The Fantastic Four: First Steps Revels in Its Vintage Comic and Sitcom Influences - Reactor

The Fantastic Four: First Steps begins a few floors above a warmly lit dining room. An impatient Johnny Storm waits for his sister and brother-in-law, noisily eating dry breakfast cereal out of the box. “You’ll spoil your appetite,” chides his craggy teammate Ben Grimm, sprinkling parmesan cheese on their entreé. Nearby, H.E.R.B.I.E the robot assistant putters about completing household chores. Upstairs in a bedroom, genius scientist Reed Richards is looking for iodine for an aching shoulder. His wife Susan Storm, played by Vanessa Kirby, asks him to wait. She knows where it is, if he’ll just give her twelve seconds.

This deeply domestic setup mirrors how Stan Lee and Jack Kirby might begin a chapter of their Fantastic Four collaboration, which spanned 1961 to 1970. Seemingly simple but deeply influential on Marvel’s character writing, Lee and Kirby’s “First Family” of superheroes began a throughline from the comics of 1961 to the 2025 film: that the Fantastic Four’s story functions best when referencing the television sitcom’s kitsch, cheesiness, and earnestness. Though the looming threat of ravenous cosmic giant Galactus is constantly following them around, there is no shortage of allusions to the comic book family’s humorous and very human beginnings. That history is formative to the film’s appeal to comics fans, and informs the character structures that scaffold the film’s detailed universe.

To understand the Fantastic Four requires establishing who they are and their place within superhero comics. They are not a team of soldiers fighting a war like Captain America’s Invaders. They are not linked through the X-gene like the X-Men. They do not scatter to the winds like the Avengers when not on duty. The Four are related by blood and marriage and friendship. Their uniforms connect them through the number that serves as their logo. They’re known as the “First Family” of superhero comics because of their dynamic’s groundbreaking role within comics, which echoed many elements of serialized sitcom television. 

Though the Four often experience larger than life adventures, the team’s home life remains front and center in virtually every medium. Within the comics, there is bickering, B-plots, and familial friction. The Human Torch and the Thing regularly engaged in prank wars. Susan Storm tried designing a metal helmet to finish the Thing’s costume, only for him to rip off the turtleneck she designed and wander around in blue briefs. Visual gags on invisibility, flexibility, fire, and stone abound, and have been translated into some of the film’s comedic scenes: Reed short-circuits power to the Baxter Building during an experiment as Johnny, inexpressive, lights himself on fire to illuminate the powerless room. “Can you get the breaker box, Johnny?” asks Reed. “Yeah, on it,” replies the Torch.

Comic readers ate the domestic life of the Fantastic Four up, writing weekly letters to the Marvel offices to ask about their love lives, hobbies, and more of the day-to-day experiences of the family. Lee, stunned at the sheer volume of fan mail after the first issue hit newsstands, responded to select letters in his distinct acerbic tone. Kirby added extra features after special issues: pin-ups of individual characters and cross sections of the team’s headquarters, the Baxter Building. These features also oozed with character and humor; Mr. Fantastic signed his photos while grinning slyly, commenting: “just between you and me, I don’t know what this contraption does either.” 

First Steps director Matt Shakman is no stranger to richly furnishing a set to resemble a mid-century sitcom. An acting veteran of a Growing Pains spinoff and a director of over forty episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, he’s familiar with the dynamics of the genre. Shakman’s directorial debut for the MCU was with WandaVision, which took the Scarlet Witch and her robotic beau Vision through a magical romp of American sitcoms of the twentieth century. What differentiates the Fantastic Four, however, is the sheer amount of comics material centered on family conflict, humor, tension, and emotional beats that are available to reference, remix, or otherwise inspire the film’s storytelling.

Shakman considered these realistic sketches of family life fundamental to his retelling of Lee and Kirby’s story. In a forward to Jonathan Hickman’s anthology of more recent Fantastic Four comics, Shakman writes: “What Lee and Kirby launched in the ’60s changed Marvel forever. Their bold gamble to center a realistic family turned into the biggest hit of the early Silver Age. Every artist and writer since has attempted to build on that legacy while finding something in the characters that made them sparkle anew.”

Indeed, these comics served as a building block for both characterization and comedy. Pedro Pascal’s flustered and hyperefficient process of baby-proofing the house proceeds at a bewildering pace, with fire alarms installed so quickly that Joseph Quinn’s hastily returning Human Torch triggers sprinkler systems. “H.E.R.B.I.E!” shouts Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Thing, upon colliding into the robot’s inexpertly placed baby gate. In those moments, a canned laughter sound clip from a studio audience wouldn’t have been out of place. These characters fit seamlessly into the domestic intrigue that their comic counterparts created, and bring to life the specific incarnations of a team that readers badgered Marvel for details about on a weekly basis.

As the Fantastic Four’s earliest comics demonstrate, punchy sitcom storytelling can add friction to the plot and define relationships, while grounding the science fiction aspects of the stories for audience members that can’t tell apart Blastaar, the Skrulls, Annihilus, or any other spacefaring members of the Four’s odd gallery of rogues. 

In First Steps, character conflicts are simultaneously personal and cosmic. Johnny Storm, yearning to prove himself as a capable adventurer, must empathize with the indifferent Silver Surfer, played by Julia Garner, and remind her of her own past as a denizen of a planet previously salivated over by Galactus. Susan Storm, the team’s resident political and PR specialist, asks her husband why he hasn’t assembled a crib in between addressing the press and weighing a painful choice about her baby. Ben Grimm, conflicted about his transfiguration into the rocky golem-like Thing, is uncertain that he wants to be known as a cartoonish stock character that loudly exclaims “It’s Clobberin’ Time!” Reed Richards, wracked with guilt over the mistakes he made on the initial trip that sent their team to the stars, second-guesses his ability to think of a solution that satisfies both the universe and his family. Cosmic and mundane are brought together in a way that has First Steps take a rest stop at the sitcom genre, but goes beyond to make the family’s conflicts far larger in scale and scope.

For all of the rich material that Shakman can refer back to, the Fantastic Four comics as a source material aren’t inherently adaptation-ready. The cosmic and the sitcom elements of the Fantastic Four weren’t always combined within storytelling in ways that have aged well. Lee and Kirby’s writing also carries the bigotry and bias of two white men making comics in the 1960s: In one panel, Reed exclaims “Wives should be kissed and not heard” while comforting Susan. Some of the characters’ comments on race, politics, and gender have aged equally poorly: Sue herself was introduced as the Invisible Girl, and remained so until psychological trauma from a miscarriage in the 1980s pushed her into changing her title to the Invisible Woman. Modern comics have toned down Mr. Fantastic’s Father-knows-best tendencies as a superhero team leader, and as an actual husband and father.

In that element, Shakman borrows from the comics’ 2000s writer Jonathan Hickman. Reed Richards, flawed as he is, is always trying to become a better father, better husband, better friend, and a better man. Even if he doesn’t succeed, he tries again to figure out a solution that is equal parts empathetic and creative. Vulnerability and introspection infuse the performances that the First Steps’ cast bring to their characters, allowing them to adapt to superhero adventures, the changing times outside the comics, and changes inside their own family.

How the Four adapt to Franklin harkens to longer running sitcoms like Full House, Boy Meets World, or the Fresh Prince of Bel Air; when new characters emerge and children are born, they are folded into comedic antics, adventures, and daily life. In one poignant conversation between the Olson Twins’ Michelle and John Stamos’ Jesse on Full House, he shows apprehension about the prospect of being a father to twins, only for Michelle to call for her sisters and start a chain reaction leading to the whole house finding out. 

The trepidation in Stamos’ character parallels Reed’s doubt about being a good father. “I’m scared to death,” says Jesse. “I’ve never been a father before… Now I’m totally going to be responsible. I make the wrong decision, and I screw up two lives.” His friends, Danny and Joey, and wife Rebecca assuage him with the knowledge that he will have other people. Reed goes through this crisis in Fantastic Four, albeit with a hungry cosmic giant at his door. Still, his doubts about fatherhood and his own flawed nature is pure sitcom-inflected apprehension. After trying to scan baby Franklin to glean clues about his future, Reed shuts down his machine and looks at the baby. He decides “I’m going to let you tell me who you want to be,” then gives the child a quick sniff and dashes off to change Franklin’s diaper.

There’s also a light touch of cartoon sitcom the Jetsons as well in Fantastic Four. Like the futuristic family, the Four have a can-do robot nanny and housekeeper assisting at home, though H.E.R.B.I.E lacks the sassy attitude of Rosey the Robot. Still, he is quite expressive in how he beeps, how he rolls up to Johnny with a sandwich tray during late night work sessions, and how he is tucked into his own niche in the family’s spaceship when adventuring.

As with the best sitcom casts, the Fantastic Four’s core traits remain innately recognizable and fixed in place: smart but shortsighted Mr. Fantastic, stubborn and strong Thing, quick-tempered Human Torch, and creative powerhouse Invisible Woman. 

Throughout their long history in comics and pop culture, the Fantastic Four have gone through the growing pains of fighting criminals and struggling through their relationships. They already have in comics and films, both past and present. However, they remain endlessly fascinated and a little afraid of what’s in the stars and how to face those problems as a family. At the end of the film, three of the four members of the team fiddle with a car seat for an awkwardly long amount of time. Seeing Reed Richards—comics’ smartest man—fiddle with a seatbelt buckle harkens back to visual gags Lee and Kirby might have added. As fathers themselves, perhaps in a distant past Stan “The Man” Lee and Jack “King” Kirby may have struggled with strollers when penciling stories that stretched across space, time, and sitcoms.