I saw a Stan Lee interview a long time ago where he was recounting the creation of Spider-Man, where halfway through he mischeviously winked at the camera and said “I’ve told this story so many times that for all I know it’s true”.

That caveat pretty much applies to any story Lee told about the birth of Marvel’s second wave of superheroes in the nineteen sixties. Even if we discount Stan’s (well earned) legendary reputation for self promotion and myth-making, he was an old man with a failing memory. But, screw it. That’s pretty much all of human history. A story we’ve told ourselves so many times, that for all we know it’s true.

There are conflicting versions of how the Fantastic Four came to be. Stan Lee said that he conceived the idea after publisher Martin Goodman asked him to come up with a superhero team to compete with DC’s then-new Justice League of America. Jack Kirby disputed this, claiming that the team was principally his idea and functioned as a continuation of his work on Challengers of the Unknown for DC. My opinion is…it really doesn’t matter. The book is credited as the co-creation of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and if you read it, it becomes immediately clear that it is a co-creation of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. If you replaced either Kirby’s art or Lee’s writing, it wouldn’t be the same thing. Both men put their stamp on it, and hard. What is, I think, un-contestable is that The Fantastic Four #1 is the single most influential comic book issue since Action Comics debuted in 1938.

While Superman’s debut launched the comic book superhero genre, it had peaked and waned in the years after World War 2. The Fantastic Four not only re-kindled interest in the genre, it set it on the path to near total conquest of the American comic book landscape. This one book acted as a cauldron for concepts that shaped the entire industry, both in a fictional and technical sense. It was working on this book where Kirby and Lee pioneered the “Marvel Method”, where instead of a full script, the writer contributed a broad outline, leaving the artist discretion to shape individual story beats, with the writer then returning at the end of the process to craft dialogue. This was the method that allowed Stan Lee to be so insanely prolific throughout the sixties and much of the seventies. The book also introduced more psychological and narrative complexity than was typical of comic books of the era, when they were still seen as a medium for children. And, of course, I could spend all day listing the iconic characters that were introduced in the pages of this one book and how it acted as the Big Bang for the nascent Marvel comics universe. Fantastic Four was the book where Stan Lee became STAN LEE and Jack Kirby became JACK KIRBY. Although they were both seasoned industry veterans, it was here that Lee honed his trademark mix of action, medodrama and wise-acre comedy. And Kirby? Kirby underwent a transformation from a talented artist to a one-of-a-kind icon of the medium.

As for adaptation to other media, the Four has been well represented with numerous animated series and a radio show in the seventies starring NO FUCKING WAY THAT IS TRUE! BILL MURRAY?! BILL MURRAY PLAYED THE HUMAN TORCH!!!?!

But for such an important property, the jump to live action took a lot longer. This is just a difficult property to adapt. It’s one thing to stick a stuntman in a Spider-man costume and have him punch a few goons. It’s quite another to set him on fire and launch him into space to battle world-devouring space gods (the union will fucking eat you alive). So it wasn’t until the late eighties when special effects driven science fiction was having a moment that the rights were finally sold. That resulted in a movie so good that Roger Corman hid it under the floorboards to ensure it was never tainted by the eyes of a sinful world. Come the 2000s the rights were picked up by Fox and we got the Time Story duology which, while undergoing something of a positive reappraisal these days, were deeply compromised.

Then there was JESUS CHRIST WHAT EVEN IS THIS?

But, at last, here we are. The Fantastic Four, in the MCU, as God and Kevin Feige intended, coming back to rekindle interest in a superhero genre that had almost died due to lack of interest.

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