October 15, 2014

The end of the Fantastic Four

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The Fantastic Four will meet their end in June 2015. ©Marvel Characters, Inc. / via Wikipedia

The Fantastic Four will meet their end in June 2015.
©Marvel Characters, Inc. / via Wikipedia

If the Invisible Woman vanished, would anybody notice? Marvel Comics confirmed over the weekend that the popular comic book series The Fantastic Four will come to a close next year, Jonathon Dornbush writes for Entertainment Weekly.

During a panel at New York’s Comic Con, Marvel’s editor-in-chief Axel Alonso and current Fantastic Four writer James Robinson made the announcement that the mutated superheroes would see their last comic book panel next June. Robinson says that he is “building up to the end of the Fantastic Four” in an arc titled “The End Is Fourever,” which will conclude with a triple-issue next summer.

Making their debut in 1961, the Fantastic Four is the first superhero team created by Marvel bigwig Stan Lee, comprised of four people who obtain superpowers from cosmic radiation — in the form of super-stretchiness, super-strength/rockiness, ability to generate flames, and invisibility.

The series has been in publication more or less continuously since then, with 416 issues, and a movie adaptation due out next August, just a few months after the comics conclude (which will surely ignore the existence of the underwhelming 2005 and 2007 movies about the superhero quartet).

It’s not uncommon for comic book heroes to die (or “die”) and return later, or to get revamped and reinvented and rebooted over the course of their existence. In fact, Robinson told the crowd at Comic Con that the Fantastic Four will be “going away for a little while;” so it’s not likely that next June will mark the definitive end for them, especially if the new movie is well received.

Nick Davies is a publicist at Melville House.

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