I believe in one of the 100500 interviews I've watched in the span of 3 days, Tobias mentioned he'd become more claustrophobic with age and that if there are any practical changes to Ghost's image it's probably because of that

and that we won't necessarily get any New characters in the usual sense any time soon

and I might be reaching but what if

what if after Copia's inevitable demise he ditched the mask to portray young Nihil as the new Ghost front man, with just face paint, and give us a full album 60's/70's inspired songs, like 7IOSP

I know you've already sort of discussed this but could you please explain the marvel 2 in 1 ending... what I'm getting is that the gist of it is that Reed and Sue are just like 'lol whoops I guess we sorta forgot about u'... which is really kinda anticlimactic and abrupt. Did I read it wrong or something? All that build up and angst just for it to go down the drain... is there something more to it that I'm missing that you know of?

I can explain it, but the answer’s not going to satisfy you, because it doesn’t satisfy me. Long story short: there were implications there was something more to the story than Marvel Two-In-One’s final two issues said, but Fantastic Four hasn’t followed up on that like, at all, and shows no signs that they’re going to anytime soon.

In the interests of putting all of the pieces together, I’m going to lay out everything that happened between the cancellation of the Fantastic Four title and now, because there are a lot of fuzzy periods. The Fantastic Four disappeared from the Marvel universe and from the shelves back in 2015, following Jonathan Hickman’s Secret Wars event. In Secret Wars, the multiverse has been destroyed and cobbled back together into Battleworld, a realm where Doctor Doom rules as god king, with Sue as his wife, Ben transformed into a huge wall, and Johnny as Battleworld’s artificial sun. It’s a real fractured fairy tale. At the end of Secret Wars, Reed defeats Doom and reunites his family. Using Franklin’s mutant ability to create entire universes and the Molecule Man’s powers, Reed, Sue, and the children of the Future Foundation set out to recreate the multiverse. Ben and Johnny are sent back to their own Earth with comment that “their stories aren’t done yet.” Doom is also sent back with his scarred face restored. 

The cancellation of the Fantastic Four at this point heralds the first time Marvel had been without a Fantastic Four book on the shelves since 1961. We know – partially because it was painfully obvious, and partially because Jonathan Hickman spilled the beans – that the Fantastic Four comics were cancelled because of a film rights dispute; aka, Marvel Studios and Disney didn’t have the film rights, and Ike Perlmutter threw a fit about it. Instead of doing their best to put out a good book that would draw in comics audiences, Marvel instead cancelled Fantastic Four, citing low readership. Marvel has denied this, but the truth is pretty obvious, especially with how the Fantastic Four’s return to comics just so happened to coincide exactly with when it became extremely clear that the Disney-Fox merger was going through. So right from the start we had this very inorganic reason as to why the Fantastic Four were hung up. Reed, Sue, and the kids were retired out of universe under the excuse that they were rebuilding the multiverse – which, to be fair, does work as a pretty good excuse. Johnny and Ben, on the hand, were kept in-universe and distributed to other properties, probably because of Ben – who, let’s be honest, is the most popular of the Fantastic Four and the moneymaker here – and because it made more sense to keep Johnny and Ben than just Ben. 

Immediately post-Secret Wars, there was an eight month (iirc) timeskip in the main Marvel universe, meaning that books that picked up after the events of Secret Wars picked up significantly after it; we see very little of the Secret Wars fallout. Here’s what we do know concerning the Fantastic Four: Reed, Sue, and the kids were largely believed to be dead, although Johnny in particular initially refused to believe that. Sometime during this timeskip, Johnny and Ben had some kind of fight. We don’t know what it was about. Honestly, at this point, we’re unlikely to ever know what it was about. Whatever it was, it was bad enough that Ben and Johnny severed all communication and Ben left the planet to join the Guardians of the Galaxy. What followed was the longest separation between Ben and Johnny that we’ve ever seen in canon. Johnny and Ben are famous for squabbling, but their fights rarely last longer than a few days at most; they’re extremely close, to the point that when Ben was presumed dead, Johnny’s coping mechanism mirrored Ben’s long time love and current wife Alicia’s. This post-Secret Wars separation between them lasted longer than when Ben thought Johnny had gotten together with said longtime love Alicia (it was a Skrull in disguise, but nobody would know that for like 80 issues). This separation between them is completely unprecedented, and like I said, we have no idea what caused it.

This scene from Infamous Iron Man #9 is the closest I’ve gotten to determining a root of the fight – note Johnny says “my family”, all handily bolded for emphasis. Not “our family”, “my family.” Ben is the only member of the Fantastic Four not related by either marriage or blood to any of the others, which has been a very occasional sore spot in the past. But even this scene doesn’t quite make sense – it’s hard to imagine Ben and Johnny having a months long separation over this alone, and to make matters more confusing, before Infamous Iron Man #9, Johnny had tried to get in contact with Ben only to be rebuffed. In Infamous Iron Man #9, Ben gets in contact with Johnny only for Johnny to practically run away from him. Already the new dynamic here feels like it needed more attention in the narrative than it actually got.

I think part of the problem with this whole return of the Fantastic Four storyline – the actual return especially, but even the lead-up – is that it was never established what was keeping Reed and Sue from coming back. On top of that, if they had the power to send Johnny and Ben back, why weren’t they able to send them back with some sort of memory or guarantee that Reed, Sue, and the kids were okay? It would have been very easy to say “well, a supervillain did it!” You know, the easiest comic book plot excuse of all time. But they didn’t do that. And that creates a problem when it’s a well-established fact that Johnny in particular tends to fall into a deep depression and displays signs of self-harm when the team isn’t together. (Fantastic Four #191-193, Robinson’s Fantastic Four run, Ben’s death in Waid’s run.) Which is exactly what happened this time, too, both during the timeskip and in the lead-up to Marvel Two-In-One (2017). 

Marvel Two-In-One (2017) was essentially the test run for the return of the Fantastic Four. The original Two-In-One was to Ben Grimm what Marvel Team Up was to Peter Parker: essentially a team up book that revolved around one character. So it made sense to relaunch it starring Ben and Johnny. In Two-In-One, Ben discovers Johnny at the end of his rope, pulling life-threatening stunts in his grief and depression, and, willed a multidimensional travel device by Reed, decides to – to the best of his knowledge at the time – lie to Johnny and say that Reed and Sue might still be alive. Learning that they’re both losing their powers and will continue to do so unless they’re reunited with Reed and Sue, as their powers depend on the four of them being in the same universe (an interesting concept, though not one we’ve seen before), Ben and Johnny set off, with a worryingly helpful Doctor Doom on their heels, on a multiversal roadtrip to find their family – one Ben thinks will fail from the start because, as far as he knows, Reed and Sue are dead. It’s a really good concept, and a great concept that starts to fall apart as soon as the notion that Reed and Sue aren’t dead starts to float to the surface. In Two-In-One #9, stranded powerless with Ben in the desert in another universe and facing death, Sue appears to Johnny.

(Marvel Two-In-One #10) This brief contact is apparently enough to reignite Ben and Johnny’s powers to full strength. Sue says that her and Reed’s powers were gone, which does seem to track with the plot – except Johnny and Ben lost their powers over a prolonged period of time, not all at once. If Reed had realized he and Sue were losing their powers, he should have come to that conclusion far before this point in time. You can say the times don’t add up because different universes (which the “you haven’t met the Zaklons yet” line would seem to imply), but with no explanation about how Sue was able to contact Johnny – however briefly – at this point, it does make it seem like Reed and Sue could’ve made contact with Ben and Johnny at any point… and simply chose, for whatever reason, not to. Which is, ultimately, the story Two-In-One goes with. 

(Marvel Two-In-One #11) In the very next issue, Reed’s reasoning for why they didn’t take Ben and Johnny with them is that… they would’ve been bored by the science aspect of it all. Which is, I’m going to go ahead say, very out of character and not in the spirit of the Fantastic Four. They’re explorers, and they explore together. This seems like a weirdly brusque excuse to write off the absence so they can get back to the status quo as quickly as possible, using Reed’s science-obsessed image to make him the fall guy. Additionally, in this issue (which I have to say, I overall like – I wrote a whole Doom/Reed fic based off of it), Reed also offers another reason why the world had to believe he and Sue were dead:

In Marvel Two-In-One #11, Reed and Ben visit an alternate universe Doom who exists in a universe where his own Reed is dead. This Doom is a pretty okay dude at the moment – in fact, he and Reed had become, through Reed’s private multiversal travel, close friends. Using this (pretty flawed) logic of “Reed dead = Doom good??”, Reed deduced that if his own Doom thought Reed was dead, he… too would be good? Look, I don’t hate this. I’m a big Doom/Reed fan and the whole thing is pretty shippy and it also depends on Reed having an enormous attachment to Doom and an enormous desire for his own Doom to be like this other Doom, who is his friend. But as far as “why did Reed and Sue stay away as long as they did” explanations go, “Reed was kind of bonkers in love with Doom” is not the direction I expected things to go. Besides, it doesn’t really work, and it doesn’t really work for one big reason: Fantastic Four (2018) #1, the actual return of the Fantastic Four, was published before this, and Fantastic Four (2018) #1 implies a hugely different story.

Fantastic Four (2018) #1 sees Johnny and Ben returned to their home universe after the events of Marvel Two-In-One #10. The reader has no idea how they got there or what they’ve been doing since they got back, or even how long it’s been since they’ve been back. Despite the Sue sighting, at the very end of the issue, Johnny becomes convinced all over again that Reed and Sue are dead, up until… 

(Fantastic Four v6 #1) The staging here is important – Reed and Sue’s battle-ripped uniforms, and the cryptic lines between them, like Sue’s “what you plan to do… seems impossible.” This is compounded by dialogue between Franklin and Val in the next Fantastic Four issue:

“You think you can boost that signal enough… to reach Earth?” “Home? I’m good, but there’s no way I’m that good.” This would definitely seem to imply that, for some reason, Reed, Sue, and the kids can’t contact their home universe, or Ben and Johnny at all. I’m admittedly biased in favor of this version: the more time went by without Reed and Sue contacting Johnny and Ben and leaving them on their own, the more obvious it became that this was the best solution, to create some comic book reason why Reed and Sue simply couldn’t return home. But Fantastic Four (2018) #3 and #4 never really explore this more, and the subject gets dropped altogether, which makes for a very unsatisfying read. The Fantastic Four simply return home together and, some frankly too quickly brushed off anger and resentment from Johnny in Marvel Two-in-One’s closing issue aside, this gets swept under the rug in favor of the Fantastic Four just being back now! Hurrah! Pay no attention to the film rights hungry Mouse behind the curtain! 

If I wanted to, I could make the explanations presented in Fantastic Four (2018) and Marvel Two-in-One (2017) mesh – Reed has massive guilt issues stemming back to the accident that granted the Fantastic Four his powers. He has a bad habit of taking responsibility that isn’t necessarily his, and of not being 100% truthful in situations because he feels it’s for the best for everyone. (The massive amount of time he takes to reveal his powers are failing during Fraction’s Fantastic Four run, or in the two instances during Waid’s run where Reed uses cruel words to distract both Ben and Sue from his plans to sacrifice himself for them.) Reed might have chosen to take the blame on himself – come up with a story he knows will anger Ben, say that he thought he and Johnny would have been bored, because he felt it was somehow easier than admitting that he and Sue found themselves in some kind of situation where they simply couldn’t get back, and couldn’t contact Ben or Johnny. It’s a way of taking 100% of the blame on himself, which would be a very Reed thing to do. But that would be me doing the book’s work for it; this is absolutely not established within the actual canon as of the time of my writing this.

Honestly, I don’t think we’re likely to see this explored more any time imminently – the Fantastic Four were banished from the stands because of film rights. They came back because for three years dedicated fans asked where the Fantastic Four were, yes, but also because of those same film rights. Now that they’re back, there seems to be this huge rush to pretend it never happened: the Four are back together, and that’s that. It’s very unsatisfying, but it’s clear Marvel cared more about pushing the Fantastic Four back together as quickly as possible than writing a coherent, satisfying story that put together all the pieces of their in-universe disappearance.