Author Ryan North, who has been writing the Fantastic Four series for Marvel, near his home in Toronto on March 11.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Marvel’s Fantastic Four: First Steps is scheduled for a July, 2025, theatrical release. The big-budget movie will be the fourth in the FF franchise (fifth if you count the straight-to-video 1990s version) based on the comic.
In print, the superhero team has gone through its own changes. For the past two years, Toronto writer Ryan North has been in charge of the Fantastic Four comic book. North, who did his postgraduate work in computational linguistics, has woven an educational science element into the stories that would make any junior-high teacher swoon.
The Globe spoke with North about the unusual approach he’s taken, merging science with contemporary conversations about labour rights and economics, as well as the Fantastic Four’s long-term focus on family.
The Fantastic Four have been relatively out of vogue since the early 1980s, when the ascension of the X-Men to Marvel’s flagship title relegated the FF to a sort of professor emeritus status. You didn’t grow up reading comics. What attracted you to these characters?
I think you’re right that there’s this idea of their being your grandparents’ superheroes. But if you look at them, there’s a guy who lights himself on fire, a rock guy, a stretchy guy and an invisible woman. Nothing in that, to me, says 1960s. That sounds awesome to me. So I never thought there was anything wrong with the Fantastic Four. I thought they had a series of bad movies, which was most people’s exposure to them.
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The hook you used to launch the series was that the FF’s home, with their children inside, is sent one year into the future. As a parent to a small child, I’d love a year off. Which came first, that story idea, or the desire to separate the leads from their sprawling family ensemble cast in order to tell smaller stories?
Part of the reason for that was that if you’re writing the Fantastic Four, a book with four main characters – Reed, Sue, Ben and Johnny – then you have [Ben’s wife] Alicia, who in my mind is equal to all of those. Plus [Reed and Sue’s children] Franklin and Valeria, plus another two kids, Joe and Nicky. That’s nine characters in a 20-page comic. And I didn’t think it was possible for me to do a good job of getting you to care about all nine characters in a 20-page comic. So splitting them up, where we get to spend a month with Ben and Alicia, and a month with Reed and Sue, it gave the readers a chance to fall in love with these characters. So it was part structural, part for the readers, and part to give myself time to figure out who these people are.
Regardless of where the FF ranks in Disney’s portfolio of IP, the characters retain a high social status within the fictional Marvel Comics universe. Was this story also about stripping them of that status?
That’s one of the things I wanted to take away from them initially. Because it’s hard to relate to rich, famous people with no problems, and superpowers. But if they’ve lost their fortune – that to me felt interesting and alluring.
North says one of his motivations for the Fantastic Four comic book series is for the characters to be more grounded, doing real-world things.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
The FF has always been about family, exploration and science, but usually made-up science. Your FF contains oodles of legitimate science and scientists. What is your motivation for including so much real-world science?
I remember reading a DC Superman comic that had science that was completely wrong. Superman says scientists have theorized that time is a loop; if you go far enough, you end up in the past. But no one has theorized this. It’s just made up for a comic book. The feeling I’m trying to go for is to share something cool and make you aware of something in the world that’s really neat. Like OMG particles, which were fast-moving particles we detected in the nineties, and have never detected since. We don’t know where they came from or what they were doing. Just a little science mystery. So the comic version of that is, what if they were arks from another world and they couldn’t travel across the cosmos, so they shrunk themselves down, hollowed out a proton and travelled in that with relativistic speed, which helped them live longer, because they’re going so fast? I’m really just trying to put in cool stuff that makes readers go, holy crap, that’s awesome.
That’s the goal of a Grade 6 science teacher. Not to produce a group of biologists or physicists, but to inspire them that some of this stuff is intriguing.
There’s an issue where they’ve got the kids back, where they’re finishing Robert Boyle’s [17-century] list of inventions, which I found researching my non-fiction book How to Take Over the World. Here is one of the great scientists of his time, who, as he’s getting older, makes a list of what he hopes science will accomplish in the future. It’s a wild list that goes from extending life and underwater submarines to scratch-and-sniff stickers. That list is real. And I wanted people to know that we have this cool, historical list of an old-timey scientist trying to imagine what the future would be like, before science fiction was a thing.
Twenty years ago, your graduate studies were in computational linguistics. One of your FF villains – the tech oligarch whose app is AI data-mining his way to world domination – is drawn from the modern tech economy. How would you compare your feelings about technology in your postgraduate years with writing this story?
This is something I think about a lot. When I was 16 in the nineties, working with computers, I thought, this technology is an intrinsic good. Because I was a kid and I was blinded by tech utopianism.
And now?
These companies are just hoping to get away with it – hoping they’ll be so useful that we’ll have to let them do it. It’s a great example of laws being not applicable to those who are rich. The character says, “If it was wrong, it would be illegal.” That’s one of the arguments I’ve heard. And it’s such an abandonment of your responsibilities as an ethical human being. I still think technology can be good. I don’t think technology is an intrinsic good. If you have a line in the sand and say I won’t cross this, if it’s profitable, someone else will be willing to cross it and hope the consequences are less than the rewards.
The main antagonist is a deep-cut reference – a goon from a 1982 Johnny solo story (FF 233) – and his evil plot is wage theft and unsafe working conditions in a retail environment. Where did this story, and the focus on labour rights, come from?
It came from me wanting these characters to be more grounded. Less billionaires in their tower and more people doing real stuff. It felt like a great way to know Johnny and see him actually help people. I think that’s a danger of superhero comics being just about heroes punching villains. We want to see a superhero help people who can’t help themselves.
I really dug a small moment in the issue with Boyle’s list, where the parents quietly discuss whether the children need to be punished for creating a universal solvent and launching it into the sun, or whether it was a teachable moment. That’s what parents talk about when they get together. And I loved seeing the FF share that, the discussion of discipline being a bonding moment.
Thank you. When you ask people about Fantastic Four, they say it’s about family. I was worried about that, because I don’t have kids. What cracked it for me was, these are just relationships. Ben and Johnny have this great loving and teasing relationship. They’re not related in any way. These are people who like each other and live together. Maybe that’s what family is?