The Fantastic Four is known as the First Family in comic book circles. The Fantastic Four was the first superhero team created by writer-editor Stan Lee and artist/co-plotter Jack Kirby back in 1961. FF4 has been experiencing dragging sales in the last few years, despite attempts to reboot the series. We now have it on good authority that the series is coming to an end in June 2015.
Disney and FOX has been going head to head in the Marvel cinematic universe for quite awhile. FOX has the movie rights to X-Men, Deadpool and the word “mutants”, which is why your will never hear this uttered in any of the films Disney creates. FOX also has rights to the Fantastic Four and will be releasing a reboot of the series in mid 2015, and Marvel does not want to promote it at all. This has prompted the comic book company to suspend production of the Fantastic Four comic for over a year.
The destruction of the Fantastic Four to not promote the upcoming Fox movie is reverberating across the industry. Diamond Select Toys were told by Disney that they can’t make any new toys if they feature Mr Fantastic, the Invisible Women, Thing, the Human Torch, Doctor Doom, Galactus, Silver Surfer, the Watcher or Skrulls.
When it comes to bookstore distribution, this is primarily handled by Hachette. They only handle graphic novels now and abandoned single issue distribution in 2013. The last graphic novel will come out in June and is entitled Fantastic Four: The End Is Fourever. “THE END IS FOUREVER! Witness the closing act on the First Family of the Marvel Universe! THE INVADERS meet the FANTASTIC FOUR as the hunt for REED RICHARDS and the missing kids of the FUTURE FOUNDATION continues. Meanwhile the mastermind behind everything unveils his ultimate plan. But how does FRANKLIN RICHARDS factor in? And how does this all lead to…The END?! Collecting FANTASTIC FOUR #642-644 and the Triple Sized Final Issue 645!”
I think its very interesting that Marvel would rather give up one of their oldest ongoing franchises just to stick it to FOX. Likely, we will see no more comics featuring the FF4 to be produced until well after the DVD will be released sometime in 2016.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.