In response to my last Deck Log Entry, on the tortuous romance of Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Girl, my pal, the Silver-Age Fogey, raised the question, “How old WERE Reed and Sue?” This invited a bit of discussion among the other respondents. I took it as a challenge to see if I could determine the couple’s relative ages based on what information was provided to us in the Silver Age.
I thought on this much during the recuperation from my total knee replacement. Stan Lee’s tales of the Fantastic Four never provided a specific answer. But he did provide a few details, maybe enough that, like one of those logic puzzles that provide a few facts (“Philbert is older than Mary but younger than Cosgrove”; “Cosgrove is a bank vice president”; “”Bushrod and Mary have been married for ten years”) in which one can deduce the answer to a question (“What colour is Mary’s hair?”), perhaps we can determine how old Reed and Sue were, or at least hit a reasonably close mark.
First, we start with one premise: that Stan Lee advanced the time of the Fantastic Four’s adventures in lock-step with the actual years, at least at first. In 1961, the Smilin’ One would have no way of knowing that the Marvel Universe he was creating would be thriving sixty-four years later. More likely, he expected it to peter out in five years, tops. Therefore, there was no problem in synchronising Marvel Time with real-world time. On occasion, comments in the stories backed that up.
That was until about 1965 or so, when the series shifted to setting one adventure over three or four or five issues, and taking up the next one immediately after the previous one had ended. At that point, keeping the length of the F.F.’s adventures in sync with the real world became difficult, if not impossible.
But, for the stories published from 1961 to 1964 or so, it’s safe enough to presume a year-for-year standard.
In studying the first thirty-five issues or so of Fantastic Four, I determined that Stan Lee’s scripts provided at least three salient facts which had a bearing on Reed and Sue’s ages. Let’s dive right into it, shall we?
Fact № 1: Reed Richards and Ben Grimm were veterans of World War II.
This was established in “A Visit with the Fantastic Four”, from Fantastic Four # 11 (Feb., 1963), in which Reed and Ben reminisce over their early days. Besides the fact of their wartime service, much can be extrapolated, with a reasonable amount of accuracy, from this sequence, especially when put against other Marvel comics published.
F.F. # 11 tells us that Ben Grimm served as a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps, while Reed Richards was an Army officer assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, working behind the lines. But exactly when did they enter the service?
As Reed states, “We hardly had time to pack away our diplomas” before joining the war effort. This strongly suggests that Richards and Grimm joined the service immediately after they graduated from college. College graduations typically take place in the early summer, June or July. The first summer in which the U.S. was involved in the war was in 1942. If Reed and Ben graduated in 1942, then directly entered the armed forces, even an accelerated pipeline for commissioning as officers and then training wouldn’t have put them into the war effort until late 1942, probably November or December of that year.
How do we know that it was the summer of ’42 that they joined up, and not the summer of 1943 or ’44? For that, we go to another Marvel title, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. In “Midnight on Massacre Mountain”, from Sgt. Fury # 3 (Sep., 1963), Fury and his Howlers meet with Major Reed Richards leading a team of Italian partisans. What helps pinpoint the time is the fact that Howler Junior Juniper is still alive. (He would be killed in action in the next issue.)
That becomes a critical fact in the Richards/Grimm war timeline as shown by “The Howlers’ First Mission”, from Sgt. Fury # 44 (Jul.,1967). Just as the title indicates, this tale is a flashback to the Howling Commandos first action in the field. The story states that the Howlers’ first foray took place in the autumn of 1942. It snows during this mission, so it could be as late as November, 1942. All accounts place the time of Junior’s death early in the Howlers’ operational existence. He was still alive when the Howlers met Major Richards, so that couldn’t have been much later than January or February, 1943.
That establishes that Reed and, by extension, Ben entered the military in the summer of 1942. (That Reed was a major, a field-grade rank, as early as the beginning of ’43 is unusual, but not unheard of; promotions often came quickly in wartime, especially in the case of one with Reed’s credentials.) And that nails down Richards and Grimm’s ages. They graduated from college just before entering the service, and the usual age one graduates from college is twenty-one.
NOTE: I know that twenty-one is not a hard fact. Many people graduate college before they reach twenty-one. I did, and I’m not nearly the genius that Reed Richards was. And that goes to something that needs addressing. In all of my calculations of age and dates, there is a margin of error---a year or so one way or the other. Please bear in mind throughout this piece that I provide the most likely figure, and that this margin of error applies. First, that keeps me from having to repeat this caveat throughout, and second and more important, it doesn’t significantly alter my findings.
So, if Reed and Ben were twenty-one years old in the summer of ’42 (or, at least, turned twenty-one sometime during that year), that means that they were born in 1921. That makes their ages at the time of Fantastic Four # 1 a simple matter of math. Under the “Marvel year = real year” premise, Reed and Ben were forty years old, or verging on it, at the time of their fateful trip to space, shortly before November, 1961.
Now that we’ve established the ages of Richards and Grimm at the time of F.F. # 1, what about Sue and Johnny Storm? The other two facts have a bearing on this, but before we get to them, there is an indication of Sue’s age from F.F. # 11, as well.
During his wartime remembrances, Reed reflects, “All the time I was at the front, I dreamed of the day I’d return home---to the girl who was always in my thoughts! To the girl I’d left behind . . . “ He is talking about Susan Storm, to Sue’s embarrassment. Reed goes on to point out that they had once been kids living next door to each other.
Yes, there’s a lot of slop in the characterisation of “kids”, and it can even approach “ick” territory, as many a post-Silver-Age discussion on this has pointed out. But if we go with what Stan Lee had in mind when he wrote this, I think it avoids any disturbing patches of weeds.
Aye, I know that there could be a wide separation of ages, as evidenced in Richard Willis’ comment on my previous Deck Log Entry, that his grandmother was twelve and his grandfather, twenty-one, when they met. But that’s an uncommon situation, and likely not what Stan Lee had in mind. What’s telling is Reed Richards’ comment about “the girl I’d left behind.” That indicates more than just a casual relationship between him and Sue. At least, they had been dating before he left to join the Army.
More germane to this piece, though, is that Reed’s comment about Sue as “the girl of his thoughts” places his age and Sue’s as relatively close together. Maybe not the same age, but we’ve established that Reed was twenty-one when he went to war, so the youngest Sue likely was at that time was eighteen. (Again, yes, Sue might’ve been younger---there are probably many who would state that, when they were twenty-one, they had some romantic attachment to someone seventeen or sixteen or younger. But, also again, I don’t think that Mr. Lee had any thoughts of approaching some sort of statutory violation when he stated Reed’s pining for Sue during the war.)
If we take Sue as, at least, being eighteen when Reed was twenty-one, that puts her year of birth as 1924, or ’25. Again, doing the math, which means Sue was thirty-six or -seven, at least, when the events of F.F. # 1 took place.
So, that seems to answer the question put forward by this Deck Log entry: Reed was forty and Sue was around thirty-six when the Fantastic Four’s adventures began. Well, it would---except that the next two facts leave some messy wrinkles in that estimation.
Fact № 2: Susan Storm is older than her brother, Johnny.
Aye, I know mentioning that is gratuitous. Scarcely an early ‘60’s issue of F.F. went by without Sue mother-henning or lording it over Johnny that she was the older sibling. But it does have a bearing on how unsimple it is to specify Sue’s age when put against . . .
Fact № 3: Johnny Storm was still in high school at the time of Fantastic Four # 1.
Strange Tales # 101 (Oct., 1962) kicked off a solo series for the Human Torch, and issue # 103 (Dec., 1962) directly shows us that Johnny Storm still attends high school. Later stories in the series iterate that fact. Before we can use that info to pinpoint Johnny’s age, it would be helpful to narrow down his grade level. I believe we can do that to a reasonable degree---thanks to a panel on the first page of Strange Tales # 101.
There was a problematic conceit in the Human Torch’s series---that no-one, at least in Glenville, knew that Johnny Storm was the Torch. The idea that Johnny Storm had a secret identity was difficult to buy, given how openly public he and his teammates were in Fantastic Four. It proved to be too insulting to the readers’ intelligence to be sustainable, and the notion was dropped in Strange Tales # 106 (Mar., 1963). Before then, though, Stan Lee and his brother, Larry Lieber, who scripted the Torch’s series, tried valiantly to make a secret identity for Johnny work.
In early issues of Fantastic Four, Johnny had become the Human Torch in front of some of his school buddies---one, in F. F. # 1, and three more of them, in issue # 4 (May, 1962). In order to justify Johnny’s existence as the Torch being hidden, Strange Tales # 101 included a panel explaining that these four pals of his had been sworn to secrecy. The text even explained that the friends were no longer in Glenville, having graduated from high school.
This is our wind vane to Johnny’s age at the start of the Fantastic Four series. If Johnny’s four friends graduated from high school in 1962 (again, Marvel year = actual year) and Johnny is still in high school, then he was at least one grade behind his four schoolmates. Eighteen is the typical age for high-school graduation, so that’s how old Johnny’s buds were in 1962. Most probably, Johnny was just a year behind them, so he was seventeen years old at the start of his Strange Tales series.
Fantastic Four # 1 came out almost a year before that; thus, Johnny would’ve been sixteen years old for the events of that issue.
Are you beginning to see the problem?
My earlier calculations put Sue Storm as being thirty-six or -seven at the same time. Meaning there was a twenty-year difference in ages between big sister and little brother. Now, in and of itself, that’s not unheard of. I’m sure one or more of you, my regular correspondents, know of an example in which a couple’s eldest child was twenty or more years older than its youngest child (and probably with lots of other offspring in between).
If it were that simple to write off in the case of Sue and Johnny, then I’d dash off a few concluding remarks and end this entry right here. Unfortunately, Fantastic Four # 32 (Nov., 1964) gives us a headache.
That’s the issue in which we are told the only real details about the Storm family, in a flashback recalled by Sue. The Storms were a happy, loving family of four---eminent surgeon Franklin Storm; his wife, Mary; and their children, Susan and Johnny. One evening, Dr. and Mrs. Storm were en route to a medical society banquet when their auto suffered a blow-out and plunged over an embankment. Mary Storm was grievously injured and, despite his surgical skill, Dr. Storm was unable to save her life.
Storm’s life hit the skids. Giving up medicine, he drank and gambled away his life’s savings. Finally, he inadvertently killed the underworld loan shark who called in his markers. The father of Sue and Johnny was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison.
This account provides some view of Sue and Johnny’s ages at the time---and it doesn’t fit the situation of a twenty-year difference between the two siblings. There is one panel depicting the Storm family, just before the parents left on that fateful drive. Artistic discretion usually makes nailing down exact ages difficult---it’s often to get within a year or two, without any help from the text---and that’s the case here, with Jack Kirby’s art.
In the panel, Johnny Storm could be anywhere from ten years old to fourteen. We’re aided by a statement he made in the previous issue, that he thought his father was dead. That suggests that he was too young at the time of his father’s decline and imprisonment to be told the truth. So, let’s split the difference and say that, in the panel, Johnny was twelve years old.
Now, let’s look at Sue. Mr. Kirby depicts her as being mid- to late-teen age. Even if Sue was nineteen, and that’s pushing it, it means we’re looking at only a six-year age difference between her and Johnny. If one wanted to squint a little at how Kirby drew them, it could go even as long as a ten-year separation in age. But it doesn’t help. That one panel skews any possibility that Sue was twenty years older than her brother.
So, is there any way to square this scene with the results of Fact № 1? Believe me, gang, I worked hard on this---after all, I had experience from putting together the relative ages of Clark Kent and Lana Lang and Lois Lane from my Deck Log Entry # 175, “Superman and the Younger Woman”. There were only two ways to go.
Possible Resolution One: Reed Richards being a genius and all, he graduated from college at a younger age, as many have suggested. Say, at eighteen. He couldn’t have been much younger than that, else he wouldn’t have been eligible for military service, and it’s a fact that Richards entered the Army right after receiving his undergrad degree. But his military service still presents a problem: there’s no way, even if a wartime situation, that the Army would’ve promoted an eighteen-year-old Reed to major and assigned him to the critical task of leading a group of underground fighters. No matter what his I.Q. was. There’s more to command than just intellect.
Possible Resolution Two: We go the other way, and presume that Sue was much younger. Now, we’re getting into the “I’m twenty-one and she’s twelve” territory. If we make Sue younger than twelve at the time that Reed was in the Army, we run up against his statement, in FF # 11, that he and Sue had lived next door to each other when they were kids, even by the most liberal definition of “kids”. But even with Sue at twelve years old, we’re confronted with Reed’s musings about Sue as “the girl he’d left behind; the girl who was always in his thoughts.” That’s definitely unpalatable to put in the mind of a grown man---and most certainly not what Stan Lee had in mind when he wrote it. So, this possibility is out, too.
Establishing Reed and Ben as having fought in World War II seems to present a stumbling block. I can see why Mr. Lee did it. Both he and Jack Kirby had served in World War II, and to those of that generation, being a WWII vet was viewed as a benchmark of manhood. They, no doubt, wanted to present the senior members of the Fantastic Four as manly. Of course, at the time, Lee and Kirby had no idea what a sticky wicket Reed and Ben’s wartime service would turn into as the Marvel Universe continued for the next sixty years.
Even so, Marvel persisted in identifying Richards and Grimm as World War II veterans for the longest time. In Fantastic Four Annual # 11 (1976), when the F.F. teamed with the Invaders on a time-hopping mission to World War II, Reed reminds Ben that their younger selves are just getting into the war. Given that continuity-bound Roy Thomas wrote that tale, it’s not so surprising. However, the notion was pushed to the breaking point five years later, in Marvel Two-in-One # 77 (Jul., 1981), when much of the story has Ben Grimm recalling a WWII mission he undertook with Sergeant Fury and the Howling Commandos.
To the question of Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl’s relative ages, Reed’s status as a WWII vet wasn’t the problem, really. The rub was linking Sue as a contemporary to Major Richards. As we’ve seen, that makes it impossible to put a age difference between them that’s workable with Johnny’s age. A better approach would’ve been to establish Sue as having come into Reed’s life post-war. She could’ve been that pretty secretary down the hall when Reed was working on his doctorate or designing rocket ships for the government. A romance between a mid-thirties Reed and a twenty-three or -four-year-old Sue is plausibly May-to-December. And it would put Sue only ten years older than Johnny---not ideal but, again, if you squint . . .
We should cut Stan Lee some slack for not handling it that way. In 1963, he was juggling the production of a dozen titles, and he often went with story ideas that sounded good “right now”, without a thought toward the long-term implications. For example, the very premise of the X-Men was that they were students learning how to use their mutant abilities, yet Lee had them graduating from Professor Xavier’s school in X-Men # 7 (Sep., 1964)---even though the original title would run fifty-nine more issues. And, in Sgt. Fury Annual # 1 (1965), he sent the Howling Commandos to fight in the Korean Conflict, undercutting the drama of the Sgt. Fury series by ensuring that all of the squad had survived World War II.
Therefore, the ages I suggested for the Fantastic Four in 1961---Reed and Ben, forty; Sue, thirty-six; and Johnny, sixteen---could be calculated, but not internally reconciled. Unless one wanted to do a retcon, say, by revealing that Sue and Johnny were frozen in a block of ice from 1943 to 1961.
Wait a minute. I think that idea’s already been done.
Replies
I've written not about the ages of Reed and Sue but the length of their relationship. If Reed was indeed pining for Sue during WWII, why hadn't they gotten married between 1945 and 1961?
Sue in her mid-thirties would be considered an "old maid" by some.
One argument is that Reed didn't marry Sue because she was raising a young Johnny even though marrying Reed should make that easier!
Maybe Stan and Jack should have had Reed and Ben in the Korean War!
That occurred to me too — there'd have to be some really good reason they didn't marry.
Aye, I know that there could be a wide separation of ages, as evidenced in Richard Willis’ comment on my previous Deck Log Entry, that his grandmother was twelve and his grandfather, twenty-one, when they met.
To clarify, my maternal grandmother turned 12 in 1891. Looking at my family tree, back then (in Britain, anyway) families tended to stay in the same area much more than today. Their “meeting” shouldn’t be interpreted as their dating. Dating probably occurred shortly before their marriage, when she was almost 30 and he was 39 (and they had four kids who all lived long lives).
To clarify, my maternal grandmother turned 12 in 1891. Looking at my family tree, back then (in Britain, anyway) families tended to stay in the same area much more than today. Their “meeting” shouldn’t be interpreted as their dating. Dating probably occurred shortly before their marriage, when she was almost 30 and he was 39 (and they had four kids who all lived long lives).
Aye, Mr. Willis, I understood that, and saw nothing untoward in it. In fact, that's why I mentioned it in the article, because there's absolutely nothing wrong with an adult meeting someone that young. Perhaps I should've specified that in the piece, because I wasn't thinking to imply that there was by putting it next to Reed Richards' pining for "the girl next door".
John Byrne offered a solution along those lines: a 12-year-old Sue staring up at grad-student Reed with an Oh He's So Handsome crush written on her face, Reed looking acutely embarrassed.
Cogent analysis, Commander. I can fault neither your facts nor your reasoning, yet I disagree with your conclusion and I'll tell you why. Comics is a visual medium, and this timeline is rife with seeming contradictions. In order to overcome those contradictions, you have chosen to ignore (or reinterpret) the visual clues supplied by Jack Kirby in the panel from Fantastic Four #32 you reproduced above. Me, I tend to ignore (or reinterpret) Reed and Ben's military service. Specifically, I still see them as veterans, but not veterans of World War II. As far as I am concerned, they served during peacetime, and the reference to their WWII service was merely topical, included for exactly the same reason you postulated in your essay.
Continuing your "real time" analysis (a bit beyond your cutoff, I admit, but still well within the Silver Age), if Sue was 36 years old in 1961, she would have been 43 when she had Franklin in Fantastic Four Annual #6 (1968), not unheard of, but not likely. Simply ignoring the reference to Reed and Ben's service in WWII specifically solves the problem. And there is some [admittedly post-Silver Age] evidence of ignoring topical references to better fit a revised timeline. Specifically, the Badger's military service was eventually moved forward from Viet Nam to the Gulf War; Jon Sable's from the Viet Nam era with no explanation given; and Green Arrow's "Wonder Year" was later established as 1972.
To my way of thinking (Fantastic Four #11 notwithstanding), in 1961 Reed and Ben were 31, Sue was 21, and Johnny was 16.
When Nick Fury was in the debut of SHIELD and had an eyepatch, readers questioned it as a continuity error. He had appeared in the ill-advised “Howlers in the Korean War” story and also as a CIA agent without an eyepatch in FF #21. Stan was still writing at the time and came up with an elegant solution. In Sgt Fury #27 he had Fury sustain an injury to his left eye and get captured. He is aided in his escape by Eric Koenig, a German soldier who wants to defect. Not only does he defect, but he also becomes a Howler shortly thereafter. To increase the heroism aspect, Fury declines an (unlikely in the ‘40s) operation to repair his eye. Many years later, this costs him the sight in that eye, explaining the eyepatch.
In Sgt Fury #27 he had Fury sustain an injury to his left eye and get captured.
...and #89 and #129.
The Sliding Time Scale has been in effect since the 90s as soon as everyone realized that Captain America was frozen in ice for fifty years (which stayed canon) but characters like Reed, Sue, Ben, Doom, Nick Fury, etc. would all be in their 70s, despite all the "Fountain of Youth" treatments they all had gotten.
Heck, Magneto was already "fixed" way back in X-Men #104 in the mid-70s! And I think that Professor X got a younger body too and he was in the Korean War, not WWII.
There is no real way to say that, for example, the Silver Age Spider-Man is the same person of the Spider-Man of the 90s and later.
But as far as the Silver Age goes, Reed and Ben fought in WWII. This is not topical. Reed was pining for Sue who couldn't have been ten years younger than him. However it was explained later was how it was explained later. This is the original premise.
There are too many references like Captain Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders #7 (O'68).
That's why the recent "Sin-Cong War" retcon just doesn't work for me. It lacks the gravitas of WWII/the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
This is not topical.
I meant "topical" in the sense that (as Commander Benson put it): "Both [Stan Lee] and Jack Kirby had served in World War II, and to those of that generation, being a WWII vet was viewed as a benchmark of manhood."
Reed was pining for Sue who couldn't have been ten years younger than him.
She could have been if he was 28 and she was 18.
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