In the 21st century,the Avengershave become Marvel’s premier superhero team. A collection of heroes that cover the wide scope of the Marvel Universe and are often led by heroes like Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk, it is easy to see how The Avengers could be compared to DC’sJustice League. Justice League’s big selling point was bringing the company’s biggest heroes together in a single book. However, the Avengers' popularity is rather new. DC’s creation of the Justice League led Marvel Comics to create a team book of their own, but it wasn’t The Avengers. No, the team the Justice League inspired was actuallythe Fantastic Four.
While the two teams are drastically different, with the Justice League comprising established heroes and the Fantastic Four characters all created for the team, they are linked in some interesting ways. The Fantastic Four was the comic that created the modern Marvel Universe, paving the way for the likes of Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Avengers. While the Fantastic Four’s popularity has waned in the past two decades, the release ofThe Fantastic Four: First Stepslooks to restore the team as one of Marvel’s biggest names.
How the Justice League Led to the Creation of the Fantastic Four
The legend goes that in 1961, Marvel Comics (then known as Timely Comics) editor Martin Goodman was playing golf with the editor of DC Comics (then known as National Comics), Jack Liebowitz. Liebowitz was bragging about how well DC Comics had done by combining their most popular heroes, like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, with their new versions of The Flash and Green Lantern into The Justice League of America, which debuted one year prior in 1960. In desperate need of a hit, Goodman approachedwriter Stan Leeand asked him to create a team of superheroes.
The only problem was that, having worked in comics for 20 years, by this point, Stan Lee was getting tired of it and looking to move on and pursue other passions (this means that Stan Lee didn’t create the Marvel Universe until he was 39, showing it is never too late for success!). Lee was looking to quit comics, and his wife Joanne told him that if he planned on quitting, why didn’t he just write the comic the way he would want it to be? In the worst-case scenario, they would fire him, and he had planned on quitting anyway. Lee then joined forces with legendary Captain America co-creator Jack Kirby and set out to make the Fantastic Four.Kirby disputed Lee’s claim of events, saying he had come up with the idea of the Fantastic Four, and Lee had added the dialogue to the story. It is difficult to claim which version is true, but the fact remains that the Fantastic Four would change comics forever.
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While the traditional answer would be to assemble a team of established heroes, at the time, Marvel didn’t have any superheroes. The publisher was primarily known at the time for publishing war, teen romance, and monster comics. The superheroes they did have, like Captain America, Namor, and the android Human Torch, had fallen out of favor.Instead, Lee and Kirby crafted an original team of characters(though taking a page from DC Comics, they took the name of the Golden Age Human Torch and created a new character for the Silver Age). Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, The Human Torch, and The Thing made their debut inThe Fantastic Four#1 in November 1961, and became an immediate hit.
What made the team stand out was just how different they were from The Justice League. They didn’t have a big secret base and held meetings around a large conference table; sometimes, they even met in the living room over breakfast. The Thing drew from Marvel’s history of monster comics, but made him a hero, a sharp contrast to the strong-jawed, handsome heroes of the Justice League. The Human Torch was a teenager, but he wasn’t relegated to a sidekick team like Robin; he fought alongside the other heroes. The characters didn’t always get along; in fact, they argued and fought each other as much as the bad guys. They weren’t always upright citizens, but flawed people who felt real in a way that would become the template for Marvel heroes.
The Fantastic Four Created the Marvel Age of Heroes
The success of the Fantastic Fourkicked off the Marvel Age of comics. Stan Lee, along with the likes of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Bill Everett, Gene Colan, Don Heck, and Don Rico, to name a few, created many of the most famous characters in Marvel, in addition to reviving previous characters like Captain America and Namor. Just take a look at the characters that debuted in Marvel Comics in the decade following the creation of The Fantastic Four:
All of these concepts that created the Marvel Universe that fans know today can be traced back to the creation of the Fantastic Four. Characters like Black Panther, Silver Surfer, the Inhumans, Adam Warlock, and the return of Namor all happened within the pages of the Fantastic Four, earning the tagline “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine.”
Even though the Justice League of America may have inspired the circumstances that led to the creation of The Fantastic Four, it was the comics' unique characters and distinctive voice that laid the foundation for the Marvel Universe that fans know today.Within two years of The Fantastic Four’s creation, Marvel had developed enough original characters that they could combine them, similar to the Justice League, hence the creation of the Avengers.
The Fantastic Four Were Marvel’s Original Justice League… Before Being Replaced
Shortly after Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s tenure on the Fantastic Four came to an end, the book struggled to find its footing without them. By the 1970s, the revamped X-Men had begun to gain popularity, and by the 1980s, they were Marvel’s biggest-selling title.The X-Men then became the main team of the Marvel Comicsuniverse heading into the 2000s, with the Fantastic Four and The Avengers still relevant but composed mainly of outcast heroes like Jack of Hearts and Tigra. The Avengers was always seen as more of a comic to hold characters that couldn’t support their own comics, an island of misfits, with Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor as anchor characters.
By the mid-2000s, though, both the X-Men and The Fantastic Four were being downplayed in the comics while The Avengers took center stage.This was because these were the characters Marvel had the film rights to, and had begun investing in their feature films, ones that they could make more of a profit from than the Fantastic Four and X-Men film rights, which 20th Century Fox held. Even when theX-Men were being significantly downplayedin favor of the Inhumans, their popularity was still strong enough that Marvel kept them around. Fantastic Four, on the other hand, looked like a relic of the 1960s and was getting phased out more and more.
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In 2015, their solo comic was canceled, and the team was given a fitting send-off inSecret Wars. The combined fact that Marvel canceled their comic, the very one that launched the Marvel Universe, and also the disastrous 2015 reboot,marked a low point for the Fantastic Four. Meanwhile, The Avengers became a global brand with the release ofAvengers: Age of Ultronthat same year, grossing over $1 billion.The Avengers had become Marvel’s answer to the Justice League, with theJustice Leaguefilm ironically attempting to replicate the Avengers' formula.
Even though The Avengers might seem like Marvel’s answer to the Justice League, the Fantastic Four are a more fitting team to be the face of Marvel since they represent what has made the brand stand out for so long. They aren’t just superhero co-workers; they are a family. Yet more than anything, they are unconventional. They feel like they would be the outcasts in another franchise, but in the Marvel Universe, they are the greatest superhero team ever.
