Why The Fantastic Four Ought To Be The Best (But Aren't)

As I was watching the Jays game this afternoon (an 8-1 win, almost but not quite making up for their 7-0 loss last night), I started thinking about how challenging it must be for professional sports team managers and coaches these days, because the lineups change so much. When you think of how much there is, just in the way of mechanics for young players to learn - you're a runner on second, and the guy at the plate hits a scorcher to your right... do you take off, do you turn around to see what happened to it, do you scramble back to the bag, how many outs were there, was there a runner on first? - and then add in all of the interaction between players - less so in baseball, but huge in the other pro sports leagues - how do you ever get it all working like a well-oiled machine when the pieces keep being replaced with ones that run differently?

As with most things in Life, that line of thought inevitably lead me to comic books. Specifically, the fact that superhero groups have a similar problem, in that memberships are always in flux (usually because of writers' egos and personal preferences, rather than for story reasons). The Avengers rather famously lost a founding member after their 2nd issue (the Hulk) and then picked up a new one two issues later (Captain America). A year after that upheaval, all remaining founding members were gone (Ant Man, the Wasp, Iron Man and Thor) only to be replaced by three characters who didn't even have their own titles (Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver). And that pattern would repeat, over and over again, with dozens and dozens of Marvel heroes - and even a few reformed villains (Sandman comes to mind) - marching through the ranks of the Earth's Mightiest Mortals over the past 45 years.

But the Avengers haven't been unique in that way... just perhaps the most extreme! The X-Men stayed static for a few years (Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Iceman, the Beast and the Angel) but then added Polaris and Havok, before completely shaking up the membership in 1975 with the addition of Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Banshee, Nightcrawler, Thunderbird and whoever else I might be forgetting. Since then, mutants have come and gone, and there's really been no constant look for the team.

The same holds true for the Justice League who added their first new member in their 7th appearance, and two more in their next three years, before exploding in the 1970s to the point where the complete list of current and former Justice Leaguers, across several different incarnations, rivals that of the Avengers.

Their farm team, the Teen Titans, haven't changed members quite so frequently, but they've seen their fair share of roster shake-ups. At the moment, there are even two Titans teams, with one boasting the grown-up original sidekicks (Nightwing who started his career as Robin, Troi who used to be Wonder Girl, Flash who graduated from being Kid Flash after his uncle Barry "Flash" Allen died in the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and so on) while the other has younger versions (the 3rd Robin, the 2nd Wonder Girl, Kid Devil, etc.)

All of those super-teams ought to really install revolving doors on their headquarters, much like today's NHL or MLB teams. How could you even begin to form into a cohesive unit under situations like that? These aren't just games that they're trying to win, either... they're usually life-and-death battles! So much change, and so little opportunity to jell. It's a wonder those teams ever accomplish anything! And then there's the Fantastic Four.

Now, there have been a few membership changes for the FF in their nearly-50 year history, starting with Sue "Invisible Girl" Richards taking a leave of absence in order to have a child, and being replaced by Johnny Storm's girlfriend, Crystal, of the Inhumans. But just like with every switch-up since then, it was always *ahem* crystal clear to the fans that this was a temporary change. In fact, every altered FF line-up has eventually reverted back to the norm: Mr Fantastic, the Invisible Girl/Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing. Always! And in fact, hardly any of the "new look Fantastic Fours" have lasted long enough to even get the new team picture framed and mounted on a wall before the status quo was re-established. The reason for this is obvious: they're a family! Three of the four are related (some by marriage), and even the odd man out (Ben Grimm) is the best friend of the family. With that kind of dynamic, you don't just add and delete members with any permanence (although Reed and Sue did get close to divorce, at one point).

So, taking all of that into consideration, and given that it's not exactly a weak line-up (one of the smartest men on the planet who can also stretch like a rubber band, a woman who can generate force fields as well as make herself or other things invisible, a man who can fly, generate incredible heat, as well as throw and control fire, and a massive orange rock creature who's one of the strongest heroes in the Marvel Universe), you'd think the FF would be the team. They ought to put all other superhero groups to shame, with their seamless way of working together, their ability to anticipate what each other is about to do, and their knowledge of their teammates' strengths and weaknesses.

Instead, they're kind of meh. As a comic title, Fantastic Four started off strongly enough, and was the birth place for a lot of cool 1960s Marvel concepts. The Silver Surfer first appeared there, as did the Watchers, the Inhumans, the Black Panther and a slew of great villains (the Skrulls, Doctor Doom, Galactus, Mole Man, the Puppet Master and the Mad Thinker, to name but a few). In the decades since, though... not so much. And when fans list their favourite FF runs, you'll always get the original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 101 issues, with very little after that. John Byrne did some entertaining stories (as both writer and artist) but even they don't hold up all that well anymore. So it's not really been a great comic book, for the past 30 years. And maybe that's the biggest reason that the team, as a fictional super-group, has tended to be more or less lame, too.

Or maybe it's actually all Stan Lee's fault, now that I think about it. He was so intent upon producing a team of superheroes who spent all of their time bickering, to contrast them with the always-smooth interactions that Marvel's cross-town counterparts at DC Comics were publishing every month. He wanted a bunch of squabblers, and it was quite a novel approach at the time. However, maybe that's why nearly half a century of operating together as a team hasn't yet resulted in the high-efficiency engine that you might otherwise expect. In fact, when some world-threatening menace rears up in the Marvel Universe, you're still better off in most cases to call the Avengers than to bring in the FF. After all, where the blue-suited foursome are concerned, you'll never even know who might not be talking to whom this week!

Of all the teams mentioned in this post, I have to admit that the FF are probably my least favourite. I still have hundreds of issues of the Fantastic Four title, so it's not like I don't like them at all... they just aren't all that interesting, compared to the others. And it's not by chance that I chose an issue of Avengers as the picture for this blog post. It's one of the few times that Marvel's First Family really impressed me... and it turned out that it wasn't even them (but rather, a bunch of shape-shifting Skulls, impersonating the FF!)