Feminism, Motherhood and The Invisible Girl

[mrbrklyn]

These issues tend to boil over but as an attempt to dicuss these issues calmly with without personal attacks, so I tried to write this as a longer, calmer analaysis.

Susan Richards: The Invisible Women no more

In 1961, when Jack Kirby and Stan Lee developed the Fantastic Four, inadvertently they set off on one of the oddest adventures of feminism that had ever been written in American fiction. For Kirby, this was not the first time that he had developed a group like the Fantastic Four and as odd as it might sound, had it not been for happenstance, The Fantastic Four might well had been a DC title, with a little bit of luck and foresight. After all, Kirby designed the Challengers of the Unknown in 1956, and Kirby, in previous interviews had said that Challengers was the template for the Fantastic Four. He credited Stan Lee with creating the number 4 on the uniforms of the FF as his only major contribution to the creation of the characters, when discussing the ongoing controversy between him and Lee over who created the FF. The similarities can be easily enough drawn between this Kirby creation at DC and the Fantastic Four.

By the time that Kirby jumped to Atlas/Marvel after contract and creative disputes with National Periodicals, he took with him the experience and template of the Challengers and created the Fantastic Four on similar creative principles. The major difference between the two creations was that with the Fantastic Four, the main characters were family and with that the addition of girlfriend/future wife of Reed Richards, Susan Storm. Having a women character put the FF on a different and much more successful track.

Continued Below

http://www.mrbrklyn.com/susan_richards.html

[mrbrklyn]

I was hoping that in the new title that we would have some indication of how Susan took it to be seperated from her family for such a long people of time. She was very attached to Johnny, and I am not seeing all the ground work that was done on her character being leveraged at all in the new book.