It was 30 years ago today that Marvel Comics rebooted the Fantastic Four and created a new beginning for the company’s first superhero team. When Marvel Comics started its new era in creating superhero comics in 1961, the company started with a team called the Fantastic Four. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created this family team as they raced their spacecraft into space, only to come across cosmic rays and return to Earth with superpowers. For 35 years, the Fantastic Four’s origin remained untouched, and the team remained one of the linchpins of Marvel Comics. However, that all changed after one event almost destroyed the entire Marvel Universe.
Fantastic Four #1 by Brandon Choi and Jim Lee was released on Sept. 4, 1996, and it changed the First Family of Marvel Comics’ origin story, although it all ended within a year.
It was 30 years ago that the “Onslaught” storyline ended, and with that ending came major changes to several of Earth’s mightiest heroes. The Fantastic Four and Avengers both sacrificed their lives to stop Onslaught, and it seemed they were all dead. After the event ended, the X-Men were the main team left standing on Earth-616, but then Marvel began introducing new comics that featured the dead heroes on a new Earth, and it gave the company a chance to create new modern origin stories for all the heroes.
While it took about a year to learn the truth, this was a new pocket universe that Franklin Richards created to protect his family and the other heroes while also hiding until he knew that Onslaught was gone for good. However, up front, Marvel just used this as a chance to reboot the Fantastic Four and Avengers comics, as well as individual books like Captain America. For the Fantastic Four, the origin changes were strikingly different.
In this reboot of the origin, Reed Richards and Susan Storm were working with Sue’s dad on the experimental rocket ship. However, the United States. government sent in Wyatt Wingfoot, who was reimagined here as someone claiming to work for SHIELD against Reed and Sue’s dad since the government determined the rocket ship to be a national security threat. Wingfoot was the antagonistic force here, and he even murdered a scientist who tried to call the police. That was a huge change from his Marvel Earth-616 counterpart. Things got worse when he was revealed to be working for Doctor Doom, before it turned out he was actually the Super Skrull.
The new origin saw the four steal the rocket ship to get it away from Wingfoot and stop his plans, and this led to them hitting the cosmic rays, which gave them their powers. The powers stayed the same, and in a homage to the original debut, their first battle was against the Mole Man. They then met Nick Fury and the real SHIELD and ended up battling Namor, as the comic continued to deliver callbacks to their past. In the end, this reintroduced the team with a fresh origin and stories for a new generation of readers.
If that all sounds familiar, it is the same thing that happened when Marvel Comics introduced its Marvel Ultimate Universe. While those comics weren’t introduced after a tragic event on Earth-616, it was still Marvel’s opportunity to update all its heroes for younger readers. This was what “Heroes Reborn” was all about, with Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee spearheading the effort to update these major heroes, all with new origins. The big difference was that “Heroes Reborn” replaced all the original heroes with the new versions, where the Ultimate Universe was a different world, and the Earth-616 heroes didn’t change.
As a result, while Marvel’s Ultimate Universe was a considerable success, “Heroes Reborn” only lasted for one year. The titles started out successfully with massive sales, as readers all grabbed the new comics to see what changes were coming for the heroes after the “Onslaught” crossover event. However, it didn’t last, and Marvel clearly wasn’t happy with the situation. According to reports, the new comics were only planned as a 12-issue run for the books, with Liefeld taking on The Avengers and Lee working on Fantastic Four. That didn’t even last the full year.
Marvel ended up filing for bankruptcy four issues into Liefeld’s Captain America run. It tried to renegotiate the terms of the contract, and since Lee and Liefeld had big-money deals, Liefeld was released from the company in the middle of the run. The books had dropped in sales, and Liefeld said Marvel wanted to cut his pay, which he refused. Lee received full control over all the books after that and finished all of the books’ 13-issue runs. After that, “Heroes Return” ended when Franklin Richards brought the heroes back to Earth-616, and their original origin stories were reinstated.
