With the new Fantastic Four movie about to come out, I thought that I would ask about something that always bothered me. Given the information that we received from Stan and Jack themselves in FANTASTIC FOUR #11, it does seem odd that Reed and Sue weren't already married before the events of FF #1 (1961). Focusing our attention on the Silver Age issues, it is a fact that both Reed Richards and Ben Grimm fought in WWII and Reed and Sue were in love before he left for Europe.
Let's say that Reed and Ben were 25 in 1945 when the war ended and let's be charitable and make Sue 20 instead of the same age, that would make Reed (and Ben) 40 in 1960 and Sue 35. If Reed was pining for Sue, why didn't he marry her when he was discharged?
You could argue that he went back to college to gain his multitude of degrees in a myriad of subjects and didn't want to ignore Sue for his studies (he was saving THAT for after marriage!) and money wasn't the reason either because he was wealthy enough to build his own rocket ship (sans shielding!).
Certainly it would have been something of a scandal in her social squares as to why Sue wasn't married in her thirties.
The story mentions Sue's conflict of emotions due to the Sub-Mariner but that was a recent event.
It's clear in FANTASTIC FOUR #1 that Reed and Sue love each other but given the backstory that Stan and Jack devised for them, there's no real reason why they could not get married.
Unless....
in FF #1, Johnny is clearly a teenager around 15 years old. I don't recall how old his and Sue's mother was when she died nor if they acknowledged the (probably) twenty year age difference between the Storm siblings but if Sue had to raise Johnny on her own, she had to put her aspirations on hold including her acting ambitions and becoming Mrs. Reed Richards.
Of course all this is mere conjecture based on real time moving through the emerging Marvel Universe and for the Silver Age only as the FF didn't age and even got younger afterwards, especially Sue.
Agree or disagree?
Replies
Hmm....
Conventional wisdom has always suggested that both Sue and Johnny were quite young when they boarded the rocket. I've long thought that if Sue were out of her teens, it wasn't by much. One way or the other, I couldn't see Sue getting on the rocket if she were in her 30's, or even her mid-twenties. I'm wondering if this is something that Stan and Jack didn't think through.
Getting back to your original question, the one reason I can think of at the time was that Stan and Jack had the Sub-Mariner stories planned as well. Back in 1961, a married Sue considering leaving Reed for Namor would likely have been a huge scandal, whereas if she were single, well all's fair in love and war. It could also be because they realized a wedding issue could be a big seller.
The problem was that they had Reed be in love with Sue during World War II. Maybe they should have made it the Korean War.
I can see the Sub-Mariner angle coming into play if you believe that they planned things in advanced.
Focusing our attention on the Silver Age issues, it is a fact that both Reed Richards and Ben Grimm fought in WWII and Reed and Sue were in love before he left for Europe.
I think in 1961 Stan(39) and Jack(44) still thought of themselves as young, so they thought of Reed and Ben as young also. If they had invented an older sister for Sue who Reed was pining for and had her die young that would have taken care of the age issue. This and their age difference would also have explained why it took so long for Reed and Sue to marry.
in FF #1, Johnny is clearly a teenager around 15 years old. I don't recall how old his and Sue's mother was when she died nor if they acknowledged the (probably) twenty year age difference between the Storm siblings but if Sue had to raise Johnny on her own, she had to put her aspirations on hold including her acting ambitions and becoming Mrs. Reed Richards.
Without re-reading all of the earlier issues, I had the impression that Sue was not only Johnny's older sister but also his mother figure. This was confirmed later in FF #31 (OCT64). Franklin Storm, their father, has escaped from prison. At the end of the story it turns out that Sue has a serious injury that apparently can only be healed by one surgeon. Johnny is shocked by the return of his father, who he was told was dead. He happens to be the one surgeon who can save Sue. He saves her and is returned to prison. In the following issue, FF #32, Daddy Storm is replaced by a shape-shifted Super Skrull. Sue and Johnny go to the prison to see their father and discuss his past with the warden. He was a famous surgeon until a blown tire caused a car crash. He and his wife were the only ones in the car and his wife was critically injured. He operates on his wife (which I think is considered a bad idea) and is unable to save her. He descends into gambling addition which ultimately causes a confrontation with a loan shark. He is threatened with a gun and the bad guy dies. He is so guilty about his wife that he refuses to assert self-defense and is sent to prison for the killing. Oddly, the warden says he has a good record (including a prison escape) and will one day be eligible for parole. Following a battle with the Super Skrull, pretending to be Franklin Storm, the real Franklin is returned. As the FF approach him he warns them away because Super Skrull has caused him to become a living bomb. He dies while saving the FF. I don't remember them holding his death against the Super Skrull in the future, which is odd.
Randy Jackson said:
Getting back to your original question, the one reason I can think of at the time was that Stan and Jack had the Sub-Mariner stories planned as well. Back in 1961, a married Sue considering leaving Reed for Namor would likely have been a huge scandal, whereas if she were single, well all's fair in love and war. It could also be because they realized a wedding issue could be a big seller.
That would be quite a bit of long-range planning, but I could see it.
The simple reason, I expect, is that back then superheroes, by and large, were not married and it didn't occur to Stan to buck convention.
Oh, you want an in-story reason?
Hmmm ... how about, Sue and Reed were pining away for each other before he went off to war, but before he got back home, Things Changed -- now Sue has to take care of Johnny and couldn't put Reed first, as helpfully delineated above. And Reed, for his part, is too bent on saving the world through his inventions to put Sue first as a husband should -- he certaintly had that problem even after they got married.
While keeping Sue available for romance with the Sub-Mariner, specifically, would be highly unlikely as a long-range plan, having her be available for seduction by some villain/anti-hero to be named later, in the interest of keeping the soap opera frothy seems like a natural. Likewise, Reed would have been available for the same if some sexy villainess tried to lure him to the dark side (not that I recall the FF ever facing such a foe, and Ben & Johnny, especially Johnny, would be more likely targets for that sort of plot.)
For that matter, I'm kind of surprised that no one ever decided to fill in the gap in Reed & Sue's relationship with even more soap opera, based on what is both said and unsaid in Fantastic Four #11: perhaps the reason Reed's reference to thinking about her during the War is so painful for her is not because of her recent feelings for Namor, but because while Reed was away, and one suspects usually incommunicado, Sue met someone else, and maybe even gotten engaged to him. Then something went wrong (unnamed love interest either died, or turned out to be a filthy spy, or some such), and Sue was left still single, but carrying a fresh load of guilt and shame. Then she went on that ill-considered space flight to "prove" her loyalty to Reed. Hey, it could have happened!
Richard Willis said:
You have to read between the lines here. Sue was obviously in cryogenic suspension for twenty years, which is why she's still in her twenties in the early 60s despite her romance with Reed having begun before he went to war. We can infer Reed was already obsessed with space travel as a young man, but back then thought in terms of slower than light travel combined with suspended animation. Sue was his volunteer, and he had a little more trouble waking her up than he expected.(1) In the early issues of Fantastic Four he's reluctant to renew their relationship due to guilt. He took her on their rocket trip because she insisted and he felt he owed it to her. (Being the first woman in space would've jump-started her acting career.)
(1) Which is why he never obtained an academic appointment.
Now that you've explained it it's so clear.
Luke Blanchard said:
When he refers to the girl he left behind in panel 3 above he means Sue, in suspended animation. Naturally, he was always thinking about her! That's why she doesn't want to talk about it in panel 4.
In #37 they travel to the Skrull homeworld to find the guy behind Franklin Storm's death (who just happens to be the baddie that gets killed in the course of the story, how convenient.) So they either didn't get that Super-Skrull was responsible for his death, or they decided he was just a puppet and wanted the guy behind Supes. (Although technically, they couldn't have given him his powers without the Skrull Emperor's permission, so why don't they blame him?)
I'm wondering if that word balloon had been changed at the last minute, and it was originally painful for Sue because she wasn't the girl Reed left behind. Ant-Man turned out to have been married before he met the Wasp, why not Reed?
In the early days Sue was a model. Don't they usually have a lot of trouble getting jobs after about 30 or so?
The first Fantastic Four movie showed what looked like a very large age gap between Reed and Sue, but then that movie was never supposed to be released.
My aunt married a man more than fifteen years older than she was. They were married over fifty years. It happens.
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