Fantastic Four: First Steps was a great movie that captured the heart and bonds that make up Marvel’s First Family. The Four are a superhero team and the universe’s best explorers, but first and foremost they are a family, connected by their love for each other. The movie captured the care and sense of drama that permeates the team perfectly, but one thing it missed is that it excluded one essential member of the Fantastic Family. The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first adventure with the Fantastic Four didn’t include Alicia Masters, the Thing’s number one love interest and eventual wife. It replaced her with an entirely new character, and that is a darn shame, because Alicia deserves to stand beside the Four.
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Alicia Has Been Here Since the Beginning
Alicia Masters premiered way back in Fantastic Four (1961) #8. The blind step-daughter of one of the Fantastic Four’s oldest villains, the Puppet Master, she was instrumental in stopping the mind controlling mastermind from defeating the Four and taking over the world. Ever since her first introduction, Alicia stayed in the lives of the Four, immediately hitting it off with Ben Grimm. She was one of the first people to look past his rocky, monstrous exterior, forming a genuine connection with Thing despite his ground-level self esteem. As a reputed artist and sculptor, Alicia is well known for being able to find the beauty in things that others would never be able to notice, and that included Ben Grimm.
Alicia wasn’t just a useless love interest either, as she has stood up plenty of times when the situation called for it, being instrumental in saving the world her fair share of times. Beyond stopping her rogue step-father, Alicia was the person who convinced the Silver Surfer to turn on Galactus and spare the Earth, teaching him the meaning of humanity. She’s been trained to fight with the best of them, even being gifted a billy club cane by Matt Murdock, designed after his own equipment. Eventually, Alicia and Ben would tie the knot, getting married and even adopting children of their own, a Skrull girl and Kree boy that were orphaned during the attempted Cotati invasion of Earth. Alicia is not only the emotional rock of the Thing, but one of the best characters to measure against the Fantastic Four. She takes the weirdness of the Four in stride, and brings them down to Earth, which is especially important because the Four work best as a family centered story, and Alicia being such a normal person in comparison brings the emotional focus back to interpersonal relationships. She grounds the Fantastic Four from being lost in the stars, which they get lost in a lot, considering they’re astronauts and explorers first and foremost.
Why Alicia Was Replaced
It’s impossible to know for sure why Alicia wasn’t introduced alongside the rest of the family in Fantastic Four: First Steps, but we can make a few guesses. It’s possible that the creative minds behind the movie thought Alicia’s backstory would complicate the story too much, considering they already had so much to focus on with the main plot. Puppet Master was mentioned, but only as one of the criminals that Mister Fantastic caught in his effort to incarcerate all supervillains before Franklin’s birth. It would have been strange to include Alicia and mention Puppet Master without at least a throwaway line about their connection, and the direction the movie wanted to go seemed to include the Thing meeting his love interest for the first time during the film.
Beyond that, though, the much more plausible reason is that the movie’s team wanted to use the role of Thing’s love interest to pay tribute to Rosalind “Roz” Kirby, the wife of Jack Kirby, co-creator of the Fantastic Four. The movie paid tribute to Kirby in numerous places, choosing the numbers of Earth-828 after his birthday. In First Steps, Thing’s love interest is a school teacher named Rachel Rozman, and while he briefly dated a teacher in the comics, this character is completely original. It’s likely that Rozman is yet another tribute to the comic book legend, especially considering that Ben Grimm was one of Kirby’s favorite characters that he made, and by far the one that had the most of Kirby’s real life injected into him. Alicia Masters is a massively important character in the Fantastic Four’s mythos, and as much as I would have loved for her to have shown up in First Steps, I can’t argue with a tribute to one of comic books’ most important figures. Still, do you want Alicia to show up in a future film, or would you rather they stick with Rachel? Let us know in the comments below!
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Image courtesy of Focus Features.
