most other shapeshifters in comics have a “true” face. Skrulls “really” look like green dudes with pointy ears and weird chins, Mystique looks like a blue chick with red hair. But the Chameleon? He looks like this:

The Chameleon has no “real” appearance; he doesn’t change his face, he puts one on. He’s a blank canvas. At some point he made the transition from wearing masks to actually having his skin replaced with some sort of synthetic shapechanging material (although he seems to be back to masks as of a recent, and actually quite good, arc on Amazing Spider-Man). The '90s Spider-Man cartoon took this a step further by never having the Chameleon speak unless he was “in character”; at least once he even turned into somebody else solely for the purpose of delivering one line.

When he was writing the books, J.M. DeMatteis noted all this himself and came up with a backstory to explain. The Chameleon was born Dmitri Smerdyakov and was Kraven the Hunter’s boyhood servant (and possibly half-brother). He idolized young Kraven, but Kraven treated him like crap, so Chameleon developed a sense of worthlessness and became the Chameleon so he could sublimate his own identity in favor of others’. DeMatteis got some good stories out of this (he seemed to have a fondness for the character), but it didn’t exactly turn the Chameleon into one of Spidey’s archenemies (though to be fair, DeMatteis probably wasn’t shooting for this anyway). His motivations are still a bit murky; Spider-Man’s villains aren’t usually quite so complex (both a strength and a weakness – they don’t threaten to steal the spotlight from Spider-Man like some other heroes’ villains do, but it makes them a bit interchangeable). I don’t know, maybe it’s a bit of a Batman villain idea?

Or, perhaps, a bit selfishly, a bit snottily, but probably honestly, it’s not what I would have done.

“What would you have done, Justin?”

Gosh, since you asked:

I’d make it so you don’t know who the Chameleon ever really was. Fred Van Lente’s set this up a bit, actually, in that recent arc I mentioned by having him insist that Dmitri Smerdyakov was “just one of his faces.” For whatever reason, the Chameleon makes himself faceless and has a talent for disguise; if you like the DeMatteis feelings-of-worthlessness thing, you can read it that way, but I’m not going to bring it up. He’ll basically work for whoever’s willing to hire him, but his rates are considerably reasonable considering the level of skill and expertise he brings to the table, and that’s because the money he makes only covers running his operation and a few creature comforts (I’m not going to ditch the fact that this is a dude who looks sharp in a robe). The reason he’s available for hire is because he’s a blank canvas not just in appearance but also in motivation; these missions give him a superficial sense of purpose in the same way that the masks give him a superficial sense of identity. He has no loyalty, no agenda. He’ll work for HYDRA, the Red Skull, Al Qaeda, the Leader, Doctor Octopus, no questions asked, no judgment passed. Hey, he’d even work for the good guys if they’d be willing to pay him (one of my favorite ever comic book moments is in JLA: Rock of Ages when Batman simply outbids Lex Luthor for the Mirror Master’s services).

He still isn’t motivated by a simple base desire like most of Spider-Man’s villains, but it’s okay now. A Chameleon with no motivation, rather than a political one, is such an outlier that he becomes unique and interesting – the exception to the rule, rather than a data point that just doesn’t quite fit.

Or, if you like, maybe he does have a selfish motivation – maybe this is all done out of boredom!

All of which is a lot of elaboration to say that the Chameleon is easy to remove from the Cold War aesthetic because it’s not important to him in the first place. If you ignore the hammer and sickle on that submarine in Amazing Spider-Man #1, there could be anybody in that submarine; it doesn’t matter. Because there’s always somebody out there who’d like to get their hands on the nation’s missile defense secrets, and there’ll always be somebody who’d be willing to steal them.

Communists of the Marvel Universe #001: Igor Drenkov

(Part one of an ongoing series analyzing the role of communists in the early Marvel Universe and how they have been adapted - or, in some cases, how they glaringly haven’t been adapted - by comics creators in a post Cold War climate.)


So this guy is arguably one of the most important figures in the history of the Marvel Universe.

He was, you may recall (though you’d be forgiven if you don’t), the Soviet spy sent to infiltrate Bruce Banner’s gamma bomb project. Tries to get Banner to give him his notes, but Banner's all "I don't make mistakes." And when Banner goes to warn Rick Jones off the testing ground because the bomb’s primed to go off, Igor (he’s not given a last name until much later than this story) decides not to halt the countdown – he’ll let the bomb take Banner off his hands if he’s not going to cooperate. This, of course, results in the creation of the Hulk.

So yeah, this is the dude directly responsible for the Hulk’s existence, so you figure such an important guy’s gonna keep popping up in the Hulk comic, right?

Except that after Incredible Hulk #1 in 1962, not counting flashbacks to the origin, he does not appear again until issue #393 in 1992.

That’s a phenomenal time span, especially for superhero comics. Comics writers and editors seek out and extrapolate and elaborate upon the tiniest, most obscure details of continuity and ephemera, and yet nobody except Peter David wanted to use this huge player in the scheme of things. He appears in that ’92 issue of Hulk where he’s driven insane after realizing that he’s responsible for all the destruction the Hulk has caused, but also for the good things the Hulk has done. And I didn’t know it before I did a bit of research, but Igor appeared just a couple months ago in a Winter Guard one-shot where he, ah, gets turned into a monster by The Presence and fights Russia’s answer to the Avengers. Modern-day Marvel, you guys are scamps. Anyway, it’s totally not important.

So why is it that, even before the Soviet Union collapsed and enough time had passed to make the Red Menace irrelevant to modern-day readers, nobody wanted to touch poor Igor?

Igor, I would suggest, was made irrelevant very early on in Hulk history when Stan Lee & Co. decided to depoliticize the series.

Because that first story is pretty explicitly political. The amoral scientist Banner is a weapons maker to put Tony Stark to shame; Marvel historian Peter Sanderson points out the gamma bomb is, after all, a “dirty” bomb that he’s making on behalf of the U.S. Government. It’s a pretty standard sci-fi trope for its time – a scientist blinded to the consequences of his actions by his own hubris is made to pay himself for the horrors he threatened to unleash on mankind. It’s the political and military presence that makes it interesting. There’s incredible potential for black comedy and satire – here you have this weedy intellectual who has trouble communicating with his girlfriend, so he builds a weapon of mass destruction as an expression of his surpressed emotions. You’ve got General Ross, who hates Banner for not being a “real man” and dating his daughter, and yet he can’t just totally dismiss him because otherwise he won’t build that bomb they need. Igor seems oddly dejected by Banner’s refusal to show him his notes; it stops being a matter of his spy mission and becomes almost an affront to his dignity. The whole thing’s entering Dr. Strangelove territory, and if they followed through with it, you could take this places Kubrick wouldn't've dared to tread.

But then the Hulk becomes about psychology instead of politics. You know the drill – an uncontrolled, unhealthy expression of repressed emotion, the conflict between brute force and intellect, struggling with base desires, loneliness and alienation, multiple personalities – all that stuff Peter David took and ran with. Okay, I’m not fond of the multiple personality angle, but I can’t say this new direction was a terrible idea. It’s fertile ground and it’s clearly touched a nerve in the public consciousness, and anyway they’d soon come up with Iron Man to do political stuff with. The military that's always after the Hulk becomes just a symbol of authority.

But where Igor comes in, or rather where he doesn’t, is because if you’re going to set up the Hulk series as internal conflicts externalized as a giant monster, the whole damn thing is muddied up by Igor acting as an external prime mover for the series. It weakens the dynamic; Igor becomes a cheap device who’s more trouble than he’s worth, and that’s why he’s forgotten. You’ll notice the movies and TV series don’t want to deal with Banner the bomb-builder; he’s invariably portrayed as a guy who’s trying to use gamma power to help mankind rather than blow it up, but tampering with nature is still tampering with nature, and thus is punished. But it’s always a freak accident, or some matter of hubris getting back at him. There’s no Igor or Igor stand-in. It’s just Banner.

If the Hulk is about personal demons and personal mistakes, it’s got to be Banner’s finger on the button, not some Commie spy who never shows up again. So Marvel hasn’t really had to rehabilitate Igor or make him relevant for the 21st century (although John Byrne did try to retcon, in that particular John Byrney way of his, that Igor was a Skrull). He’d been phased out long before changing political fortunes would have necessitated it.

Although you know, if I were handed the keys to the Hulk franchise and told to write whatever I want … frankly, I think the psychodrama aspect’s been so thoroughly mined I’d be pretty anxious to swing it back into the political arena, to exploit that potential for satire and commentary. And if the Hulk were back in that mode, maybe Igor could come along for the ride.

But then again, we’d have to figure out just what Igor’s deal is if he’s not a Soviet agent, so we’re right back where we started from. SORRY FOR WASTING YOUR TIME, EVERYBODY.

Communists of the Marvel Universe: Introduction

So I had an idea for a new ongoing feature based on an unusual interest of mine. It’s not like Seven Films for Seven Batmen or the Seven Soldiers posts, where there’s a specific end point in mind. This one’s open ended; something I’d like to come back to now and again, or not do it for a couple months if I don’t have any ideas, or abandon it entirely if it turns out to be thoroughly uninteresting and unworthy of the time investment.

I’d like to talk about the role of communism in the Marvel Universe.

But not, you understand, from an explicitly political or philosophical standpoint. I mean, I’m certainly not equipped to speak insightfully about communism, and I’m not sure it would be of much value anyway; there’s not much under the surface aching to be explored from Spider-Man wrenching the door off the Chameleon’s helicopter and shouting, “End of the line for you, commie!”

Rather, I want to look at communism contextually, in the greater scheme of a shared comic book universe. Specifically, how it’s been phased out since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I don’t have to go into this in too much detail, right? If you want to play along with comic book continuity at all (and it is part of the fun, let’s be honest with ourselves), Peter Parker can’t have become Spider-Man in 1962 or else he’d be old as Uncle Ben today, so we have to say there’s a “sliding timescale” in effect, and that it’s been ten to fifteen years since Fantastic Four #1 (as a wretched teenager, I decided on a 4:1 year ratio based on what was going on in Spider-Man comics at the time, and today that puts us at 12.25 years).

So if Marvel’s Silver Age begins no earlier than 1995, that makes a bunch of topical references invalid (Spider-Man couldn’t possibly have teamed up with John Belushi on Saturday Night Live, for example), but it also means that the Marvel heroes have always existed in a post-Cold War environment.

Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that Marvel stories are crawling with communists, some in actually very important roles (for continuity’s sake anyway).

We could fanwank this away pretty easily, of course. When Captain America mentions one president, he means another; the Avengers go on The Late Show with David Letterman instead of Late Night; and the Soviet Union just collapsed later in the Marvel Universe (a bit after Jim Lee launched the second X-Men title, I think; less than five years ago if you use the Teenage Justin Method, or TJM for short).

Or you could just, you know, stop mentioning it.

The latter is the approach most writers seem to take, and I think it’s the right one. I mean, continuity is nice and all, but you’re just gonna look ridiculous if you keep hammering on about the Red Menace in 2010 (not to mention, politically, it’s pretty uncool). All this superhero business isn’t meant to be taken so literally anyway; relevancy is more important than consistency, and The West vs. The Soviet Union just isn’t all that relevant anymore. So yeah, next time you retell the origin, just leave all the commie spies out.

It’s the right move … but the removal of communism from the backstory of the Marvel Universe doesn’t only change stuff on a facts-‘n’-continuity level. Sometimes it actually affects things at the level of character and theme, and this is what I’m really interested in.

For example, let’s start, fittingly, at the beginning of the Marvel Universe with the origin sequence in Fantastic Four #1, where this exchange appears on page 9:

BEN GRIMM (to Reed Richards): If you want to fly to the stars, then YOU pilot the ship! Count ME out! You KNOW we haven’t done enough research into the effect of cosmic rays! They might kill us all out in space!
SUE STORM: Ben, we’ve GOT to take that chance … unless we want the commies to beat us to it! I – I never thought that YOU would be a coward!
BEN: A COWARD!! NOBODY calls ME a coard! Get the ship! I’ll fly her no matter WHAT happens!!

So in 1961, you understand why Reed wants to go through with the launch without having done proper tests on cosmic radiation and the appropriate shielding: There’s no time, man, don’t you know there’s a Space Race on? Reed is portrayed as a patriot, putting his personal safety (well, and the other three but youknowwhatever) at risk to conquer “the stars” in the name of his country. Ben, in context, doesn’t actually come off all that great. He’s not the selfless patriot Reed is supposed to be; it’s not the threat of Sue’s “commies” that gets him in the ship, it’s Sue impugning his pride.

But remove the Soviets, as we do now, and it’s a completely different story. Because without the Space Race context, why is Reed in such a hurry to get up there? It’s no longer an act of patriotism, so it’s got to be hubris; it’s inconceivable to Reed that he could have made a mistake. I don’t know what the in-story reason they’re using these days for why he took his girlfriend and her kid brother along on the flight, but I think the relevant thing to do would be to cast it as a guy trying to make space flight accessible to the common man: “Look, I’ve made this ship so easy to crew, Johnny can do it, and he’s just barely legal to drive a car.”

Even Sue takes a hit; in the original, she’s trying to get Ben to do his patriotic duty by reminding him of the communists, and only when that doesn’t work does she appeal to his ego; the modern version, one imagines, goes right for the emotional manipulation.

Ben, meanwhile, goes from the worst portrayal to the best. Because, of course, Ben is 100% right and Reed is 100% wrong, he gets cajoled into it by Sue, and Ben’s the one who ends up paying for everyone else’s mistake by becoming the Thing.

So in this case, the removal of communism makes the relationships in the Fantastic Four conceptually stronger; it multiplies and multiplies again the sympathy we have for Ben, and patriotic scientist Reed is a far less interesting character than the guy who thinks too much of himself and makes a terrible mistake he’ll spend the rest of his life trying to make right.

That’s the kind of thing I want to get into in future installments; going through and picking apart how Soviet saboteurs don’t really factor into things anymore sounds like extremely micro-level stuff, but as we’ve seen from the example above, it can have some unexpectedly macro-level implications.

So I’ll begin next time with a character who’s arguably one of the most important figures in the Marvel Universe, yet has been all but forgotten; in fact, he had a thirty-year gap between his first appearance and his second (and last).