Marvel is not in a good place right now. The Ultimate Universe was the best thing about the publisher in the last few years, but the announcement of its ending has left a lot of fans unhappy. There are some great titles from the House of Ideas right now — Zdarksy’s Captain America and the one-two punch of Immortal Thor and Mortal Thor from Al Ewing — but for the most part, the company’s books are coasting. However, there is one bright spot at Marvel, and it has been going strong since 2022. It’s a team that hadn’t been popular in years, but one that is commonly known as the First Family of the Marvel Universe: the Fantastic Four.
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Writer Ryan North took over Fantastic Four in 2022 and, since then, has been putting out Marvel’s best team book (I’m partial to Gail Simone’s Uncanny X-Men, but the X-Men are in a very dark place otherwise). The team has been silently shouldering the weight of the Marvel Universe for a while now, leading the charge in the publisher’s latest event book One World Under Doom. The Fantastic Four’s success is the best thing that could be happening to Marvel, and the company can learn something from it.
The Fantastic Four Have Become Marvel’s Best Team Again
Once upon a time, DC Comics put all of its biggest characters together as the Justice League. Superheroes were in vogue again, and Martin Goodman decided that it was time for Marvel to start putting out superhero comics again after years of monsters, sci-fi, Westerns, and romance. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were put to work, and the two of them took ideas from the Kirby co-created Challengers of the Unknown (a DC team of scientists) to create the Fantastic Four. The team became a hit and opened the door to success for Marvel.
The Fantastic Four has had more downs than ups since its Silver Age heyday, for a variety of reasons. However, there is so much to love about the team. Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, the Thing, and the Human Torch are some of the greatest characters ever, and they fit together like a glove. They’re a family, and when the team is written correctly, you never forget that. Add in an amazing supporting cast — Alicia Grimm, Franklin and Valeria Richards, and Doctor Doom, the team’s greatest villain — and their stories have everything you could want.
Fantastic Four stories should be a perfect mix of sci-fi, family dynamics, and superheroes, and writer Ryan North has nailed that perfectly. It’s hard to think of a time when anyone had written the team as well as he had (Hickman comes close). He understands how to mix big concept science fiction with family dynamics and nails the characters (just see his subplot with Human Torch falling in love with the most alien woman ever). He gets how to make the team compelling, something a lot of writers struggle with, and is able to take the old ideas of the group, and make them all new.
Marvel has a lot of problems right now, and one of them is the way they’ve lost the direction of some of their best characters and teams. The Avengers don’t work anymore, Spider-Man has been forced back into the ’70s conception of the character, the X-Men are trapped in darkness constantly, and the Hulk is just power-scaling pornography for fans who would rather talk about Hulk punching through dimensions than the psychological drama that made the character great. They’ve lost their way in the name of “protecting” the characters. It’s one thing to keep things hindbound and do it right, but Marvel isn’t doing that. However, North’s Fantastic Four feels old school while blazing new paths, and that’s what Marvel needs.
Marvel Needs to Bring the Fantastic Four Feel to the Rest of Their Line
The Fantastic Four has been hit or miss for decades, but there’s one thing that people often forget — without the team, there would be no Marvel Universe. Ryan North has been able to find the sweet spot of the First Family, and it’s paid off. He’s able to use the team’s core in the best way possible, but he doesn’t feel like he’s doing a pastiche of Lee/Kirby or Byrne or Hickman, like many creators have over the years. He’s doing his own Fantastic Four, and it’s perfect.
There’s this idea that Marvel editorial likes to put forward that they’re keeping characters or teams static in order to protect them and keep them fresh for new readers. However, for the vast majority of characters, they aren’t doing that. Fantastic Four is. North’s run feels like the team should feel without walking the same ground they always do. There are Doom stories, but it’s not the same old Doom. There’s Galactus, but it’s not what you expect. That’s what the book does, and that’s what Marvel needs to do. Use the past, don’t enforce it, and create a new future.
What do you think about North’s Fantastic Four? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
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Image courtesy of Paramount+
