A Streetwise Jewish Monster From Brooklyn

I’ve spent most of my life living with monsters. Monsters in my head, I mean; not the kind that torment you (although I’ve known a few of those, too), but the sort that entertain. My earliest exposure to monsters came in 1968, when my parents took me to a drive-in movie theater to see Destroy All Monsters. Seeing Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster romp across the big screen blew my 3-year-old mind, and I’ve remained a monster guy ever since.

The most famous Jewish monster of them all is the golem. Ever since Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel supposedly created a servant from clay in 17th-century Prague and granted it animation so it could protect the Jewish ghetto from threatened destruction due to a Christian blood libel, the golem—essentially an organic robot whose on/off switch is a Hebrew word carved into its forehead, either emet (“truth”) or met (“dead”)—has proved irresistible to writers and artists. The creature is a key figure in stories and novels by luminaries such as Gustav Meyrink, Avram Davidson, Cynthia Ozick, and Michael Chabon, the big bad in horror films (a trio of popular German silent movies and a British fright picture, It!), and a gold mine for modern Prague’s tourism industry and craftspeople. But while the golem is endlessly fascinating as symbol or allegory ... as a protagonist in and of himself, he’s a bit of a damp squib. He’s basically a robot, with all the personality of a toaster. Mary Shelley transplanted a personality into his skull when she reimagined the golem in her 1818 classic Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, but she took him far from his Jewish roots, so much so that Dr. Frankenstein’s creation cannot be considered a Jewish monster (although he’s definitely mishpocha).

The next most obvious choice for favorite Jewish monster would be the dybbuk, the restless, vengeful revenant who possesses the body of a living person to enact revenge, initially made famous by S. An-sky’s stage play The Dybbuk, first performed in 1920 in Warsaw. Since then, dybbuks have seen nearly as many permutations in popular culture as the golem. The concept of a pissed-off ghost that can possess living people is terrific, but the realization of that neat idea can either be compelling or meh; just because a ghost is vengeful doesn’t mean the ghost is particularly interesting. So I wouldn’t peg the dybbuk as my favorite, necessarily.

But what if there were a Jewish monster that combines the best attributes of both the golem and the dybbuk, is a wonderfully rounded and beloved character, and has a rich history of thousands of stories that extends back to a few years before I was born? It just so happens that such a monster exists: Stan Lee’s and Jack Kirby’s the Thing, aka Benjamin J. Grimm of the Fantastic Four comic book series.

Wait! you say. That’s cheating! Ben Grimm isn’t a monster—he’s a superhero! Well, he’s definitely a superhero ... but he’s also a monster. Transformed by cosmic rays in a more hideous way than any of his three friends, he is cursed with the outward appearance of a monster. Throughout the original Lee-Kirby run of Fantastic Four in the 1960s, he thought of himself as a monster, indulging in operatic bouts of self-pity that often drove the comics’ plots. New Yorkers reacted to Ben Grimm on the streets as though he were a monster, which led him to attempt to disguise his appearance with trench coats and hats, scarves and dark glasses. More to the point, he sometimes acted like a monster, unpredictably turning on his friends, variously due to bouts of pique and resentment, mind-control by malign forces, or unintended side-effects of genius scientist Reed Richard’s efforts to cure him of being the Thing. Multiple stories featured the Thing temporarily becoming as fearsome a menace to the other members of the Fantastic Four as Annihilus, Psycho-Man, or Doctor Doom.

Ben’s more than occasional fits of rage at his supposed best friend Reed are pretty justified, actually. The group’s first adventure finds Reed, his girlfriend, Susan Storm, her younger brother Johnny, and Ben sneaking onto a military base to steal aboard a rocket Reed designed for the government. Reed’s motivation for acting in this illegal fashion is that he wants to bypass bureaucratic protocols and beat the Russians into space (this is 1961, after all). But Ben, dragooned by his pal into serving as pilot, warns his genius friend that they’re all taking a huge risk, since there hasn’t been time for Reed to install sufficient shielding on the rocket against cosmic rays. Ben’s unheeded warning proves prophetic when a storm of cosmic rays penetrates the ship in orbit, debilitating all four passengers. The rocket makes an emergency hard landing in a rural area. Each of the quartet soon finds him or herself differently transformed: Sue vanishes, having turned invisible; Johnny bursts into flames and finds to his boyish delight that he can fly; Reed becomes an egghead version of the classic golden age character Plastic Man. Ben Grimm suffers the worst change by far. 

I was first introduced to the Thing when my mother brought me home a copy of Fantastic Four to read in bed while I was recovering from a bout of pneumonia. This was issue No. 116, “The Alien ... the Ally ... and Armageddon!” dated November 1971, so I read it two months before my eighth birthday. The Thing is featured on the dynamic cover drawn by artist Joe Sinnott, who had served as Jack Kirby’s inker during much of Kirby’s run on the title; the Thing charges toward an unseen enemy, massive fist raised, side by side with one of the Fantastic Four’s greatest nemeses, Doctor Doom, who has formed an alliance-of-convenience with three of the members of the Fantastic Four to combat an invader, the Overmind, an alien threatening to conquer all of Earth.

Although the comic featured a profusion of colorful characters, including a number of superpowered guest stars, the Thing immediately became my favorite. He looked like a walking pile of bricks. Even better, he talked just like my stepdad, who had grown up in the working class Jewish enclave of Brownsville, Brooklyn, and had spent his teen years and young adulthood working in his father’s shoe store, Mellin Shoes, a neighborhood hangout frequented by Jewish gangsters, pimps, and prostitutes (who liked the place because it had plenty of chairs). The Thing cracked wise in a particularly Brooklynese way, like my stepdad did. He even smoked cigars, like my stepdad did every night after dinner.

By the time they co-created the Fantastic Four in 1961, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee had shared a working relationship extending back 20 years; Jack, in conjunction with his partner Joe Simon, created Captain America for Timely Comics, the corporate predecessor to Marvel Comics, in 1941, when a teenaged Stan Lee was working as an office gofer for his cousin-by-marriage Martin Goodman, Timely’s publisher. The late 1950s witnessed the dissolution of America’s largest magazine distributor and a second crisis for the comic book field, which just a few years earlier had suffered through a nationwide moral panic and hostile congressional hearings regarding crime and horror comics, leading to self-censorship and a near-collapse of the industry. By then Timely Comics had been renamed Atlas Comics with Stan Lee as its editor and lead writer.

Declining sales forced Stan to lay off nearly all of Atlas’ in-house staff and rely upon freelancers, key among them Jack Kirby, who had returned to Timely/Atlas after a stint working for their primary competitor, National Publications. Stan and Jack spent the final years of the 1950s pumping out endless monster stories for anthology comics including Tales to Astonish, Strange Tales, and Journey Into Mystery. Stan wracked his brain coming up with outré names for the monsters of the month, and he came up with some doozies, reflected in titles such as “I am Dragoom! The Flaming Invader!” “Beware of Googam, Son of Goom!” and “I Was Captured By ... Korilla!” But the highlight of all those monster comics was Jack’s fabulous creature designs. No two were alike, and they all possessed an ominous physicality, a mass and weight and menace that leaped off the four-colored pages. However, by the time the 1960s began, the lights were about to go out at Atlas Comics. Something new and daring was called for if the business were to survive.

The first issue of Fantastic Four saved the company. Accounts of the origin of “The World’s Greatest Comics Magazine” vary; Jack and Stan suffered a series of fallings out in later years, and each man peddled his own version of the creation tale. Stan claimed the idea had come from Martin Goodman, who’d played a round of golf with fellow comics publisher Jack Liebowitz, while Liebowitz happily bragged about his recent success with Justice League of America, a team superhero book starring modernized versions of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and the Flash. Goodman then ordered Stan to come up with something similar. Stan, who’d nurtured ambitions to be a serious novelist, decided to go for broke and invent a team of superheroes with real-world problems.

Jack’s account is more poignant. The way he told it, he’d entered Stan’s office one afternoon to find the editor/writer with his head laid upon his desk, weeping and moaning that the company was about to go under. Jack then comforted him by promising him he’d come up with a new concept that would be a breakout hit.

The two versions don’t contradict one another, so it’s likely both are accurate, at least in part. Success, after all, has many fathers. The fan mail Jack and Stan received told them the star of their querulous quartet was Ben Grimm, the grotesque Thing. There had been nothing quite like him in comic books before, a monster-hero, save perhaps for golden age character the Heap, a former World War I German flying ace transformed into a muck monster after his crash into a mystical swamp. But the Heap didn’t have 1/100th the personality of Ben Grimm.

Jack Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg, chose his professional pen name to honor the Irish American prize fighters he’d idolized as a boy. He likely based Ben Grimm on an amalgam of his favorite pugilists. Stan Lee, born Stanley Lieber (he wanted to save his actual name for serious novels), might have originally followed Jack’s lead in this, but fairly soon he was writing Ben Grimm as a streetwise Jewish roughneck from the Lower East Side. He and Jack even invented a childhood home for Ben—Yancy Street, their version of Delancey Street, with its irreverent Yancy Street Gang, whose anonymous members delighted in pranking and tormenting their neighborhood’s most famous spawn, always seeking to remind Ben Grimm of his modest origins. From what I can gather, Stan based the Thing’s persona, speech patterns, background, and mannerisms on none other than Jack Kirby, child of Jewish immigrants, who’d learned early on how to navigate the tough streets of New York’s Lower East Side. Jack had drawn his earliest published artwork for an amateur newspaper put out by the Boys Brotherhood Republic, a self-governing “city” of street kids located on Manhattan’s East Third Street, likely the inspiration for the Yancy Street Gang.

Reed and Ben’s relationship mirrors in many ways that between Rabbi Loew and his golem. Reed creates his golem, the Thing, by luring Ben Grimm into exposing himself to transformative cosmic rays (in a run of Fantastic Four stories from decades later, it was suggested that Reed’s error in failing to install adequate shielding on his rocket had been no mistake at all, but rather part of a plan to transform himself and his friends into superpowered guardians of humanity). Reed convinces Ben to join the other three in using their new powers to protect the weak; similarly, Rabbi Loew intended for his golem to serve as the protector of the Jews of the Prague ghetto. The Thing, just like the golem of Prague, is prone to going berserk and becoming a danger to the innocent, rather than their protector, and Reed, just like Rabbi Loew, must find a way to halt his creation’s destructive rampages. Rabbi Loew managed this by rubbing out part of the inscription on the golem’s forehead. The Thing comes with no such convenient off switch, so Reed must variously appeal to his basic good nature or create a chemical concoction to transform him back to human form, or invent a superscience doohickey to nullify whatever malign influence the supervillain of the month has managed to exert upon Ben.

The Thing looks like a golem, too, although his appearance gradually changed through the comic’s early run. In the first year’s run of issues, his orange skin had a texture similar to that of a duckbilled dinosaur, lumpy and bumpy. If he’d been colored brown instead of orange, he would’ve appeared to be made of irregular clumps of clay, even more akin to a Space Age golem. By issue No. 18, his skin had become more platelike and angular, evolving toward the “pile of orange bricks” look he would sport when I first encountered him nearly a hundred issues later.

This change wasn’t due to any particular plot development. Rather, Jack Kirby’s art style was changing. His style arguably took its biggest leap forward when he was reunited with his old partner, inker Joe Sinnott, as of issue No. 44. Joe’s use of heavy shadowing gave a new, bolder look to Fantastic Four, particularly to the Thing, whose skin took on an intensified geometric complexity that granted the Thing a mass, weight, and dimensionality akin to Jack’s most impressive monster characters from the late 1950s (which, not incidentally, had also been inked by Joe Sinnott). The changes made the Thing look less like an ugly, deformed, somewhat obese muscleman suffering from the world’s worst case of plaque psoriasis and more like a strangely attractive humanoid sculpture made of orange Lego bricks. No wonder his girlfriend, later wife, blind sculptress Alicia Masters, loves using him as her primary model (he saves her from the evil scientists of the Beehive, she gets his kisser into the permanent collection at MOMA).

During the Lee-Kirby run on Fantastic Four, not only was the Thing portrayed as a sort of golem, he also spent a good chunk of his time being possessed by a succession of evil forces, every variation of a dybbuk that Stan and Jack could dream up. The parade of possessors got rolling with issue No. 8, “Prisoners of the Puppet Master!” This classic issue introduced both Alicia Masters, the Thing’s longtime paramour, and her deranged stepfather, Philip Masters, the discoverer of a type of radioactive clay that, when fashioned into the likeness of a living subject, grants the possessor of the clay puppet mental control over the subject. Masters’ initial antagonism is directed against the Human Torch, but he soon develops a far more visceral hatred for Ben Grimm after his stepdaughter Alicia becomes romantically attached to the Thing.

Issue No. 8 is merely the opening salvo in an ongoing war between the Puppet Master and the Fantastic Four in which Masters uses his Thing puppet to force Ben Grimm to attack his teammates. Other villains who either took control of the Thing’s mind or tricked him into turning against his friends include Diablo the alchemist (No. 30, “The Dreaded Diablo!”), wicked billionaire Gregory Gideon (No. 34, “A House Divided!”), the Wingless Wizard (Nos. 41-43, starting with “The Brutal Betrayal of Ben Grimm!”), and the Mad Thinker (an epic extending across issues Nos. 68-71, “By Ben Betrayed!”). During the first six years of Fantastic Four, close to 15% of the issues centered around a possessed or otherwise turned evil Ben Grimm. Not even Doctor Doom, the Fantastic Four’s main bête noire, took up as many pages; the irresistible melodrama of intimate friend turned deadly foe was a vein of storytelling ore that Stan and Jack mined again and again.

What helps make the Thing the greatest monster-hero in the history of comic books is the way he brings out the very best of whatever writer gets assigned to him. I’ve read thousands of comic books over the past 55 years, and I’ve noticed how even otherwise mediocre writers rise to the top of their game when writing dialogue for Ben Grimm. The Thing’s combination of working-class upbringing, Brooklyn street smarts, self-deprecating humor, cynicism, idealism, self-pity, nobility, altruism, grumpiness, extroversion, emotionality, and never-say-die ethos makes him a kind of Midas-touch character, a Dostoevskian cornucopia of humanity impregnable to weak interpretation.

So when a talented writer serves as Ben Grimm’s mouthpiece, the results can be truly memorable. Such is the case with Fantastic Four No. 51, “This Man ... This Monster!” Stan Lee selected it as one of his personal favorites among the bazillions of comic book stories he wrote. It remains a special story for me 52 years after I first read it as a reprint in Marvel’s Greatest Comics No. 38 at the age of 7. A nameless scientist-inventor, overcome with bitterness that he never received a fraction of the adulation and riches showered upon Reed Richards, plots to destroy the Fantastic Four from within, using the Thing as his primary pawn. Not exactly an original scheme, but at least this version comes with a twist: Rather than turn Ben Grimm evil and monstrous, he changes the Thing back to human form and takes on the cosmic ray-powered transformation himself, enabling him to impersonate the Thing and infiltrate the Fantastic Four.

To pull this off, he utilizes a ray to attract the Thing, who has been wandering the streets of Manhattan lost in a fog of self-pity, to his seedy apartment/laboratory, where he offers sympathy and coffee—drugged coffee that sends Ben Grimm to slumberland. The inventor then attaches himself and the unconscious powerhouse to a machine that transfers the Thing’s mutation to the scientist, leaving the true Thing a powerless human being. Having already practiced the Thing’s locution and possessing all of his strength, he easily insinuates himself into the Baxter Building, the headquarters of the Fantastic Four, and convincingly refutes the accusation of a furious and human Ben Grimm when the latter shows up to warn his partners.

The impostor doesn’t need to wait long for an opportunity to do away with Reed Richards; Reed tells his supposed partner and friend that he needs his help exploring a newly discovered extradimensional pocket universe called the Negative Zone. The impostor’s role is to anchor the end of a miles-long cord that Reed affixes to his belt before entering the gateway into the Negative Zone; should Reed encounter some insurmountable danger or near the end of his oxygen supply, he will signal the Thing by a yank on the cord to reel him back in. The impostor realizes that all he need do to rid himself of Reed Richards is to ignore the signal. But his evil intention is undermined by the selflessness he has observed in Richards, who has, without fanfare, put his life in danger for the good of mankind. After initial hesitation, he tries to reel Reed in, but he acts too late—the cord snaps, seemingly dooming Mr. Fantastic. But the impostor, seized by a new and impulsive heroism, leaps through the gateway in time to grasp the broken cord.

He finds himself stranded on the same asteroid where Reed faces death; their chunk of space rock is being drawn toward the edge of the Negative Zone, where negative and positive matter annihilate one another. Reed is distraught that his efforts to signal Ben resulted in the Thing being pulled into the deathtrap; he embraces the impostor and tells him no man has ever been gifted with a more noble and loyal comrade. Realizing that before now he has never known what it is like to have a friend, the impostor uses his purloined strength to hurtle Reed back in the direction from which they both came. He then faces death on the drifting asteroid, consoling himself that at least he has finally experienced true friendship. His death restores Ben Grimm to his Thing persona, who rushes back to the Baxter Building to have it out with the impostor.

Ben arrives to find Reed and Sue mourning what they assumed to be Ben’s death, and explains the situation to his enormously relieved partners. Their joyful reunion turns somber when Reed explains to Ben, “Somehow, at the last minute—some of your own heroism reached out through the endless void—and touched him! ... We’ll never know what monstrous things he had done in the past—or, what monstrous plans he had made! But, one thing is certain—he paid the full price—and he paid it—like a man!”

Pretty heady stuff for a 7-year-old reader to absorb. The degree to which it impressed me is reflected in the fact that I insisted my great-aunt Ethel read “This Man, This Monster!” while babysitting me. Aunt Ethel had taught me the virtue of tzedakah, and I revered her as a Hasid would his rebbe; I thought, given her saintliness, she would especially appreciate what Stan and Jack had made. I could tell she wasn’t enthused about reading a comic book, but she was considerate enough to humor me. I’m pretty sure she liked it well enough.

Although he has never become a star in Marvel’s cinematic universe, whether due to bad scripts or inadequate costume/makeup/CGI, the Thing is arguably the beating heart of the original Marvel universe, the one encompassed in comic books. Over the years, he has befriended virtually every other Marvel hero, and even some villains regard him with begrudging respect approaching fondness. Ben Grimm is the guy other heroes want to have a beer with after work, the colleague they go to for advice regarding personal or superheroic problems or just for some cheer and encouragement. Dozens of Marvel stories have been set at one of Ben’s famous poker games, where he manages to generate goodwill and levity between rival tribes of heroes that usually don’t get along, such as the X-Men and the Avengers, and has a big enough heart to also invite grade Z heroes who otherwise get no respect, like Squirrel Girl, Flatman, and Big Bertha.

So Ben is a mensch. But simply being dreamed up by Jewish creators isn’t enough to make a monster Jewish. The monster needs to have a story-based connection to the Jewish people. Stan and Jack never made Ben Grimm’s status as a Member of the Tribe explicit, but writers and artists who followed in their footsteps left no room for doubt. In a 2002 issue of Fantastic Four, decades of guilt over a Star of David necklace he had stolen as a young member of the Yancy Street Gang prod Ben to reunite with an elderly pawn shop manager from the old neighborhood, Hiram Sheckerberg, the necklace’s rightful owner. When a local villain’s villainy seemingly results in Hiram’s death, Ben haltingly recites the Shema over his body, struggling to remember what he’d been taught in Hebrew school.

Hiram, fortunately, was only knocked unconscious, and he wakes in time to hear the end of Ben’s recitation. He asks Ben why he has never made his Jewish identity public; does it make him ashamed? Ben responds that isn’t the case; he’s never publicized it because “there’s enough trouble in this world without people thinkin’ Jews are all monsters like me.” But the interaction gives Ben much to think about. Not long afterward, Ben marks the occasion of reaching 13 years as the Thing by celebrating a formal bar mitzvah highlighted by his reading a portion from the Torah. And in 2019, following one of the longest unmarried romantic relationships in comics (58 years!), Ben finally ties the knot with Alicia Masters in a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony replete with chuppah, tallit, and the breaking of a glass.

So l’chaim to Ben Grimm, the Thing, comics’ most devoutly Jewish monster and a monster-hero of deepest humanity. What’s not to love? And that punim!