10 Things Marvel Wants You To Forget About The Fantastic Four

Most writers these days like to portray Reed Richards as the platonic ideal of the benevolent scientist and explorer. Someone who goes out into the stars not to conquer but to understand, always fascinated with every new thing that comes his way and loves his family more than life itself.

Yeah it, uh... took us a while to get to that point.

Not to say that that wasn't always the intent with Reed, but he was also definitely a product of the times. The joke with Reed was that he was a high strung stick in the mud, "father knows best" type, with the fact that his powers were stretching and being super flexible acting as the punchline.

However, as the old saying goes, comedy is the fastest to age, and the fastest to age poorly. Nowadays, old Reed just comes off like a condescending and uncomfortably sexist, misogynistic pig. None of the enlightened genius family man of Hickman, or the geeky but always well meaning hero of Waid, but instead a man who you really just wanna kick in the nuts every time he talks to Susan - who really should've just eloped with Namor by this point - like she's anything less than the best thing in his entire life.

Marvel would love nothing more than for everyone to forget this era of Reed Richards, and honestly, obliging them might not be the worst idea.