Why would they cancel the Fantastic Four?

I’ve heard rumors that Marvel is cancelling the Fantastic Four or at the very least, de-emphasizing the team’s status in the Marvel Universe. If true, it would be a damn shame.

Reed Richards, Susan Storm Richards, Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm have been the first family of Marvel since 1961. They’re the reason we even have a Marvel Universe. For 100-odd issues, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created stories of unparalleled imagination and scope. The list of heroes and villains who first appeared in the Fantastic Four is staggering: Doctor Doom, Galactus, the Silver Surfer, Namor the Sub-Mariner (who had been around in the ‘40s but was revitalized by the FF), the Black Panther, the Inhumans, the Watcher, the Mole Man, the Skrulls, Alicia Masters, the Puppet Master, Franklin Richards, etc. It’s endless.

If the comic goes out of print, if the four heroes don’t have a permanent home and just wander from title to title making guest appearances, we’d be losing an important legacy.

I know why the cancellation might happen: Marvel doesn’t have the movie rights to the Fantastic Four so it can’t reap the benefits of the movies. It’s funny how certain flagship books wax and wane in popularity over the years. Sure, there are perpetual high sellers like Spider-Man, who has starred in several books for decades, but other properties fade and strengthen over time.

The Fantastic Four was very prestigious through the ‘60s and I imagine it sold well. It seems like it drifted a little in the ‘70s but then made a big creative comeback in the early ‘80s, when John Byrne brought it back to its roots and revitalized it.

The Avengers have been a big deal for the last few years because of the movies but they weren’t always so popular. They had a crappy period in the ‘90s until Kurt Busiek and George Perez resurrected the comic and made it closer in tune to the glory days of the ‘70s. Now there are innumerable Avengers titles — Avengers, Uncanny Avengers, New Avengers — like ice cream flavors. I don’t know how serious collectors can afford all of them. In the ‘80s, we only had Avengers and later West Coast Avengers, plus some solo books.

The X-Men have been critical and sales darlings since the ‘70s but their title had gone into reprints and then been cancelled altogether for a few years before Giant-Size X-Men #1 changed the whole ballgame. X-titles multiplied in the ‘80s and there were spin-offs galore. In recent years, I get the sense that Marvel is sidelining the mutants a little, maybe because it doesn’t own the film rights.

I wouldn’t count the FF out, though. I’ve been reading comics long enough to know that death is never permanent.