In many ways, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a blissfully standalone entry in the larger megafranchise. But those of us who’ve been around the block with these films know that it’s never that simple. Along with the First Family’s first child, Matt Shakman’s film bears with it some important cross-film connective tissue.
For one thing, there’s the declaration in the credits that the Fantastic Four will return for the already announced Avengers: Doomsday, a project centered around the team’s archnemesis Doctor Doom (Robert Downey Jr.). For another, there’s that Fantastic Four rocket emerging from space at the end of Thunderbolts*. But these are just the surface-level connections. Those who know their comics lore have probably already clocked that there’s another, bigger connection to the wider Marvel picture, one contained in a very small package. He’s still in diapers, but depending on how messy this new MCU gets, Franklin Richards might end up as its single most important character.
First off, yes, there’s a baby that can resurrect the dead in the MCU now, and if you think that’s going to complicate these stories a great deal in the years to come, you are likely correct. The son of Reed Richard (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Franklin Richards (Ada Scott) has been a part of the Marvel Comics world for nearly 60 years, first appearing in 1968 in the pages of Fantastic Four Annual #6, created by Marvel Comics’ founding fathers Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. As in First Steps, his expectant parents worried that Franklin’s DNA might be affected by the same cosmic radiation that gave them their powers, and as in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Franklin started to exhibit extraordinary abilities even as a baby.
For much of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, Franklin’s superpowers, though enormous, were often treated as something of a sideshow by the larger Marvel Universe. It was a real “Jack-Jack in The Incredibles” situation. He was left with babysitters (including the old, matronly comics version of Agatha Harkness) and joined kid superhero teams like The Power Pack, but never really affected the grand scheme of the universe aside from the occasional team-up with his parents, his uncle Johnny, and his godfather Ben Grimm.
That changed in a very pronounced way in 2009, when writer Jonathan Hickman took over story duties on the ongoing Fantastic Four comic book series. One of the most important writers at Marvel over the last two decades, Hickman’s runs on the company’s key titles are characterized by grand-scale storytelling, tremendous attention to detail, and paradigm shifts for both individual characters and the Marvel Universe as a whole. And given the clues we have in the MCU so far—Thanos’ henchmen in Avengers: Infinity War were Hickman’s idea, to name just one example, as was the most recent incarnation of Marvel’s Secret Wars—his work is a key inspiration for what’s coming in the films.
Hickman’s three-year run with Fantastic Four and its spin-off title, FF, was an ambitious effort to refine and boost the team’s status, and set up events that would continue in Hickman’s run on Avengers/New Avengers in 2012 and culminate in his 2015 Secret Wars crossover event. This massive macro-story touched on every aspect of Fantastic Four and Marvel Comics lore, and among many other things, it redefined Franklin’s place in the multiverse.
Though he was always seen as a powerful child prodigy, Franklin became even more important under Hickman, who devised a cross-time story in which an older Franklin from the future returned to the present to help his child self refine and strengthen his powers. And, as his resurrection powers in First Steps suggest, Franklin’s got a lot of potential. He has immense psionic abilities, including familiar stuff like telekinesis and the ability to generate powerful energy blasts, but more importantly, he can reorganize and reshape matter into basically anything he wants. He’s initially classified as a mutant, and eventually his powers are assessed as so great that calling him “Omega-level,” like Magneto and Apocalypse, doesn’t really begin to cover it.
During the Hickman era, Franklin practices his matter-altering powers to such an extent that he’s able to create pocket universes and draw the eye of Galactus, who sees Franklin as his heir. As the new film implies, Galactus is the last survivor of what’s known in Marvel lore as the “Seventh Cosmos,” the most recent universe that was compressed and obliterated by what we know as The Big Bang. He’s literally the last man standing from a whole multiverse, and Hickman’s Fantastic Four reveals that Franklin is destined to succeed him as the survivor of the current multiverse when it finally goes boom. He’s just that powerful and that important.
Then we get to the elements that don’t just tie to what has happened thus far in the MCU, but what seems to predict its direction moving forward. During Hickman’s Secret Wars, the basis for the upcoming Avengers film following Doomsday, Franklin, his sister Valeria (who has powers of her own), and his mother are taken by Doctor Doom, the new God-Emperor of what’s left of the cosmos, and adopted as his own family. Doom rules over Battleworld, a hodgepodge of all the surviving Marvel multiverse characters and worlds. No one has any memory of what came before, until a group of surviving superheroes (including Reed Richards) begins to reveal the truth.
In a final battle, Doom is defeated, and Reed sets out to rebuild the Marvel multiverse world by world, universe by universe. And he does this, in part, through Franklin’s ability to generate entire universes, whole cloth. When the dust settles on Secret Wars, that baby from The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the one who puts everyone’s favorite characters back where they belong, resetting things for the Ninth Cosmos (the one destroyed by Secret Wars was the Eighth) and restoring a version of the status quo to Marvel Comics.
Is this exactly what will happen in the MCU? In The Fantastic Four: First Steps alone, Franklin is named by Galactus as his heir, uses his powers to bring his mother back from the dead, and, in a mid-credits scene, is clearly of interest to Doom and his larger plan, whatever that plan may be. It’s early days for the character, but keep a close eye on Franklin Richards. That kid’s going places.
