It Started on Yancy Street
Sometimes haters aren’t really haters
In the annals of superhero comics, there has never been a character so easily and consistently outdone as the Thing has been by his old neighborhood rivals, the Yancy Street Gang. A mere group of Lower East Side hoods—the kind who used to menace Jack Kirby in his younger years—the Yancy Streeters used to know Ben Grimm before he was transformed into the stone-skinned strongman, The Thing. Ben even ran the gang for a while before he left it at the insistence of his aunt and uncle, a betrayal for which the gang never forgave him.
As the Fantastic Four’s comedy relief, the Thing was unusually susceptible to the Yancy Streeter’s juvenile needling and goofy pranks. They could wind him up so easily that one time they mailed the Thing a crude drawing of him wearing a tutu, and the Thing got so riled up about it that he nearly threw a bulldozer at their building. And what stopped him wasn’t his better judgement, but a call for a team meeting back at the Baxter Building. And the Yancy Streeters? They never even blinked.
A few issues later, the Thing hears “reports of elevated crime” on Yancy Street—which is probably just an excuse to find another bulldozer—and figures he’ll bring the whole team down there to straighten things out. Only this time, the Yancy Streeters brazenly ambush the entire team and drive them off with a humiliating barrage of garbage, hurled lettuce, buckets of water, and sneezing powder. Seriously, these guys are an unholy mashup of the Jerky Boys and Tucker’s Kobolds. Had the FF debuted nowadays, they probably would have driven the Thing to another planet just to escape their cyber-bullying.
One of my favorite gags, though, is in issue #34, when Yancy Street’s latest package to the Thing contains a Beatles wig with no letter or taunt to go with it. Johnny Storm drops an insults about how the Thing should wear it to cover his ugly face, but later, the Thing tries it on anyway and kind of likes how it looks. It’s a funny gag that also shows that the Thing can make himself vulnerable enough to try wearing something meant to make him look a bit silly. But this prank lands differently because it’s not a direct crack at the Thing. It feels like the kind of razzing that you only get from a sibling or a close buddy because everyone looks stupid in a Beatles wig. This one feels less like an insult and more like a schoolyard dare to try something fun but embarrassing. And in that context, every wisecrack Yancy Street sends the Thing to humble him also contains an important message he needs to hear: You are one of us.
Now, lest you think send me my own booby-trapped birthday present for reading too deeply into the Yancy Streeters’ antics, consider this: After Spider-Man, the Thing is probably the saddest superhero in all of Marvel comics, horrified by his cosmic transformation and filled with self-loathing. None of that is made any easier when random passers-by call him a monster to his face, or when the members of his own extended family—to which he has the thinnest connection of them all—use him as their comic relief. The only grace anyone gives him is around his blind girlfriend Alicia, but only because the Thing is too busy pre-emptively assuming that the only reason why Alicia sticks around is because she can’t see him.
Many years later, when he is selects the She-Hulk to replace him on the team, it’s not hard to imagine the Thing is projecting his own desires upon her. After all, she has the same powers he does, essentially, only she can turn them off whenever she likes. But she doesn’t, because she gorgeous when transformed, and honestly prefers her super heroic alter ego to her original identity. She is everything the Thing wishes he was, and the saddest part of it all is the Thing probably doesn’t even realize it.
Sure, Ben Grimm has a Ph.D in self-pity, but this is who he is. He was never the smart guy. Or the handsome guy. Or the rich guy. He was the dude who stuck by Reed in college and could fly the rocket that would seal his own superheroic fate. One wonders, if the Richards had never gotten powers, how long Ben would have stayed in their orbit, and if it would have been as a friend or as an employee.
Which brings us back to Yancy Street. Over the course of the Fantastic Four, even as the characters deepened, the Thing’s relationship with the Yancy Street Gang never really goes away. It recedes into a nostalgic nod to the Thing’s rough-and-tumble upbringing, and if they’re still sending him packages, he isn’t opening them. In FF #300, when Johnny Storm and the Thing’s old girlfriend Alicia get married, the Thing returns to Yancy Street to mope about it, only for the gang to await him with a bowling alley filled with dummies. Hit the dummies, dummy! The Thing obliges, smashes, them, cools off, and walks away. Only then do we linger on the Yancy Streeters, who reveal they set the whole thing up just to make him feel better. They knew what he needed more than anyone. And they delivered.
So much of what I love about Marvel comics is how they address the difficulties of growing up and of being an outsider. They make heroic the burden of carrying unwanted grief and unresolvable guilt. They acknowledge that sometimes what makes you special is something others aren’t ready to accept. They never stop telling us that we are the architects of our own hero story, even though it will test us sorely along the way.
But with the Yancy Street Gang, Marvel somehow manages to remind us that life isn’t a solo journey, even when it might feel like it. Wherever life takes us, there will always be people who see us for who we are. Maybe they’ll use that to keep us honest. Maybe they’ll use that to keep us grounded. Or maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll do a bit of both and mail us exploding cakes on our birthday.
Thanks for reading! This series unpacks my journey as a fan of superhero comics and how it led me to write my novel Omega Reign, in which a guilt-ridden, grief-stricken superhero must face his past if he has any hope to save the world. The Kickstarter for this action-packed tale of loss and redemption has only a few days left, and every pledge counts. So please grab a free PDF of Chapter 1 and consider supporting. Thanks!