Marvel’s First Superhero Quartet: The Fantastic Four (2025)

After a long wait, Marvel Studios finally announced the cast of The Fantastic Four, its first quartet of superheroes on Valentine’s Day, much to the surprise and thrill of Marvel fans. The announcement was made via Marvel Studios’ social media accounts and read “Happy Valentine’s Day from Marvel’s First Family!”

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How did the Fantastic Four Came into Being?Ten Important Changes in the Fantastic Four Origin

The message was followed by a kitsch, a 1960s inspired illustration, showing the four superheroes — Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch and Thing — celebrating the holiday. It was interesting to note that the image, which showcased the new look of the characters, was in a retro setting, indicating that it was a period movie in line with the characters’ origins in the comic books.

Thus, as Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn get ready to step into their new avatars as super-elastic Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic), powerful Susan Storm (The Invisible Woman), basher Ben Grimm (The Thing) and hot-headed Johnny Storm (The Human Torch) respectively, perhaps it is time for us to take a short trip down memory lane into the history of these characters and see how they came into being, and what has been their journey so far.

How did the Fantastic Four Came into Being?

The Fantastic Four superhero quartet, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for Marvel comics, debuted in 1961. The story regarding the origin of the Fantastic Four is quite controversial. There are several accounts as to how Goodman came upon this idea.

A popular version of the story says that Martin Goodman, the comic book publisher, came up with the idea after he heard a top executive of the rival, DC Comics, either Jack Liebowitz or Irwin Donenfeld, brag about their success with the new superhero team they had created, the Justice League of America, while playing golf with them.

However, Michael Uslan, film producer and comics historian, vehemently refuted the theory. In a letter published in December 2004 in Alter Ego, he wrote that Donenfeld never played golf with Goodman. Instead, he says in the letter,

“The way I heard the story from Sol (Harrison, production chief, DC Comics) was that Goodman was playing with one of the heads of Independent News, not DC Comics (though DC owned Independent News). … As the distributor of DC Comics, this man certainly knew all the sales figures and was in the best position to tell this tidbit to Goodman. … Of course, Goodman would want to be playing golf with this fellow and be in his good graces. … Sol worked closely with Independent News’ top management over the decades and would have gotten this story straight from the horse’s mouth.”¹

Nevertheless, being a publishing trend-follower, Goodman was aware of the Justice League’s strong sales and did direct his comics editor, Stan Lee, to create a comic-book series about a team of superheroes. Lee, wrote in 1974 in Origins of Marvel Comics, that “Martin mentioned that he had noticed one of the titles published by National Comics seemed to be selling better than most. It was a book called The [sic] Justice League of America and it was composed of a team of superheroes. … ‘If the Justice League is selling’, spoke he, ‘why don’t we put out a comic book that features a team of superheroes?’”²

Lee had been working as a comics editor for almost two decades and was increasingly becoming conscious of the medium’s creative restrictions. He wanted to do something unique. He wanted to “to carve a real career for myself in the nowhere world of comic books”. He writes in the book: “for just this once, I would do the type of story I myself would enjoy reading…. And the characters would be the kind of characters I could personally relate to: they’d be flesh and blood, they’d have their faults and foibles, they’d be fallible and feisty, and — most important of all — inside their colourful, costumed booties they’d still have feet of clay.”

Ten Important Changes in the Fantastic Four Origin

Till 2019, The Fantastic Four movie rights were with 20^th Century Fox. The production company made three films with the characters, Fantastic Four (2005), Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) and a remake, Fantastic Four (2015), but none of the movies resulted in cash registers ringing. After Disney took over 21st Century Fox, the characters finally came home to the Marvel Studios sandbox.

However, over the years, Marvel has made innumerable changes related to the origins of the Fantastic Four in tandem with the real-world space age or conforming to comic reboots, according to Comic Book Resources’ site cbr.com. The key feature of the Marvel Universe is that it uses a sliding timeline, which means that the characters always gain their super powers 10-15 years before the present day.

Nineteen sixty-one was a year when the battle to reach space was fiercest between the US and the then USSR. The Fantastic Four was an outcome of that sentiment. It told the story of a team of astronauts who gained superpowers after cosmic rays penetrated their spaceship. The four decide to use their new-found power for the benefit of mankind. The story clicked well then, but there have been many scientific and technological developments since. Hence, to make the story more relatable and contemporary, Marvel has been reinventing and updating the Fantastic Four’s origin from time to time.

The storyline began with the space race, which gave an assurance to Americans that the country would list greater achievement in outer space (the USSR was ahead of American in the space race at the time).
The story was greatly influenced by World War II, which had ended just 15 years before the launch of the Fantastic Four. Thus, all four characters had military backgrounds. However, as the years rolled by and the Fantastic Four origins went farther away from the war, it increasingly became less relevant.
The next detail added was the realignment of the characters’ ages. As per the original plot, both Reed and Ben would have been around 40 (keeping in mind that they served in WWII), Johnny Storm would have been a teenager and Sue Storm a few years older than him, which meant that Reed would have been much older than Sue when he met her. However, his history was tweaked, and he was shown as a child genius who went to college at a younger age. So, when Reed meets Sue, he is in his 20s.
In 1978, Johnny was dropped from the Fantastic Four line-up and Mister Fantastic, the Invisible Girl and the Thing were joined by H.E.R.B.I.E. the Robot for a season.
The next change came in 1996, when the story behind the origin of the superheroes was changed once again. As per the new version, Sue is the head of aerospace at the Storm Foundation. After an anomaly is discovered in space, Ben is assigned to pilot Reed’s rocket, which has proper shielding against cosmic rays, to fix it. Doctor Doom jeopardises the mission and imprisons Reed and Ben. Sue and Johnny help them escape by flying in the proto-type rocket developed by Reed which is not shielded against cosmic rays, thereby getting their superpowers.
The next change in the storyline suggested that it was the Celestials who gave humans superpowers to secure planet Earth as a cosmic egg that would give birth to a new Celestial. The powers remained dormant in them and were activated only after they were hit by cosmic rays.
In 2004, Marvel again updated its characters for the Ultimate Fantastic Four. According to this storyline, Reed and his team-mates, including Victor Van Damme, get teleported to different locations around the globe as a result of Reed’s interdimensional experiment and their bodies undergo various changes along the way. And while the four of them return as the Fantastic Four, Van Damme turns to villainy.
The next detail that cropped up in the story talked about how Reed influenced the cosmic rays in order to construct the exact circumstances that created the Fantastic Four; and that Ben’s avatar as the Thing, Sue’s invisibility and Johnny’s fire were his manifestations about the kinds of people he believed them to be.
After the initial story about the creation of the Fantastic Four in 1961, it was only in 2006 that Marvel came out with the thereafter story. The year 2006’s Fantastic Four: The First Family by Joe Casey and Chris Weston, told the back story of what happened after the four came back to Earth, how the government became involved and how, from being the Fantastic Four, they became an official superhero team.
In 2018, Dan Slott and Paco Medina added two new details to the origin of the Fantastic Four. As per this storyline, astronauts Colonet Duchman and Captain Sanders were originally part of the flight crew but opted out of the mission, citing the dangers it entailed. The mission was headed to a habitable planet 44 light years away from Earth but could not reach it due to cosmic rays, which prevented it from reaching the planet. The fact that the planet also developed superbeings through exposure to cosmic rays, was never revealed.