The Fantastic Four Just Celebrated a Major Milestone In the Most Perfect Way Possible

Marvel Comics just celebrated the Fantastic Four‘s 65th anniversary with its most recent issue. Fantastic Four #15 (2026) by Ryan North and Humberto Ramos had the four heroes trapped in time by Nicholas Scratch. The warlock’s evil plan was for the Fantastic Four to see everything good they had done in the world erased one piece at a time, leaving them wiped from existence, but not before they watched everyone they saved lost to them since they were never around to help them. However, the team found a young girl in the past, and that one person helped save them by the time she had grown into a brilliant elderly woman.

Time travel stories have always given Marvel a chance to do something interesting, and this story was no different. This took the Fantastic Four through their own history, as they fought to find their way back home, and it was the perfect celebration of their lives.

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The issue saw the Fantastic Four thrown into the past, and they struggled to find a way out. However, the team got lucky when they ended up in 1725 and found a 15-year-old named Clarina Canady, who could see them and help them with their predicament. However, she couldn’t do anything as a 15-year-old, and it took decades for her to be able to finally help pull the Fantastic Four out of the timestream, where they were incorporeal. When the girl learned that Reed was a scientist, she was intrigued, but when she learned that Sue was also a scientist, she set the course for the rest of her life.

This one meeting with heroes who wouldn’t even be born for over 200 years caused Clarina to prove that she could become more than anyone believed was possible. They influenced someone who would never have been anything more than a scullery maid to become a renowned scientist. When Clarina was 35, the Fantastic Four visited her again, and while the FF didn’t remember her, she remembered them. She created what they asked her to, and while they didn’t remember asking, it was enough to help them slowly find their way back.

It took another 20 years, but she had created what they asked her to. She then waited for them to come back, but they didn’t return. Finally, in 1805, when Clarina was 95, the Fantastic Four finally returned again. She spent her entire life waiting for them, but she created several amazing inventions and was prepared when they showed up to help get them back home. It was a life worth living, and even though the heroes felt terrible that they took her life away from her, she revealed they gave her a life she never would have had otherwise. She lived an extraordinary life, and it was all thanks to Marvel’s First Family.

Fantastic Four Revisit Their Biggest Moments During Their 65th Anniversary

What really helped make this special anniversary issue work so well came after the Clarina story had concluded. That first part showed how important and influential the Fantastic Four are to Marvel Comics. The second half then celebrated their career in Marvel Comics. After Clarina did what was asked of her, the Fantastic Four ended up traveling through their history, including the moment when they fought their first battle against the Mole Man.

What made this perfect for an anniversary issue is that Ramos’s artwork showed the team as they look now, but then the scenes they were looking at were all from classic artists. This included the scene from Fantastic Four #1 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, which showed the classic design as they fought the Mole Man’s creature. The giant Galactus making his first appearance was shown next, followed by “Terror in a Tiny Town” with Doctor Doom. Human Torch’s sacrifice showed he was fighting in the Negative Zone with the time-traveling Fantastic Four standing behind him. This is where North wrote, “We were never truly alone.”

This led them back to the present day, where they fought Nicholas Scratch and his temporal duplicates of the Fantastic Four, something that it took the Human Torch’s clever plan and the sacrifice of his terrible mustache to end. In the end, the Fantastic Four had helped a woman from 300 years in the past to discover her fantastic life, and in return, she helped them get back to their own timeline and defeat Nicholas Scratch once and for all. Through it all, the issue celebrated the team’s past and ended with a line of thanks to all the “fantastic teams of the past, and all of those yet to come, but most of all, to Jack and Stan.”

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