Why There's Never Been a Better Time to Start Reading Marvel's Fantastic Four

We may have picked Deniz Camp and Juan Frigeri’s The Ultimates as the Best Comic Book Series or Original Graphic Novel of 2024, but if there’s any Marvel book that could have dethroned it, it was definitely Fantastic Four. The series is currently as good as it’s been in a very long time, thanks to writer Ryan North and his collaborators. And with The Fantastic Four: First Steps hitting theaters soon, Marvel is clearly hoping to attract an even bigger audience this summer.

Marvel will be relaunching Fantastic Four in July, but don’t worry - North is still on board. The new volume pairs North with artist Humberto Ramos (The Amazing Spider-Man). North and Ramos will craft a new series of adventures for Marvel’s First Family as they deal with the ongoing fallout of the One World Under Doom crossover and find themselves dragged through time.

To find out more about the new series and why it gives readers an easy jumping-on point for an already accessible comic, IGN spoke with North via email. First, check out an exclusive preview of the first issue in the slideshow gallery below, and then read on to learn how the new volume will explore the FF not just as family, but as friends.

It might seem odd to renumber the series when its writer is remaining on board and the direction isn’t drastically changing (not that this has ever stopped Marvel in the past). But for North, the idea is simple. There’s a new Fantastic Four movie coming out, and anything Marvel can do to make the comic more appealing and approachable to curious newcomers is a good thing.

“An opportunity comics has as a medium is always to expand,” North tells IGN. “There are millions of people who don't read comics, who think comics aren't for them, and they're wrong! There are a ton of comics that are absolutely for them, but they just haven't found them yet, or maybe haven't felt like they were invited in to read them. Especially in superhero comics, where every book has a number on it and people may think they have to start with number one, it can be a real challenge. So by giving readers that new number one, the hope is that if they see the movie and love it and want to know more about these fantastic people, that's at least one less barrier for them to overcome.”

The big change with the new series is, again, the shift to Ramos on art. North reveals that he and Ramos have been discussing and planning for this relaunch for quite some time

“We were lucky enough to get to meet and have breakfast at San Diego Comic-Con a while back, before he even started work on this new series and before I even started writing them, so we got to talk about the characters and what we like about them from the word go,” North days. “He is a very creative and generous collaborator, always down to punch up an idea and able to render those ideas with such excitement and verve. I think people are going to really love what he's been coming up with, and it's been a real trial these past several months sitting on top of all this great art and being unable to share it with anyone.”

Ramos is renowned for his speed as an artist, among other things, and that creates a major advantage for North. With the series pivoting to a more consistent art team, he has the advantage of knowing for whom he’s writing when he creates his scripts, something that wasn’t always true on the previous volume.

“I've been lucky enough to work with a ton of great artists on Fantastic Four, but I'm usually so far ahead with the scripting that I don't know who the artist is going to be when I'm writing it,” North says. “It's always my preference to know the artist, because then you can write for them and create something that can be a better melding of the two of your interests, and with knowing Humberto has been on this book for so long, it's been really great to get to write specifically for him for issue after issue.”

While a new #1 issue always helps, it should be pointed out that North’s FF run has always been pretty easy to dive into. North has always structured his run as a series of standalone adventures that contribute to a larger, overarching narrative. The book is similar to Rick and Morty in that sense. Is that format changing with the relaunch?

“Not really, but I am using it as an opportunity to lean a bit more into that larger narrative!” North says. “I still want each issue to stand alone, and I want every issue to be a place for someone to jump on and get a fully satisfying story with every issue they pick up, but I am turning the dial a little bit more towards larger and crazier stories for that larger narrative. I'm not changing the special sauce - as Ben would say, ‘I'm just adding a couple cloves of garlic - not because it's not delicious, I just wanna add a little bit of zip.’"

When the relaunch was announced, North noted a desire to focus on the idea of the FF as friends, not just family. We were curious about the distinction there. How does that dynamic play out on the page?

“It's maybe a subtle distinction, but I really love my friends, and wanted to tell stories about people who are in these long-running relationships that they don't have to be, but they choose to be,” North says. “And that's not that different from family, in the sense that, yes, you are born into a family, but you have to choose to stay there - you have to put the effort in to maintain and develop the relationships that are important to you. And if you look at the Fantastic Four, we often think of them as a family, but only two of them, Johnny and Sue, actually are family at the start. But they all choose each other, they all choose to stay with each other and become something more, and I think that's really fun and beautiful and interesting. Guess what I'm trying to say is the distance between good friends and found family maybe isn't as wide as I thought it was.”

One issue with relaunching Fantastic Four this summer is that the Marvel Universe is still very much embroiled in the events of the One World Under Doom crossover. North confirms that the new series won’t be ignoring or skipping past the crossover, but will instead use it as a platform to tell a big Doctor Doom story right out of the gate.

“One of the challenges of relaunching like this is we're trying to do a new number one that's an easy on-ramp for new readers, but also it's right in the middle of the One World Under Doom event, and we don't want to ignore that either,” North says. “So the first story is a Doom story, giving the Fantastic Four the chance to actually fix everything that Doom has done - this involves a big, weird science fiction idea - and then we're off to the races with a whole bunch of other new, weird, big science fiction ideas.”

One of the big developments in One World Under Doom so far involves Doom finally curing Ben Grimm of his rocky condition, a way for the self-proclaimed Emperor of Earth to prove he’s better than his nemesis, Reed Richards. But based on the preview art we’ve seen so far, it would seem Ben is back to being The Thing in the new series. So that raises an obvious question - will the relaunch series still be exploring the fallout of that twist? North hints that this is a loose end that will be tied up before the relaunch, though it may still have lingering ramifications for the FF going forward.

“We’ll actually get to see how it is resolved in the last moments of the previous run, so that we're not starting this new one with an unresolved plot thread!” North says. “I do really want it to be accessible to that new and curious person who wants to know more about the Fantastic Four, so I'm trying to keep the back story they need to know to as much of a minimum as I can for this first little bit. Which might sound hard, but it's also something that I've been doing the entire run so far. The Fantastic Four have literal decades of history, but I want to make sure that nobody is lost when they pick up an issue and everyone is welcome to the party, you know?”

Fantastic Four #1 will be released on July 9, just a couple of weeks before The Fantastic Four: First Steps hits theaters. Check out the solicitation for Fantastic Four #2 below:

In other Fantastic Four news, the movie is also getting a prequel comic that reveals the origin of Pedro Pascal's Reed and his family. It's one of the first comics in a long time to tie into the MCU.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.