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History of the media migration of the Fantastic Four brand is almost as dramatic as the most thrilling adventures of Stan Lee’s and Jack Kirby’s original superhero team. Initially one of the most influential comic book characters in American history, and generally a foundation for the whole Marvel Universe, the team of four exceptional characters went through various versions of TV shows, cartoons, video games and finally cinematic features. However, unlike other Marvel properties, such as Spider-Man or X-Men, the Fantastic Four has never achieved much recognition from other media properties, with the blame being put mostly on the ridiculous film presentations created by Roger Corman or Josh Trank. But there is a different, hidden story behind Fantastic Four’s outside-comic’s failures, which underlines the perception of the American popular comic book as highly dependent on cultural, economical and multimedia-oriented shifts. If we assume that the superhero comic is a strictly paratextual and transmedia phenomenon, and the history of that genre suggests nothing different, then on the basis of the Fantastic Four example we can observe how a modern politics of managing a comic brand like Marvel relates to property-rights struggles (i.e. between Marvel and Fox Company), a fan perception that is shaped more and more by the comic-based extensions and finally how the comic book itself, being still a major inspiration for the modern audiovisual culture, loses against transmedia storytelling rules. In my essay, I would like to concentrate on the question of why the Fantastic Four comic title vanished after the recent Secret Wars crossover event and what the categories of synergy, franchising, transmedia narration and convergence have to do with the landscape of a modern popular comic.

The doom of the Fantastic Four: Marvel’s First Family disappearance and what it says about the transmedia perspective of popular comics