When Marvel published Fantastic Four#1 by New York Jewish comic creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in August 1961, everything changed.
If it wasn’t for the success of Fantastic Four#1, there would be no Avengers, No Spider-man, no Captain America, no Thor and no Hulk. This group of four adventurers, boffin Reed Richards and his wife Sue, her brother Johnny Storm and friend Ben Grimm, decided to take a trip into space in an experimental rocket designed by Reed Richards. However the rocket passes through cosmic radiation and the four return to Earth changed forever. Reed can now stretch his body as Mister Fantastic, Sue can turn invisible, Johnny can engulf his entire body in flames, fly and control any nearby fire while Ben was transformed into The Thing with a rock hard orange body.
The genesis of the Fantastic Four goes back to Jack Kirby’s work on the Challengers of The Unknown for Marvel’s competitor DC in 1957. The Challengers were also four people with powers who investigated unusual occurrences but Lee and Kirby refined these concepts for the Fantastic Four, a group who also explored the power, positive and negative of science in a period when science was seen as something that would improve our society.
Also, the Fantastic Four were the first superheroes with a less than perfect life. This idea of flawed heroes was something that Marvel introduced and Lee mentioned his reasoning for this in an interview during his long career: “Just because you have superpowers, that doesn’t mean your love life would be perfect. I don’t think superpowers automatically means there won’t be any personality problems, family problems or even money problems. I just tried to write characters who are human beings who also have superpowers.”
It was his artist and co-creator Jack Kirby who came up with the concepts for the Four as he revealed in an interview in the 1980s: “The idea for the FF was my idea. My own anger against radiation. Radiation was the big subject at that time, because we still don’t know what radiation can do to people. It can be beneficial, it can be very harmful. In the case of Ben Grimm, Ben Grimm was a college man, he was a World War Two flyer. He was everything that was good in America. And radiation made a monster out of him —made an angry monster out of him, because of his own frustration.
“If you had to see yourself in the mirror, and the Thing looked back at you, you’d feel frustrated. Let’s say you’d feel alienated from the rest of the species. Of course, radiation had an effect on all of the Four— the girl became invisible, Reed became very plastic. And of course, the Human Torch, which was created by Carl Burgos, was thrown in for good measure, to help the entertainment value.”
Fantastic Four the comic enjoyed significant popularity under creators like John Byrne and Walter Simonson in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Thing was a very important character as he was based on Kirby and he was the first Jewish comic character. Writer Brian Michael Bendis, who wrote a long run on the Fantastic Four as part of Marvel’s Ultimate imprint, sees this as a very significant milestone in US comics, he told me recently.
“People don’t talk about representation in regards to Judaism as much as I would like or hope. Like many, I believe that with representation becomes understanding. more Jewish representation would help with ignorance that surrounds us constantly. As a little Jewish boy going to Hebrew school, when I found out Ben Grimm was Jewish, it blew my mind.”
Dan Slott, who has written the Fantastic Four since 2018, also sees the fact that one of the FF is Jewish as very important as well, he told me.
“As someone who started reading as an eight year old Jewish kid, I know it means the world to me. So many of the all-time classic super heroes sprung from the minds and penciled pages of Jewish comic book creators. And there are a number of big name characters that were clearly written as Jewish—but because of the times, it was never really said out loud. Ben Grimm was obviously one of those. There’s an old sketch/holiday card that used to make the rounds, something Jack Kirby drew, that showed the Thing in a yarmulke and tallit while reading the Torah.
“We all knew Ben was Jewish, but it took over four decades until it was made canon in an issue of the Fantastic Four, written by Karl Kesel and drawn by Stuart Immonen. A number of years later, while working on the Thing’s solo series, I was very grateful that I got to tell the story with artist Kieron Dwyer, where we gave Ben his barmitzvah. And a couple years ago, over in Fantastic Four, artist Aaron Kuder and I gave Ben and his longtime girlfriend, Alicia Masters, a proper Jewish wedding under a chuppah.
“Representation in comics is important. It’s nice to be able to see heroes who share your roots—as well as characters who open your eyes to different cultures,” Slott admitted.
The one thing that Marvel hasn’t been able to carry off yet is a successful film adaptation of the Fantastic Four despite two attempts in the 2000s and one last decade.
Walter Simonson, who wrote and drew the Fantastic Four back in the 1990s, does have a theory as to why this might be the case: “They have lacked decent screenplays. And probably it would help if they could borrow some of Kevin Feige’s understanding of what makes superheroes work on screen.”
Now that Disney owns Fox though, a new Fantastic Four movie is likely to appear in the next three or four years. Fantastic Four saved Marvel when it launched and there is no question that without them, we wouldn’t have had any of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They’ve certainly come a long way since two Jewish New Yorkers created them.
