Fantastic Four in the 2010s
The early 2010s a dark period for the Fantastic Four, despite having some of the best story arcs in ages, the title was not long for this world. For the first three years the title was written by Jonathan Hickman and this was some of the best stories of the entire decade. Hickman started off tying up loose ends that were left over from Mark Millar’s run. One of the big things that Hickman managed to do was not only reinforce the idea that the Fantastic Four was a family, but amplify it. For the longest time both Franklin and Valeria Richards were treated as nothing more than baggage that were just around. If they weren’t in danger, they were usually being handed off to various babysitters while the Fantastic Four’s adventures. By this point Franklin is roughly 12 years old in Marvel years and with his sister being hyper intelligent they weren’t just useless characters to have around and Hickmen spent the first couple of issues of the decade to build on this.
His first story arc titled “Prime Elements” ran from Fantastic Four #575 to 578 was used to set up future plots of his run. It introduced the Future Foundation, a group of intelligent children who were going to be trained by the Fantastic Four to be the next generation of scientific minds, the Interdimensional Council of Reeds, the High Evolutionary’s evolutionary engine, the Cult of the Negative Zone, and lastly the Universal Inhumans which consisted of Inhumans from other places in the universe. Issue #579 saw the official formation of the Future Foundation who would play a larger role in the adventures of the Fantastic Four in the months to come.
Going to pause my praise here for a second and talk about Fantastic Four Annual #32 which came out in 2010 and was one of the few Fantastic Four stories that was not written by Hickman. Joe Ahearne wrote a story about a woman getting knocked up by the Human Torch. When they confirm that it is Johnny’s kid the woman realized that Johnny doesn’t want to be burdened with raising a child and since she wants to keep the baby and doesn’t want to be a target dives into Reed’s Time-Platform and is promptly never seen again. It was such a jarring story it makes you wonder what the fuck they were trying to accomplish with it. Anyway, back to Hickman’s run…
Fantastic Four #583 to 588 featured a story arc titled “Three” which teased that one of the Fantastic Four was going to die, and delivers with the Human Torch seemingly sacrificing himself to prevent Annihilus from invading Earth. It was a powerful moment that shook the team to the very core and they decide to disband the Fantastic Four and after taking on Spider-Man on as a member of the group they focused their entire time on the Future Foundation.
To reflect this change the title was rebooted to FF and started new numbering. Over the next 11 issues the Future Foundation worked to prevent the Interdimensional Council of Reeds from manipulating their worlds, stopped the High Evolutionary from hyper-evolving the world, but failing to stop the resurrection of the High Evolutionary. Then the Earth was under invasion from the Negative Zone and the revelation that Johnny has been alive this entire time. After issue #11, the title was changed back to Fantastic Four which went by its legacy numbering since it was the 600th issue. The FF series continued on, focusing more on the children of the Future Foundation or flesh out plot points going on in the core Fantastic Four title. Still by this point, it seemed that Hickman had busted his nut and the subsequent 11 issues just featured Hickman tying up loose ends as the title was going to be rebooted. Still, a lot of the ideas that were covered during this run of Fantastic Four would have far-reaching consequences in future Marvel titles that Hickman would go on to write.
When the Fantastic Four was relaunched for a fourth volume it also ran in tandem with the similarly relaunched FF. Both books were written by Matt Fraction and drawn by Mark Bagley. After all the heavy plots of Hickman this title decided to engage in a more free-spirited and fun adventure. In the core Fantastic Four book, the Fantastic Four decide to take Franklin and Valeria on a year-long trip through time and space, which is just a cover for Reed trying to find a cure for an illness that is secretly killing him and his teammates. It’s a very fun Doctor Who-esque adventure that sees the group exploring strange new worlds and investigating different points of history. While in FF, the Future Foundation is left in the care of Ant-Man, Medusa, She-Hulk and Johnny’s girlfriend Darla Deering who think they are going to be looking after the group for a few minutes quickly discover that something is wrong when the real team doesn’t come back as planned. This de facto Fantastic Four has some fun adventures of their own.
By this point, 20th Century Fox was going to pump out another Fantastic Four movie and, allegedly, Marvel didn’t want a Fantastic Four comic book to promote it. So another title relaunch was called in 2014. This run was written by James Robinson and drawn by Leonard Kirk. It ran 18 issues and if the first arc, title “The Fall of the Fantastic Four” was any indication this was going to be a hatchet job. The entire arc reveals that the Fantastic Four has been manipulated by a guy calling himself the Quiet Man. See, the Quiet Man was an Incel jerkwad that fell in love with Susan Richards back when she was in college but never had the balls to talk to her, let alone ask her out. When she started dating Reed Richards he became insanely jealous and engaged in a decades-long revenge scheme, allegedly. This plot is exceptionally bad and leads to a massive battle against nearly every Marvel hero against the Quiet Man and his army from “Dimension F” the pocket universe that Franklin created waaaay back during Heroes Reborn. It ends with the Fantastic Four deciding to disband so they can focus on the family.
Thus began the Dark Ages. For a while, the Fantastic Four were still around, they just didn’t have their own title for a little bet. That was until 2015’s Secret Wars event. When that was over, the Fantastic Four went on a permanent hiatus. Only the Thing and Human Torch were seen regularly in the Marvel Universe, with the Torch hanging out with the Inhumans and the Thing paling around with the Guardians of the Galaxy.
If Marvel was planning to curtail any possible success of Fox’s last Fantastic Four movie, I think they over-estimated the people at Fox because Fant4stic (as it’s called) was a fucking bomb. It tanked bad. It’s a fucking awful movie. Still, Marvel kept the Fantastic Four off the limelight, either biding their time for the film rights to revert back to them or some other hail mary. That hail mary came when Marvel’s parent company, Disney, went into the process of buying 20th Century Fox. With the deal pretty much set in stone, Marvel relaunched the Fantastic Four. First with a brand new run of Marvel Two-In-One in early 2018 which teased the relaunch of the core Fantastic Four title (volume 6) near the end of that year with Dan Slott (who just came off a whirlwind run on Spider-Man) as lead writer.
Since then, Marvel has been ramping up the Fantastic Four promotion machine with all sorts of cross-overs, limited series and one-shots since their return. Which is just the type of hype machine that Marvel did in the years leading up to various movie properties. So you can probably look forward to a Fantastic Four movie coming in our not too distant future.
I’ll leave it at that, you’ll notice this index does not include the Fantastic Four comics that were published in 2018-2019. Those will be added muuuuuuch later as I intend to expand this index to include all significant Marvel comics published between 1961 and 2015 (pre Secret Wars) first. Why? Well it gives stories that are currently being published time to develop and complete themselves so that when it comes to indexing 2015 onwards, I have a clearer idea of what’s going on in each book and how they all tie into each other. There’s no point in indexing something brand new when the plots are still in mid development.