November marks the 60th anniversary for when the Fantastic Four first appeared on newsstands in 1961. I feel that some people outside of comic readers don’t fully understand the importance of this team and how they shaped the “Marvel Method” and helped flesh out the identity Marvel would have to this very day.

The story, as it goes, began when publisher Martin Goodman noticed the strong sales of the Justice League of America comics, and then directed Stan Lee to create a comic book series about a team of superheroes.

The team was created by Lee and artist Jack Kirby. For the first story, Kirby was provided with a story synopsis and then Kirby turned in his art pages to Lee, who then added dialogue. This became known as the “Marvel Method” mentioned above, which allowed a lot of freedom on the artist’s part for creating the various stories.

For those that need a review, the story of the Fantastic Four is tied to the Space Race of the 60s with scientist Reed Richards leading a mission to get to the moon before the Soviets. Accompanying Richards on his flight are Ben Grimm, Susan Storm and her younger brother Johnny. The quartet is exposed to massive amounts of cosmic radiation and crash back to Earth, discovering they each developed superhuman abilities.

Richards’ body became more elastic and gave him the power to stretch, adopting the code name: Mr. Fantastic. He is also regarded as one of the smartest characters in the entire Marvel Universe.

Susan was given the power of invisibility and generating force fields. She was first known as Invisible Girl and later Invisible Woman.

Johnny became the Human Torch (the second character in the Marvel canon to bear the name) and was able to ignite himself and control fire, usually with the cry of “flame on!”.

And finally, Grimm gained an orange, rocky skinned look and became The Thing. Arguably the most popular of the four, always starting a fight with the phrase: “it’s clobberin’ time!”. Years later, the comics would also reveal that he is Jewish.

This aspect was included by later writers most likely as a reference to Kirby himself, who was often compared to the character in temperament and was himself Jewish. Now whether Grimm being Jewish was intended by Lee and Kirby (especially since revealing the religion of a character was taboo in the 60s), Kirby did feature The Thing in a Hanukkah card to his family in 1976. The first issue was a massive success and helped to launch future Marvel endeavors.

Unlike most superheroes of the day, the four were not a cohesive unit, and they would often bicker and disagree with one another. This began the first in a long line of “heroes with hangups” as Stan Lee put it. Something that would be continued with the likes of Spider-Man, the X-Men and so on.

Despite this, the group would ultimately function well as both a team, and a family.

The third issue of the comic would use the slogan of “The Greatest Comic Magazine in the World!” which would eventually be changed to “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!” well into the 90s.

The four would have numerous memorably adventures and introduce plenty of important fixtures and characters of the burgeoning Marvel universe including the warring aliens: the Kree and Skrull; the hidden society of Inhumans; the introduction of Black Panther; the reintroduction of Namor the Submariner (from Marvel’s predecessor: Timely Comics); the Negative Zone; Uatu the Watcher; the Silver Surfer and his master, the Devourer of Worlds himself, Galactus.

But of special mention is the archenemy of the Fantastic Four: Doctor Doom.

Doom is perhaps the greatest super-villain in all of comics. Make no mistake, none of the film adaptations have quite served this character justice.

Victor Von Doom is the monarch of a small country known as Latveria. He is driven by a desire to rule and his obsession with proving himself better than Reed Richards. Although he has no powers of his own, Doom utilizes his wealth, technology and sorcery (the one bit of knowledge he definitely has over Reed) to face the Fantastic Four, plus numerous Doombots made in his likeness (and a handy tool for writers to do retcons).

Doom has gone up against just about everyone in comics from Spider-Man, the Avengers, Doctor Strange, the Hulk and even cosmic beings like the Beyonder and an Infinity Gauntlet-ed Thanos.

But enough about Doom; back to the team.

Marvel has always had a “sliding” time scale. This usually manifests itself in the updating of certain historic events around characters to be “modern”. An example would be changing the conflict Tony Stark gets injured in from the Vietnam War to Gulf War in the 90s to the more modern War in Afghanistan in the 2000s; or how the amount of time that passes between when Captain America was first frozen in the ice to when he wakes up in modern times.

What remains constant on Marvel’s sliding time scale is when that time scale started: the appearance of the Fantastic Four. This point is always marked as the “start” of the modern times the characters find themselves in, fittingly as it was the start of the comics as well.

How much time exactly has passed in the comics? That is debatable. It is usually accepted that somewhere around 13-15 years have passed. Evidence includes The Thing having a Bar Mitzvah, because it had been 13 years since he began his second life as The Thing.

As mentioned above, the Fantastic Four set the Marvel Universe in motion and would be followed by Ant-Man, Hulk, Spider-Man and Thor in 1962; Iron Man, Doctor Strange and the X-Men in 1963; Daredevil in 1964 and many, many more to follow.

The Fantastic Four have enjoyed a number of adaptations in cartoons, video games and four live action films (of varying quality) with a fifth film that will be set within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) currently in development.

My hope is that the MCU’s version of Marvel’s first family manages to capture that excitement and sense of adventure that the comics have been doing for decades.