Ultimate Fantastic Four

Ultimate Fantastic Four is a superhero comic book series published by Marvel Comics. The series is a modernized re-imagining of Marvel's long-running Fantastic Four comic book franchise as part of the Ultimate Marvel imprint. The Ultimate Fantastic Four team exists alongside other revamped Marvel characters in Ultimate Marvel titles including Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates.

While the characters remain relatively faithful to their original Marvel Universe conception, they differ in a number of notable aspects. The origin story of the team is modified and modernized and the team is much younger, being in their late teens to early 20s. The series revolves around the adventures of teen genius: Reed Richards, his childhood friend: Ben Grimm, and siblings: Susan and Johnny Storm, who get engulfed in a malfunctioned teleporter experiment and begin to develop super-powers: Reed can stretch his body to impossible lengths, Susan can project force fields and turn invisible, Johnny develops pyrokinetic super-powers and Ben is transformed into a rocky-skinned figure with super-human strength and durability. The series takes place in contemporary New York City and was met with mostly favorable responses from readers and critics, with the fresh, unique and modernized re-imagining of the classic Fantastic Four mythos, the artwork and the writing runs of Millar, Bendis and Ellis, being points of praise, while criticism was aimed at the perceived decline in quality of the writing, as the series progressed.

The title was created by Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Millar and Adam Kubert. The series debuted in early 2004 and had a monthly publishing schedule. Issue #60, the last of the series, was written by Joe Pokaski and drawn by Tyler Kirkham and was followed by a series epilogue in Ultimate Fantastic Four: Requiem.

Ultimate Fantastic Four was the fifth continuing series of the Ultimate Marvel series, after Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates and Ultimate Marvel Team-Up. The first writers assigned by project leader Bill Jemas were Mark Millar (The Ultimates, Ultimate X-Men) and Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men), who had both previously written comics in the Ultimate Marvel universe. Grant Morrison was involved in conceptualizing Ultimate Fantastic Four and was at one point set to write the series. However, Morrison departed from Marvel for an exclusivity contract with DC Comics before this could be finalized. Bryan Hitch designed the costumes for the characters, thus explaining their aesthetic resemblance to the costumes worn by the protagonists of The Ultimates.

In the Ultimate Fantastic Four Vol. 1 hardcover edition, Millar and Bendis write about the somewhat odd circumstances of their collaboration. Foremost, virtual communication was the only method available as Millar lives in Glasgow, Scotland, and Bendis in Portland, Oregon. Secondly, they both had considerably different writing styles, as Millar's stories are typically fast-paced and widescreen, while Bendis' output is more dialogue-heavy and slow-paced and both writers feared it could wreck the project. It was agreed that Millar would write the plot and Bendis finalized the scripts based on his plots.

Millar completely rewrote the origin for the protagonists because he was not satisfied with the original 1961 story, in which the four team members steal a space craft to beat the Soviets to the moon. In their version, Millar and Bendis wrote a story in which Reed Richards is a child prodigy, protected by his burly friend Ben Grimm from bullies, who had invented a method of teleportation in his youth. He is discovered by government official Willie Lumpkin, and subsequently recruited into a think tank/school located in the upper floors of the Baxter Building. There he meets Professor Storm, who leads the project, and his children, bioengineer Susan Storm and her younger brother Johnny. Reed also becomes the rival of Victor Van Damme, a fellow student. When Reed turns 21, he plans to teleport an apple into a parallel universe (the "N-Zone"), but Van Damme claims Reed's calculations are wrong and changes the setup at the last minute. The five students are teleported through the N-Zone, and when they rematerialize, they are heavily mutated. After the Fantastic Four return to the Baxter Building, they face their first opponent, Mole Man.

Although staying relatively true to the original stories, Millar's storylines and writing deviated from the original source material in notable ways, almost bypassing the original works by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Most notable were changes to the characters' personality and backgrounds. The character of Reed Richards, in the mainstream Marvel Comics super-intelligent and a true leader, had his previous role split, with Professor Storm taking his leader traits, while the 21-year-old idealist Reed retains his super-intelligence. Reed no longer automatically assumes leadership of the team in demanding situations, a role more often filled by Sue Storm. She was little more than a damsel in distress in the early comics, but in this version, she is the most head-strong and assertive member of the team, and has a gift for biochemistry and bioengineering. Ben Grimm, no longer Reed's college friend but his grade-school friend, is not as intelligent and has to have science explained to him, providing an opportunity for plot dumps.

In the end, both writers were satisfied with the results. Millar and Bendis stated that they had many more ideas, but massive scheduling problems forced them out. Instead, they persuaded Warren Ellis to continue the series. Ellis wrote the next arc, "Doom", centering on Victor Van Damme. He made Van Damme a descendant of Dracula, a boy whose childhood ended when he was 10, formed by his severe, authoritarian father. Ellis also fleshed out the hard science fiction element behind the FF, namely writing that they gained their powers because the teleportation changed their "phase space condition" into something from an alternate universe; in laymen's terms, there are multiple conceivable states of an object, a 'phase space' of all the possible ways they could be. While in the N-Zone, each one of them mutated into another form that they could have been. It was also explained that Reed's body functions because his cells were replaced with "pliable bacterial stacks", single cells which duplicate most of the larger functions of the human body and does not rip or tear when he extends.