Some history of the Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm, also known as The Thing

A writer at Tablet gave some history of the Fantastic Four's resident stone humanoid, Benjamin Grimm, usually known as the Thing, the first comic through which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby launched Marvel's Silver Age, how such creations could draw inspiration from stories like the Golem of Prague, based on the Jewish background Ben was given, though initially, it wasn't made explicit. It's also noted that:

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.

As I recall, when Joe Quesada became Marvel's EIC, he banned almost all depictions of smoking, except, perhaps, if Brian Bendis was the one who wanted to feature it being practiced in his stories. Now of course tobacco isn't healthy, and runs the risk of cancer, but still, such censorship (and special exceptions/exemptions along with favoratism) did not help in the long run if you could make a point of smoking cigarettes and cigars being a health hazard. And Quesada's ideas of what to prohibit in storytelling were very laughably petty compared to what he didn't.

As interesting as the history of the FF and the Thing is, the article also risks relying on unclear data about who exactly created them, Stan Lee or Jack Kirby:

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.

As much as I admire Kirby, I think his account was something he told out of revenge in the late 80s, because Marvel never returned half of his art drafts, and Stan obviously wasn't helpful. Yes, I know Stan obviously wasn't a saint, but that doesn't mean Kirby should've made statements that became weaponized by Stan's unaltruistic detractors. What Kirby should've done was simply stick to his demands that his art drafts be compensated in full, and that sadly didn't happen.

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.

I'm sorry to say, but it's not so that Grimm's "brought out the best" in every writer who got the assignment of writing FF material. Dan Slott, who scripted FF in recent years, proved to be one of the worst writers Marvel ever employed in the past 2 decades, and when he wrote Spider-Man, he turned out some of the worst intellect-insulters, particularly when dealing with anything involving Mary Jane Watson, who still remains separated from Peter Parker, ever since Quesada oversaw One More Day's production, and this is a problem Marvel and Spidey's series may never recover from. I guess the point here is that, if Slott wrote Ben and Alicia marrying, not only is it unlikely to be scripted well under a writer who turned out to be very awful, it also doesn't compensate for the bad taste he left behind with his Spider-scripting.

Curiously enough, Slott once apologized for allegedly resorting to stereotyped writing of Silk, a character he created, but he's never apologized for all the awful insults to fans he wrote up when he worked on Spider-Man. So why does anybody think we're going to care at this point if he wrote up a wedding for Ben and Alicia?

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.

Wow, how come modern Marvel comics writing doesn't count as bad scripting? If it's a problem in movies, along with dreadful costume/makeup/CGI, then surely it's ever affected comicdom? It's a shame the columnist doesn't want to dwell on that, because only so many bad writers/editors/artists got away with bad storytelling based on favoratism and PC. On which note, such chutzpah to call minor characters "grade Z", as if their being minor alone makes them bottom of the barrel, not how they're written. Putting it that way is a serious flaw that completely misses who's responsible for the best or worst stories turned out: the writers/editors/artists.

There is some interesting and impressive history given here. Even so, this piece curiously obscures Marvel Two-In-One (1974-83), and The Thing (1983-86), the former where Ben was teamed up with dozens of other MCU characters major and minor, much like Spidey's Marvel Team-Up, and the latter where he was more a solo star, before returning to more full membership in the FF, at a time when She-Hulk was filling in. And, there was a time when all these FF-related adventures with Ben Grimm were entertaining. But all that's regrettably been ruined and embarrassed by writers in the post-2000 era who don't respect Stan and Jack's creations and what made them work out. It's also important to remember the company wide crossovers have long ruined everything, and nobody asks whether 1984's Secret Wars sowed the seeds that brought down mainstream superhero fare in the long run. The crossovers post-2000 have been particularly pointless and egregious. Such matters have also affected storytelling for the Thing, and not for the better. As a result, it's a shame we have here one more alleged historian who shrugs off the challenging questions of what went wrong with comicdom, in favor of an otherwise unobjective view that fluff-coats much of what led to Marvel's artistic collapse.