Ben Grimm Hits Stuff pt.1

Every so often a man wants to see somebody or something get pummeled. I'm talking about a good 'ole walloping by someone who knows what they're doing. I thought long and hard about it, and I realized that when you want to see some expert punching you've got to look to Aunt Petunia's favorite nephew. I don't think there exists a substance in the Marvel universe that hasn't at one point felt the three-fingered fury of the FF's resident rock-man.

Where esle to start but in the hallowed pages of Marvel Two-In-One #33? I know some of you are thinking, "Brandon, why not look for examples from the Fantastic Four? . . . or even The Thing?" I'll probably find them there as well but I'm pretty sure Marvel Two-In-One existed purely as a showcase for The Thing to hit stuff. So why not start there?

In this issue Ben and Alicia have been on vacation for sometime now. After the suckiness of Alicia's recent (and thankfully brief) transformation into some kind of hideous spider-creature, the happy couple decide to give Stonehenge a try.

As it so frequently happens with vacationing super-heroes, they end up getting sucked into a hell-like dimension where they run into the Brothers Four, a group of elementals created by Merlin to capture a truant pupil of his known as Modred. Threatened with violence, our hero reacts with a hearty ". . .it's gonna be clobberin time. . . . . ."

Surely confused by the tense change of our ever lovin' blue-eyed hero's catchphrase, the earth demon cannot focus and becomes the victim of a classic right hook.

I love sound effects. More people should use them nowadays. It don't get much better than WHAMMO! folks. Maybe THRAKK-A-DOOOM!!, but not much else.

The earth creature quickly recovers though, and he doesn't really seem that impressed. I guess when you're an demon spawned earth elemental you run into all sorts of awe inspiring stuff. But c'mon, some puny mortal just knocked you across some giant hell cavern without even breaking a sweat! I mean, even Spider-Woman is rendered speechless having witnessed such a powerful fist-to-face connection, and she's a freakin' super-evolved spider who I'm pretty sure was raised by some kind of talking cow. Not even in Hell does The Thing get any respect.

Suprisingly light on the punches this issue, Ben dishes out one more heap a' hurtin- this time to the water elemental. He trys out what appears to be a left this time only to be denied the sweet sight of his opponent sailing across and out of the panel. A SPLOOSH might seem a bit anti-climactic, but how often do we get to see man-monster fist exploding into anthropomorphic water beings? Besides Hydro that is. . .Yeah , now that I think about it , Marvel prabably has its fair share of water beings.

Does anyone else think that SPLOOSH would also be the proper sound effect for if The Thing hit some regular dude in the head? Probably a little too gruesome for marvel though. If you just squint your eyes and imagine that splash of water to be a deep, crimson red. .

Needless to say, Modred comes along and sorts things out. Ben and Alicia are returned to the surface world, their horrific vacation memories magically erased, while the issue ends with creepy ass Modred putting the moves on Spider-Woman.

Pay attention DC - magically based memory wipes aren't all that bad after all.