Berry C.🍓

🇧🇷 OCs and characters I love. Lesbian She/her, he/him. Insta: @berry_camargo48 Please don't repost my art to other platforms

[supagurls]

comic fans we've gotta stop with the "it's not that deep". everything is that deep. we should be thinking more critically about the comics we read

[berry-camargo48]

If we think deeply about the media we consume, people will be more inclined to write deeper, more meaningful stories. And to explore new narratives. Better stories for us

[mjwatsonsworld]

i’m so serious when i say you’re not allowed to talk about spideytorch if you hate mj/petermj

[traincat]

You said this "Peter who always wants to the fixer being forced to contend with someone who has the ability to fix things on different levels than him." abt spideytorch and I was wondering if you could talk more abt what you meant by it? It just sounds like a fun scenario for peter character exploration,

So I don't really remember the context I said that in, but in general, I think that represents a challenge for Peter. Peter is very action-oriented, and he also likes to be in control. You know, and you can argue that last bit is something of a trauma response -- the loss of control when Uncle Ben was murdered, or when he lost Gwen. I think you definitely see that in moments like in Marvel Knights Spider-Man where Norman tosses MJ off the bridge and Peter saves her by webbing every joint to reduce the impact of the stop on her. That's clearly something he thought about before that moment. And in his friend group, Peter is very much the fixer, the dependable one, the person people go to when they're worried about something. You see this with Flash reaching out to Peter when he's worried about Betty joining a cult (top ten storyline by the way more Spider-Man characters need to join cults) or looking for his abusive father, or in the way Harry wishes he could be more like Peter, or MJ calling him after his second proposal when she's been emotionally cornered by her father and her sister is in trouble.

He's the fixer. He's very, very comfortable in that position. He likes being the fixer.

But there are definitely situations where Peter's abilities aren't suited to that task. Outside of Parker Industries, for instance -- Peter cannot fix anything with money. Not without crossing certain lines. And I do think, if he had to, he would cross those lines. You see this in Back in Black, for example.

"If money's a problem, then I'll just get money." This is after he's committed nine felonies in like a ten minute span, by the way. (ASM #542) Or in Marvel Fanfare #42, a much more mundane take on this, where he blackmails a bank manager to discretely leave the woman who was fired for rejecting said manager's advances enough money for her rent.

Peter can get money, but he usually does not have it on hand, and he can't finance things long term. Johnny can. And Johnny is generous, and happy to do it -- despite what Peter thinks, Johnny actually does know what it's like to have no money, so he's not unsympathetic there. But Peter's also very proud. I've said it before, but I think a lot of the financial issues with Spideytorch depend on whether Peter's already had a relationship with MJ where she paid the majority of the bills. Because I think otherwise it's difficult for him in some regards.

Likewise, there's a difference in powers here, too, right? Peter is very physically strong and very physically capable. He's physically stronger than Johnny. But Johnny's abilities surpass that strength. Peter can wreck a city block, but it's going to take him some time and effort. Johnny, at his extreme upper limits, can function as a human sun. He can incinerate that city block with very little effort. So there is that difference in ability. Which is interesting, because I'm sure Peter and Johnny both don't think about it on that scale on a day-to-day basis, but the difference does exist.

You know, there's also things like Johnny being an experienced space explorer, having been to the Negative Zone several times, more familiarity with various alien worlds. Peter is an inventor on a personal level. Johnny helps design space ships. Again, I don't think they think about on that scale. But it is interesting and there are just things where Johnny is inherently going to be more suited to fixing a situation than Peter, and I think that would be difficult at least the first few times it happens, and especially when Peter is younger. I don't think it would be a dealbreaker -- he's very in awe of Johnny in his own way, and we see he can get over these kind of relationship difficulties -- but I think it would be difficult. Whether it's on the scale of their powers, or their experience, or even on a financial level, it's interesting to think about in terms of the ship, because I don't really think Johnny would even think about it. Peter, especially Peter who is still in his early twenties, having to learn how to relinquish that control is just going to be incredibly difficult. He's clinging on by his sticky fingertips. Johnny is like can you stop you have twenty dollars in your account.

[berry-camargo48]

If I had a coin... For every time...

First panel is from Spider-Man Human Torch #3 by Dan Slott, the second one I have no idea

[berry-camargo48]

"How can I say noooooo~"

DON'T DO IT, JONATHAN!! He's not "hot and mysterious", he just wears a mask!

Spider-Man Human Torch #3 by Dan Slott

[berry-camargo48]

Johnny Storm any chance he gets:

"But what about Spider-Man!"

Me: What ABOUT him?! He's not even in this story!

No, but he's so cute when he happily talks about him. It's my weakness

[traincat]

To think I almost missed my Sunday question ☹️ just got done with finals and (massive plot twist I'm sure) I still have Johnny on the mind.

So here's another big question that you can feel free to answer in whatever depth you'd like!

How has Johnny and Ben's relationship evolved through the years? The panel that really made me ask this question is the one where Johnny's asking what he can do for Ben to forgive him. (Also when the rest of the family disappears and they start losing their powers). It just got my brain working. (I also always enjoy their interactions in your fics so I was curious abt how you see their relationship being).

Thanks! ✨

Yeah, I definitely think there's a lot of evolution to Ben and Johnny's relationship, and that Johnny specifically is very, very emotionally dependent on Ben. I'm not saying Ben doesn't love Johnny just as fiercely, he's pretty readily demonstrated he would die for Johnny, but that Ben has other relationships he can rely on in that corner, whereas Johnny tends to self-destruct without Ben's presence.

(Fantastic Four #5)

I think there's a perception that Johnny's teasing of Ben, especially in the early days, is cruel or malicious, and I think that's an unkind reading of the situation. Yes, Johnny does make fun of Ben often, but here's the thing (badumpsh): Johnny doesn't tip toe around Ben's condition. Ben is the one who calls himself a monster, who rages in the early days, who is the one who (in early canon) is the most physically impacted by the cosmic rays. (Later canon will explore Johnny's depth of self-control with his powers, in addition to the Reed and Sue's own control of their powers.) Johnny is sixteen, his sister is frequently busy with her boyfriend and their new responsibilities -- he's in pretty close contact with Ben, probably more so than anyone else on the team. He's teasing him and playing practical jokes to get his attention and to take Ben's mind off things.

Ben says it himself in The Thing #23 (during a period where he and Johnny very much are not on good terms): "Nah, I wuz never really mad at ya, kid... sure wanted ta moider ya sometimes... but I still loved ya."

Ben has the least reason to be emotionally close to Johnny. He's not his girlfriend's kid brother, after all. But it's clear from early on that Ben is attached to Johnny and that he does love him, even if wants to "moider" him sometimes. Early canon Johnny is a magnet for trouble. His Strange Tales run is really where that shines. He's easily manipulated by slick criminals. He's targeted by a fake Captain America. He gets tied to sign posts, the rail road tracks, and a porpoise. He absorbs a bomb's explosion to save a town.

(Strange Tales #112) "If anything happens to that kid, I'll... no!! It can't happen!" Fantastic Four makes it clear very early on that as much as they fight, this isn't a purely antagonistic relationship. Ben loves Johnny, he'd just rather walk through Times Square in the buff before he admits it.

As for Ben being Johnny's rock, literally, there's a couple of big examples of Johnny just absolutely going off the deep end without Ben present. Johnny already generally does not tend to do well when the team is not together.

(FF #191)

The incident you outline, where Ben says he never wants to see Johnny again, is probably the best example of this, although I have two others. For background: by total accident, Johnny once messed up once of Reed's attempts to cure Ben of being the Thing. Reed decides that neither he or Johnny will ever tell anybody about this, especially not Ben. Of course, the truth comes out, and at a terrible moment, when an outside force is trying to tear the team apart. Johnny's powers are gone (something that already puts him in a precarious place emotionally), and Sue and Reed have lost custody of their kids.

(Fantastic Four v5 #7) Gonna blanket rec volume 5 on the whole here. It's the last run before corporate took the book off the market over movie rights for three years, and it's a very good, very cohesive story. (I don't like what it does with Sharon Ventura. But I don't like what any Fantastic Four book has ever done with Sharon Ventura, save for Marvel Knights 4's brief cameo.) But Johnny's been through the wringer here already. He's lost his powers, both of his careers, and his sister has lost custody of his niece and nephew. But he only goes totally off the rails and disappears into his "party boy" persona after Ben cuts off contact with him.

(FF v5 #10-11) "Johnny's a mess." Luckily he's got an incredibly handsome and devoted """best friend""" (canon JohnnyWyatt when) and also Spider-Man to drag him out of it, but Johnny reuniting with Ben is definitely a huge part of what drags him out of this state.

(FF v5 #12) "So you love me again, big buddy?" "Maybe."

There's the more recent example, where after Secret Wars (2015), when Reed, Sue, and the kids were assumed dead, we know Ben and Johnny had some kind of huge fight. Ben went to space, Johnny -- spiraled. Hard. Harder than the above example. This sets up a romantic relationship with Medusa which I feel pretty critical about, in part because the writer clearly didn't actually read Medusa's tenure on the team. (She and Johnny were friends! They were actually really good friends!) I believe it could have happened, not just because I'm an annoying canon purist, but because it kind of falls into previously established territory -- Johnny, in an emotionally vulnerable state and with Ben off planet, gets into an ill-advised romantic relationship with a member of the Fantastic Four's social circle. That's basically the exact setup for when he got into a relationship with Alicia. (Which, as I've previously said, was a relationship that, pre-Skrull spy retcon, was about Ben.) So I buy it, because Johnny does not make good romantic decisions when he's spiraling, I just kind of hated the writing surrounding it. Even after Ben came back, Johnny was too hurt by everything else to really recover. Ben's solution to this was to take Johnny on a multiversal wild goose chase to find Sue and Reed (Ben very much believed they were dead and was stalling for time) that went, uh, bad. Also they both lost their powers.

(Marvel 2-in-One (2018) #8) They made up! Off screen. When Sue and Reed returned. Johnny might have been living with Wyatt at this point, it's really unclear. (Tinfoil hat on, I do fully believe Slott originally intended to soft launch canon JohnnyWyatt. If he didn't do it intentionally, he did it unintentionally, because it's very difficult to read the beginning of his run any other way.)

But I think a bigger example of Johnny going off the rails without Ben is when Ben dies. And, very importantly here, Ben dies because he manages to overcome mind control for only long enough to tell Reed to kill him to save Johnny.

(FF #509)

In the aftermath, Johnny goes running, which is pretty typical for him. Rather than disappearing into a party boy persona, though, he takes Johnny Storm off the map entirely, working in an auto shop and avoiding Sue's calls.

(FF #509) "Hey, squirt, you... you know I ain't really here, right? That ya really are just makin' believe?" "...Yeah. But this is how I get through the day."

Johnny's grief is mirrored by Alicia, who has locked herself in her studio to do nothing but sculpt Ben all day.

(FF #509) "She says it helps her pretend Ben's still with us. Isn't that sad?" Yikes.

Ben gets better, of course, and Johnny bounces back, but I do think about it in context of Johnny Storm's Last Stand, where Johnny bodily pushes Ben out of the way (seconds before Ben transforms back into the Thing) so he can take his place defending the Negative Zone gate.

(FF #584 and #600)

I do think this is a case where Johnny can't let Ben die for him again. It's a relationship with such an intense amount of emotion. Yeah, they fight a lot, and the (mutual) prank war has been going on forever, but they will both sacrifice themselves before they let the other put themselves in danger.

(FF #535) And I don't think it's a relationship where you can point to moments that caused that intense loyalty and love for each other. I think it's a slow slide into it, a result of living in each other's pockets for so long. Johnny was young when he met Ben -- for him, Ben is one of the constants in his life, the person he can depend on. When he doesn't have Ben to lean on, he's lost.

For Ben, Johnny's the little brother he never had, the thorn in his side, his partner in crime. He might be able to get along without Johnny's presence in his life, but he wouldn't be happy, as much as he protests otherwise. He goes to incredible, if misguided, lengths in 2-in-1 to try and protect Johnny, largely from himself. I think, for Ben, the depths of Johnny's self-hatred is something he hates thinking about, but he knows about it, and so he does what Johnny did for him in the early days: he picks on him to him to distract him. It's never malicious. It's their dynamic.

(Marvel 2-in-1 #3) "'Cause you're broken."

For some fun, largely overlooked Ben and Johnny content, I really like the brief period where they were on the team with T'Challa and Storm while Reed and Sue were on a second honeymoon.

(FF #545) "Is Ben going to try and fight him?" "Does Wolverine go through a lot of gloves?"

It's very brief, from #544-550 (although I'd read #543 as well for Ben and Johnny content), but it's fun and it's a good look at them on their own when they're both in a relatively good place.

In conclusion, I love them, your honor.

(FF #570)

[traincat]

Thank you, miss Cat!! I asked about the Johnny ghosting his gfs thing. Thank you for answering my question in detail!

DID YOU HOOK UP WITH EMINEM?? What?!? Snddjsjsksdj Do you have the panel or remember the context to that?

Ben knows about his crush on Spidey? I'm sat. (I kind of always assumed). Is it the panel where he says something like "I know you have a sweet spot for the web-head", something like that? One where he gives Johnny a mini Spider-Man action figure. I never found out if that was official or fan made. What are you referring to, miss Cat?

And, yeah! I also think he might have a preference for men (or people similar to men)

You're welcome, anon, and no problem! It's interesting to me,t oo.

So the Eminem comment comes from Deadline #1:

"All right, Storm, who were you with last night? Britney? Christina? Eminem?" So, you know, update for the sliding timescale -- I think the actual people listed here are less important than what they represent, which are major music stars of the time. Two female, one male. I think it's interesting that Johnny's problem here, even in a comic published in 2002, isn't the implication about his sexuality, but about his professional image. He dislikes that Kat says he was drunk on the job, and the attempts to pry into his private life. He never actually engages with the "were you with a woman or a man last night" aspect.

I'll read anything starring a Bugle reporter, by the way, and this is a really fun comic. Kat's commentary on Johnny here actually comes back to bite her later as the book progresses and she starts to realize she was the one out of line. But also it's a pretty funny rant.

"Pretty Boy Storm here burns down Union Square Park and the mayor kisses his yoga'ed butt."

For Ben teasing Johnny about his crush on Peter, Spider-Man's Tangled Web #21, which is the action figure scene:

"Admit it, you're kinda sweet on him." Whether Ben actually knows or he's just taking cheap shots is up for interpretation, but I personally think he knows. (If we're reading between the lines in Daken: Dark Wolverine, he definitely knows Johnny and Akihiro had a sexual relationship.) I can't tell if this is based on a specific figure, but the packaging does look like the official Marvel ones. Peter is not getting a cut out of those sales in canon.

[traincat]

I think fantastic four writers fall into this problem where they want Johnny to be the kid brother with kid brother problems. Ignoring that one, Johnny is too old for that, and two, these aren’t kid brother problems just because everyone’s treating it as such. A kid brother problem is having two dates to the prom. Not being forced to be someone’s soulmate.

Ironically, there's an issue of Untold Tales of Spider-Man where Peter's problem is that he has two dates to prom. You know, Peter. The relatable hero with relatable problems.

But yeah, generally, I think that's at least part of it. There's this idea with Johnny I think of using this "hotheaded kid brother" model of characterization to be like, oh no, Johnny's messed up another relationship! And that can explain things like his family being sympathetic to his ex's side of things. The problem is they never establish that model of behavior for Johnny. He generally doesn't act badly in relationships -- the worst he ever does is kind of ghost people, which is a different story altogether. (Why does the "girl crazy" character avoid spending quality time with his girlfriends?) So there's that dissonance between comics acting like Johnny behaves in one way, and then showing us another, with the sitcom laugh track underneath whenever something that should be considered genuinely upsetting happens.

[traincat]

I am curious about the "ghosting" thing Johnny has with his girlfriends. "The guy who loves women doesn't spend his free time with them" or "seems to run away from them?" Do you have your guesses/theories on why this is so frequent for him? I'm guessing this has happened over the span of many decades, if not how it's always been. My first guess was "maybe they didn't want to show their teenage hero being too out there in the 60s" but that's just not it either, is it? He dated most people after that

sorry, anon, I fucked up and deleted the initial answer to this ask, but luckily I was writing in a doc, so let's try this again.

So for me, this is where "Johnny is in the closet" holds a lot of merit, even separate from the word of author (Marjorie Liu) confirmation that he had a sexual relationship with a man. You can't make gay jokes in the text about a character for years and years without it getting a little, like, is that what we're doing here. The "light in the asbestos loafers" comment, Julie Angel's "with my luck, he's probably gay -- oh, hi, Johnny!" line, Kat Farrell asking if he hooked up with Eminem, Ben commenting about his crush on Spider-Man, a villain literally named Makhizmo calling him "an effeminate -- these are all things that happened in canon. So for me, when you combine that with the less than stellar dating history here, I'm kind of like -- the homophobic dog meme factors in.

(FF #251) John Byrne when I catch you.

(Before anyone sends me hate mail about it again, I've gone back and forth on how I think about Johnny's sexuality over the years, whether he's gay or bi, and I'm not saying I don't think he's bisexual, but I think there's a strong reading of the canon that he prefers men. Anyway, none of it matters because Marvel doesn't acknowledge him as anything other than straight at the time of this post. I will break out the I Do Not Control How People Label the Human Torch's Sexuality reaction image if anyone tries it.)

Honestly, I think Johnny's relationship history is really interesting. There's a lot to analyze and explore, in a very different way than a character like Peter, who has really good romantic chemistry generally. But if we want to look at when and where Johnny ghosted hard, there's kind of three examples that come to mind. The first is admittedly the weakest, and I think the sliding timescale and generational attitudes on dating come into play here, but Dorrie Evans, Johnny's high school girlfriend, broke up with him because he stopped paying attention to her.

(FF #45)

Johnny and Dorrie are always kind of an interesting case. They were never a melodramatic romance with highs and lows the way, say, Peter's first romance with Betty Brant played out -- Johnny and Dorrie's main drama was that she disliked him "flaming on" all the time. She didn't want to date a superhero, and wanted Johnny to be more mature. (She does literally compare him to Peter here, who she met once when he returned her wallet.) But Peter was prepared to marry Betty at the rich age of eighteen, and Johnny and Dorrie never have that intensity. When they break up, they remain friends, and he falls in love with Crystal in the same issue at basically first sight. I don't think Johnny ghosts Dorrie so much as that they fizzle, but it does kind of set the groundwork here. Johnny only has two relationships in the '60s, by the way, first with Dorrie and then with Crystal, so I don't think the decade had anything to do with it. The bigger cases (Nita and Psionics) came significantly later, both in the 2000s.

Johnny's romances post-Dorrie are I would say more typical, and I think he's in them, for the most part, up until his marriage. He really loves Crystal, and he and Frankie have some compelling drama and interesting differences that never really get a chance to shine because she dumps him to become Galactus' herald. I think the first time we start to see him kind of pull away from a woman's advances is when Sharon Selleck, a friend of Frankie's, tries to initiate a relationship with him after Frankie's departure, when Johnny is pursuing a girl named Julie Angel. (That also goes nowhere.) She kisses him, coming onto him, and he visibly panics about it. (FF #259)

Again, notably, he and Sharon stay friends, although she later falls off the page. Iirc, I don't believe we've seen her since Byrne's run, which is a shame because I liked her. But anyway, we don't really see a shift in Johnny's relationships until after his marriage. I've talked about this before, but Johnny doesn't have "celebrity" relationships before his marriage. How I'm defining those are that they are relationships with someone else with a high celebrity profile, where at least part of the draw is their combined profiles. These aren't quite sham relationships for the press -- but they're relationships built at least partially on the attention that Johnny and the other person receive from being seen together. In the case of the first one, Namorita Prentiss, that's something she and Johnny actually discuss before they start dating.

Johnny and Nita attended Johnny's movie premier together, were photographed together, and apparently liked each other -- or so it seemed, until Johnny started ghosting her hard enough that other characters commented on it. (FF v3 #55) "'Scuze me -- I had this funny idea a guy was supposed to spend time with his girlfriend." Get him, Ben.

Johnny and Nita later broke up off page. There was an attempt to kind of explain the breakup in Human Torch (2003) #11, but it again kind of depends on the author inventing stuff we don't see, like Johnny allegedly wanting Nita to move into the Baxter Building. I can believe it, actually -- I think Johnny not wanting to spend time with his girlfriend but simultaneously attempting to play house with her in a bad mimicry of Reed and Sue, or Ben and Alicia, makes a certain amount of sense. But we don't see it on page, it's just addressed afterwards. (And then Nita was killed in the Stanford Incident, and Johnny was beaten into a coma during Civil War.)

Johnny's other celebrity relationships are Kourtney, a supermodel, who he had an on-again, off-again thing with that's kind of interesting. They have moments of genuine affection for each other, but they're also pretty clearly both using each other for their image, which y'know. It's interesting. Darla Deering, a popstar turned superhero who I like a lot, dumped Johnny for Scott Lang. Johnny wasn't broken up about it at all and was happy for her. Interestingly, again, he acknowledges he was more into her lifestyle than he was into her.

Then there's Psionics, a relationship that was troubled from the start. Millar's run came out right after Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, so I think there was some attempt to kind of capitalize on the movie characterization and image of Johnny. Psionics is really Johnny's only "bad girl" love interest -- a superpowered bank robber who turned out to be with a group of individuals from the future looking to use Johnny and Doom as a Galactus battery to save themselves. So she does kidnap him, and would have seen him dead if it fulfilled her goals. But Johnny doesn't die, and when Psionics kisses him after everything, he just kind of stands there.

(FF #562) Admittedly, I don't find Hitch to be a particularly passionate artist, and there's mitigating circumstances here, like the fact that she kidnapped him and also that they're at a funeral for a future Sue. But he does say he'll come visit her, and then he does not do that even remotely. The next time he sees Psionics, she'll kill one of his friends in front of him and then also be murdered in front of him. It's like, one of my least favorite parts of Hickman's run. I think Psionics is a pretty interesting character (I love women behaving badly), honestly, although not a good love interest, and I would have loved to see another author explore her ruthless side in other contexts, but unfortunately that's not what we got. Again, like, a certain amount of this is chalked up to the art -- would that kiss have looked different with another artist? Maybe. But as it is, he just stands there and then he makes no effort to see her until the aforementioned double murder. And since we were talking previously about the Lyja arc, I think Psionics kind of figures in there in that she approaches Johnny with ulterior motives and then later is involved in a scheme to literally drain him like a battery. Like, there's interesting stuff going on there, but it's not romantic.

Anyway, those are my big three examples. Given Johnny doesn't have that many canon romances, three is a pretty significant percentage. I just think it's an interesting little habit he's got there. Would love someone writing Fantastic Four to investigate it. Instead of just perpetuating it and then tweeting inaccurately about canon. Slott.

[sonicspeeddemon]

The ghost of jack kirby possessed his body for sec

[berry-camargo48]

WHO MADE THIS?? I cannot be caught laughing at this

[gracieparkerr]

"in all universes, gwen stacy falls for spider-man" except its "in all universes, peter parker's best friend is johnny storm.”

[sciderman]

he’s trying so hard 

untold tales of spider-man #6 & amazing spider-man digital #17 

[berry-camargo48]

"Wanna look at my hot ride?"

"Wanna maybe watch ME moan?"

He's offering his best and it's NOT working 💔 kkkkkkkkkkk "What do you mean you're not sexually curious about me? 🥺"

[atomikats]

you’ve heard of the spider-man kiss, but what about the human torch’s drive-by?

[penopero]

Happy pride month!

[traincat]

further spider-man and sports news: the mets are using a spider-man mask as their new home run celebration because they needed a new one and like that he’s from queens

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZk-TNbPsZa/

Aw, that's cute!

@the-emerald-defender just pointed out that Johnny and Wyatt are at a Mets game in Fantastic Four (2018) #1, which is a thing I should know given the amount of times I've posted that panel, but apparently I was paying attention to other things. So I guess in both ships this is a Mets household.