Wyatt Wingfoot's Family and the Economy of the Keewazi
So, you guys have probably gathered that I'm mildly obsessed with Johnny Storm. That's an undeniable truth with mountains of evidence. And another one of my obsessions is his relationship with Wyatt Wingfoot, his best friend and former college roommate.
Fantastic Four (1961) #50
Problem is, while Wyatt is an old character with a long history, literally created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, he hasn't made regular appearances throughout these 69 years. According to the Marvel wiki, he has 120 appearances throughout the whole of Marvel comics. It's significant, but not particularly impressive.
The other problem is that a lot of those appearances are contradictory and tell us opposite things. For example, in Fantastic Four #192 we are told he's a teacher to his Tribe's children, in The Sensational She-Hulk: Ceremony we are told she's going to Law School, and in Ka-Zar: Guns of the Savage Land we are told he's an anthropologist.
Fantastic Four (1961) #192 and Ka-Zar: Guns of the Savage Land
We can certainly make it work. I think he studied Anthropology in Metro College, where he met Johnny, and after graduation he went back home and got a job as a teacher. We aren't told if this is an official job in a public school, he may just be a teacher in an after-school program or referred to as such in a community center. It makes some sense. I think Wyatt was teaching the children about the history and tradition of the Keewazi people.
Later on, he goes to Law School (it's mostly about Jen) and then drops out of Law School (fully about his duties to the Keewazi, but also a little bit about Jen). Maybe once he was back home he kept delving into Anthropology and got a job as a researcher in a local college, if not a Doctorate on the subject and a teaching position.
This wasn't that hard, was it? No, the problem comes when we try to figure out his family and how much money he's supposed to have.
FAMILY
We can divide Wyatt's family in two categories, the ones that appear on Fantastic Four issues, and the ones that are only in the graphic novel The Sensation She-Hulk: Ceremony, Ceremony for short.
Ceremony isn't really canon, according to John Byrne. And you may think whatever you want of him, but he's the main writer behind his relationship with Jen and also happens to be right on this one. (EDIT: Kinda. I did manage to fix the worst of it.)
The Sensational She-Hulk (1989) #36
I'll go through what we learn in Ceremony at the end, but I think it's fair to give precedence to the other books.
The other books are also terrible at continuity but it's fine it's okay I'LL FIX IT MYSELF.
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SILENT FOX
Fantastic Four (1961) #80 and Strange Tales (1994)
Silent Fox is, hands down, the most important character from Wyatt's family. His grandfather was the chief of the Keewazi tribe when Wyatt was introduced, and would continue to be so for years before his death forced Wyatt into that position. For a long time, he was Wyatt's only known family (his father was dead already) and it's likely that Silent Fox raised his grandson, explaining why they were so close.
He has five appearances according to the wiki and has consistently been portrayed as a serious and competent man, the kind of person who doesn't hesitate and stands against insurmountable odds without fear. Personally, I'm partial to his appearance in Strange Tales, where we see him have a bit more humanity. This old, tough chief reading Monster Magazines and laughing with his son seems more real to me. I love the idea that, outside of desperate and dangerous situations, Silent Fox had a bit of a mischievous streak and a good sense of humor.
Of course, this appearance also includes him using "tribal magic" and gets his name wrong at least once but oh well. We count our blessings and move on.
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WILL WINGFOOT
Fantastic Four (1961) #51 and Strange Tales (1994)
Will Wingfoot is Silent Fox's son and Wyatt's father. He was a brilliant athlete, considered the best Decathlon star the USA had ever seen, and we are later told he won two gold medals in the Olympic games.
We don't really know much more about him, other than he died before Wyatt went to college and, as I understand it, when his son was still fairly young. The both of them look very much alike and share the same strong build, but Wyatt refuses to get involved into sports, preferring academics.
I think his refusal has much to do with his grief for his father, given his strong reaction when the coach tries to recruit him. It's not a lack of capability, because we constantly see him fistfighting enemies way above his weight class when he goes on adventures with the Fantastic Four. He's strong, fast, and smart, perfectly capable of holding his own... or he would be if he wanted to.
In other continuity notes, his daughter calls a random man named Black Eagle "father", and I have to guess that's supposed to be Will. He's not, because Will is dead, and doesn't share a name with any Van Damme movie.
He's also wearing a Metro shirt in his only true appearance (the other one is in Ceremony), but he was canonically a student at State University. I think you can go with either university according to what you want, but I'm going to explain this away by saying that the Metro alumni was Wyatt's mother and Will got that shirt as a joke because she kept stealing his State U hoodie. And the best part is, nobody can stop me.
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WYNONA WINGFOOT
Fantastic Four (1998) #26 and #29
Wynona Wingfoot is Wyatt's younger sister, Will's daughter. She's only in two issues (she's in four pages) and we know shockingly little about her. Well, not shockingly.
She's a strong, defiant woman who will stare death in the face and refuse to budge, same as all the Wingfoots. Same as all the Keewazis. There is some Noble Savage stuff going on here, in case you haven't noticed. They keep bringing up that the Keewazis have Comanche ancestry and how that makes them great warriors, it's a thing.
Honestly, I think Wynona is a blank page that you can fill out however you want. In my headcanons she lives in Tulsa, where she runs the business side of the Keewazi's tech empire.* Because someone has to, and you can be sure it's not Wyatt "let me pop out to New York for six months or so I'll be right back" Wingfoot.
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Okay! Now we get to Ceremony! If there is a lot of Noble Savage in the previous characters, get ready for a HEAVY dose of Magical Indian to go with it. It's not only Silent Fox who has "tribal magic" because in this comic, everyone in Wyatt's family can seemingly use it. Yes, even Wyatt. He learns magic and gets a Medicine Man look. He makes it work.
The Sensational She-Hulk: Ceremony (1989) #2
I agree with Byrne that we should ignore a lot of what it's established in this comic, given that it gets almost everything about Wyatt and the Keewazi wrong, but oh well. We're comic book fans, we scavenge and pry the little things we want out of a comic before throwing out the rest. And as you can see, there isn't a lot of material to get picky with.
To be fair, Ceremony does have a lot of good stuff in it for us to take on.
The Sensational She-Hulk: Ceremony (1989) #1
Like this cute family picture! It's not accurate because Wynona didn't exist yet, but it's still cute.
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ROBERTA ELK STEP
The Sensational She-Hulk: Ceremony (1989) #1 and #2
Roberta Elk Step is Wyatt's grandmother and has another granddaughter named Rain Falling West. That's all we know for certain about her place in the family, because Ceremony never specifies if she's Wyatt's paternal or maternal grandmother. And THAT'S actually what brings the book's canonicity down.
We cannot know for sure what the writer's intention was, because they ignore all of Wyatt's previously established backstory and Roberta and Rain are just existing in the ether, unconnected to anything else. Roberta speaks of Will while Wyatt's mother goes unmentioned, sure, but Ceremony also establishes that it's her, Roberta Wingfoot, who gives the magical basket to Will as an engagement present, and if the basket used to belong to Roberta Elk Step... she's probably her mother.
You'll say, "Artemisa, of course she's Roberta's mother and not Will's, they have the same name!" Well, that argument doesn't work because Wyatt's mother doesn't have a name in this comic. She gets a name in a reference book, and it's the same reference book where Roberta Elk Step is declared Will's mother.
So as it stands, Roberta is canonically Will's mother... But it's soft canon, so I think I'm just going to ignore it and declare that the Elk Steps are Wyatt's maternal side of the family. It even explains, a little bit, why they don't mention Silent Fox at all. (It doesn't explain why Roberta speaks of Will like was the Keewazi chief but again. We count our blessings and we move on.)
In other information about her, she and her late daughter Miriam were powerful Medicine Women until a rich white businessman betrayed them. He murdered Miriam and ran away to escape Roberta's revenge.
Roberta also dies of sorrow at the Keewazi losing their land towards the end of Ceremony, but THAT lost is in no way canon to 616 so do with it what you will.
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ROBERTA WINGFOOT
The Sensational She-Hulk: Ceremony (1989) #1
Wyatt's mother. She gave a magical basket to Will Wingfoot when they got engaged. That's literally all we know for sure, and it's SEXIST.
(Personally, I call her "Bobbi" because it gets too confusing with another Roberta in the mix.)
If we go with the headcanon that she's Roberta's daughter, then we know she had a sister named Miriam who died when they were young adults. She married Will Wingfoot and had at least two children with him, Wyatt and Wynona, and then she died at some point before Wyatt went to college (to her alma mater, according exclusively to my headcanon to explain the t-shirt Will was wearing earlier).
She's also (most likely) the mother of our next character, Rain Falling West.
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RAIN FALLING WEST
The Sensational She-Hulk: Ceremony (1989) #1 and #2
Rain Falling West is Wyatt's sister and Roberta's granddaughter. Rain and Roberta lived together and had a very close relationship.
Because of the amount of jewelry she's wearing in her introduction and her abilities as a seamstress (she fixes one of Will's tops into a gorgeous mini-dress for She-Hulk), I like to headcanon her as an artisan and artist. She's portrayed as deeply connected to her indigenous roots and her culture as a Keewazi (aka she has magic too, and I'm ignoring it), so she probably works using traditional methods. I can see her running workshops and trying to keep their culture alive through weaving, beading, etc.
The Sensational She-Hulk: Ceremony (1989) #2
(It really is so pretty, Rain is very talented!)
Rain's name is-- dubious. I'm not sure why, given that this book names other Native American characters and the names chosen were Roberta and Miriam. Still, we can be fairly sure that it doesn't fit the naming pattern the Wingfoots chose for their children, aka Wyatt and Wynona.
Now, I see two ways of fixing this. The first one, the cleaner one, is to make Wynona and Rain the same person. It may have been Claremont's intention in the first place, given that Wyatt never had a sister before Ceremony. I'm not taking this option because I LOVE Rain, and honestly my reason for writing this whole post is that I want to beef up Wyatt's backstory and family life. Why would I throw away an extra character?
The option I'm going with is that Rain is actually Wyatt's half-sister. This was always my preferred option, but in my reread I've realized that Rain only talks about Will as "Wyatt's father" and never her own. Now that we've decided that the Elk Steps are Bobbi's family, the obvious choice is making Rain a daughter from a second marriage. It would also explain why she's never referred to as Rain Falling West Wingfoot.
(Goodbye to my fleshed backstory about Will Wingfoot's college hock-up that ended up in a pregnancy he never got to know about before his death...)
By the way, I'm making her father's last name West and changing her name to only Rain. Rain West is a name a person may have, Rain Falling West is a white guy making something up with the intention of sounding Native.
Yes, Rain is my favorite, how did you know?
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IN CONCLUSION: With the combination of hard canon, headcanons, and guess work, I figure that Wyatt's family tree looks something like this:
The faded names are to mark the person has passed and, as you can see, most of Wyatt's family has! Yay!
(I called Rain's father Earl because of that one guy Wynona calls dad in her one appearance. Black Eagle sounds kind of like Earl, if you squint.)
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ECONOMICS OF THE KEEWAZI AND WINGFOOTS
So, about the money.
There have been some contradictions here, but I'm pretty confident in saying the Wingfoots are well off, and that means that their tribe should also be economically stable.
Wyatt is introduced to us as the son of a celebrity and drives a Ferrari around (a Ferrari Dino V6 Berlinetta Speciale, specifically) with his rich superhero celebrity best friend. A friend he takes off to New York for months to visit! And to visit Jen too, of course, who is also a celebrity and a member of the Avengers and lives in her richer friend's apartment for free because real estate in Manhattan is just that cheap and meaningless, I guess.
There is no version of the Keewazis struggling that doesn't make Wyatt into an asshole, is what I'm saying.
Luckily, everyone but Dwayne McDuffie and Robin D. Chaplik agree with me, and we know about Ceremony by now. You take what you can, you drop the rest.
The Sensational She-Hulk: Ceremony (1989) #1
This is the most realistic portrayal of living in a Reservation, I'm sure, but Wyatt moving to New York with his rich friends and going to Law School to try and win his ex back while his sister works in a factory and lives in an old rundown house with their elderly grandmother in the middle of a fierce land dispute... yeah no.
Let's not!
Also, as I explained before, the Keewazi lost their ancestral land in this comic so we couldn't take it as canon even if we wanted to.
Lee and Kirby establish that the Keewazi have money because there is oil in their land, and show them fighting back against the oil industry (mostly because that particular company was Communist but oh well).
Fantastic Four (1961) #80
Later on, Claremont adds that the Keewazi took advantage of the oil money to educate their people and allow them to branch into tech,* which is how they earn their money now (very classy of him, given the constant battle of Native American communities against those damned oil pipes).
Fantastic Four (1998) #29
Slott goes back to oil drilling, but it's not the Keewazi doing it this time and there is clear dissent from at least part of the tribe.
I don't love that we are getting back into the oil, but I can't be mad with Slott for not knowing about the tech (I found out like three days ago, it would be hypocritical) and I like that the Tribe is no longer a monolith of Noble Savage stereotypes and "yes" men.
Fantastic Four (2018) #19
It makes them more human, to show that we have people who don't trust Wyatt to have their back (because of the whole leaving for New York with beautiful superheroes and not coming back for months, mostly) and people who care about profits above all, like Highcloud.
I don't think it needs to contradict what's previously established. The Keewazi may need extra money for something or maybe it's part of a deal with the Roxxon Energy Corporation in exchange for some big tech contract. It can be worked with, is what I'm saying, especially when they go out of their way to establish that they have Roxxon tied short with rules and regulations if they want to drill in Keewazi land.
All of this happens so they can find a group of Moloids while drilling, let them join the Keewazi, and have a conflict with the Mole Man. I mention it because it's important to me that the Keewazi accept the Moloids as part of their community, even that dick Highcloud. It tells you a lot about their character.
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IN CONCLUSION: The Keewazi are well-off thanks to their past exploitation of their land's oil and their current work on tech, especially in software. They also have a strong presence in the videogame space.
The Wingfoots seem to be upper middle class, but live frugal lives with the exception of a weakness for expensive cars. Luckily, Wyatt gets his hand on Wakandan tech and is gifted an Airjet-Cycle by the Fantastic Four, so the Ferraris seem to have lost their shine.
