Fantastic Four: Why Baby Franklin Matters So Much for the Future of the MCU

Photo: Marvel Studios.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps brings Franklin Richards into the MCU, a character who has shaped Marvel’s past and may shape the future of the cinematic universe.

As in most action and adventure movies, the heroes of The Fantastic Four: First Steps suffer utter defeat halfway through the picture. But rarely has a downfall been so complete. Despite their amazing abilities, the Fantastic Four are mere flies in the presence of the world-devourer himself, Galactus (Ralph Ineson). They’re also no match for his herald the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). There is only one thing that will stop Galactus: Franklin Richards, the infant son of Reed and Sue Storm (Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby).

For moviegoers, the reveal comes as a shock, not least of all because Reed had assured Sue earlier that their child was perfectly average. But for comic book fans, the reveal was obvious. After all, Franklin Richards has long been one of the most powerful characters in the comic book Marvel Universe, a person who literally has the ability to create and destroy worlds.

To borrow a phrase from the unofficial fifth member of the Fantastic Four, “With great power comes great responsibility.” And the FF’s attempts to act responsibly with Franklin has made for some wacky comic book adventures.

A Child That Changes the Universe

As fitting for the son of superheroes, Franklin’s birth, depicted in 1968’s Fantastic Four Annual #6 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, was unusual and spectacular. When Sue’s cosmic-irradiated body suffers complications in childbirth, Reed, Johnny, and Ben travel into the Negative Zone to find a cure, battling Annihilus along the way. Despite the heightened stakes, Franklin appears to be a normal, healthy baby boy.

However, it’s not long after that strange things begin to happen around Franklin. First a peculiar woman named Agatha Harkness arrives to be Franklin’s nanny, a woman who eventually reveals herself to be a witch come to look over the boy (and who remains an elderly woman until very recently, when she was de-aged to match her MCU counterpart played by Kathryn Hahn). Then in the middle of a battle with the supervillains in the Frightful Four, the toddler Franklin somehow rouses a defeated Ben Grimm, bringing him back to life.

Upon further investigation, Reed discovers that Franklin is a mutant with vast psionic abilities. Instead of triggering when he hit puberty, as is the case for most mutants, Franklin manifested the powers as a toddler, a result of exposure to energies from the Negative Zone. Unable to help his young son control these powers, Reed was forced to make Franklin comatose before things grew worse.

Eventually, Reed finds a way to remove Franklin’s powers, allowing him to live the life of a normal little boy. That is until 1982’s Fantastic Four #245, written and penciled by John Byrne in which Sue returns home to the Baxter Building to discover her teammates easily defeated by a confused bearded man called Avatar. Throughout the scuffle, Sue discovers that Avatar is in fact Franklin, who has aged himself into an adult, a jump in maturity he cannot handle. Even in his confused state, Avatar realizes that he had matured too soon, so he reverts himself back to childhood, putting blocks on his abilities to keep from repeating the mistake.

Tale of the Tattletale

As a mutant, one would think that Franklin would jump at the chance to join the X-Men. However, outside a few stories set in the future—most notably Days of Future Past—Franklin rarely spends time with his fellow children of the atom.

Instead Franklin is most often a member of the Power Pack, a quartet of super-powered kids. Created in 1984 by Louise Simonson, June Brigman, and Bob Wiacek, the Power Pack consisted of four siblings—Alex, Julie, Jack, and Katie—who gained abilities after their father, working in a think tank called the Pegasus Project, discovered a power source called the Anti-Matter engine (MCU fans will recognize some of these plot points from the 2019 Captain Marvel movie). Franklin joins the team’s ranks as Tattletale, taking his name from his ability to see the future in his dreams.

For the most part, Franklin’s adventures with the Power Pack were fun and lighthearted, befitting a comic about super-kids. However, his passive powers as Tattletale soon reveal a frightening reality. Franklin wasn’t seeing the future in his dreams; he was creating the future as he dreamed. The blocks he gave himself as Avatar only obscured the truth about what he could do, his ability to shape reality to his will.

Over the years, writers have struggled with how to handle Franklin’s world-shaping abilities. For a while, he was shunted into the future with his grandfather Nathaniel. He returned as a teenager calling himself Psi-Lord, leader of the Fantastic Force, a very ’90s series that is mostly forgotten, like everything else in Fantastic Four comics from that era (except for the horrific costume Sue wore at that time).

One terrible story from the era that no one can seem to forget, however, is Onslaught. Onslaught is the dangerous villain created when Professor X removed all the evil from Magneto, a response to the latter’s decision to pull the adamantium skeleton out of Wolverine. The evil persona laid dormant for a while, before manifesting in the form of Onslaught, a baddie so strong that he killed the Avengers and the Fantastic Four.

By “kill” though, I mean “reboot them in a new separate universe created by flashy artists like Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld.” The reboot called “Heroes Reborn” was a desperate attempt by Marvel to regain the hipness (and money) they lost when Lee, Liefeld, and others left to form Image Comics. Simply put, Heroes Reborn was terrible: badly written and badly drawn, as demonstrated by the infamous Liefeld drawing of Captain America puffing out his chest. However, the experiment did lead to Heroes Return, an incredible reintegration of the characters into the mainline Marvel Universe, shepherded by talented creators such as Mark Waid and Kurt Busiek.

What does this have to do with Franklin? Because the Heroes Reborn universe, we learn, was a pocket universe that Franklin created to save the Avengers and the FF from Onslaught. When it was safe to do so, Franklin returned them to the mainline Marvel Universe, allowing the editors to write off the whole thing as a childish fantasy.

Franklin Richards, Secret Warrior

In current continuity, the now teenaged Franklin has completely lost his powers so thoroughly that even Professor Xavier of the X-Men no longer recognizes him as a mutant. Or so it seemed.

In last year’s Fantastic Four #18, part of the delightful current series by Ryan North and Carlos Gómez, we learn that one evening year, Franklin’s powers manifest as he sleeps and he takes care of every cosmic threat that may occur. He then goes back to sleep and wakes up with no memory of what’s happened, a gift of forgetfulness he gives himself.

Lovely as that story is, the future of the MCU suggests that Franklin’s full powers will be needed once again. In the mid-credits scene of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, we witness Doctor Doom arrive to meet Franklin, a cliffhanger that sets up Avengers: Doomsday. We don’t yet know the plot of Doomsday (neither does apparently Kevin Feige), but if it follows the Secret Wars arc from the comics written by Jonathan Hickman, a story that begins with the Fantastic Four, then Doom probably plans to use Franklin to attack other realities.

But Franklin can do so much more than attack. In the Secret Wars comic, Doom uses the power of the Beyonders and of the Molecule Man to remake reality in his image. After defeating Doom in Secret Wars, Reed uses those same powers to set the universe back.

Feige has already talked about how Avengers: Secret Wars will be a type of reboot for the MCU, leading to new versions of the X-Men and, perhaps, of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. It’s not hard to imagine that Franklin will be part of not just Doom’s plans to make his own reality, but also Feige’s plan to create a new MCU. So it seems that Franklin Richards will end up saving the universe, just not in the way Reed and Sue—or Galactus—anticipated.

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