Oh boy, here we go again. It has apparently leaked that the Fantastic Four are seeing their comic canceled. By itself, it’d be unremarkable, but it’s the alleged reasons behind it that have people riled up.
Essentially, according to Bleeding Cool, the cancellation of Marvel’s First Family is due to the belief of Marvel CEO Isaac Perlmutter that running Fantastic Four comics just promotes Fox’s movies at the expense of Marvel’s own. So screw Stretcho and Ben Grimm, onto the dust pile they go.
Here’s what’s true about this story: The Fantastic Four are indeed getting canceled. Here’s what’s likely untrue about this story: Literally everything else.
The simple fact of the matter is that the FF just aren’t selling books. The team has been relaunched no fewer than four times with different creative teams and various other gimmicks in the last four years. After a successful relaunch in February, selling over 60,000 issues, the book only moved 30,000 issues or so last month. That’s well below the threshold for being canceled by the Big Two.
Bleeding Cool makes much of the timing of the final collected volume, which was going to drop right around the time the movie was supposed to hit theaters before Michael Fassbender’s hidden blade retracted on Fox, insisting it’s out of spite. You know, because comic book companies have never, in the history of the medium, tried to piggy-back on the millions of dollars spent by movie studios to market their characters to sell more comic books. That’s why we so desperately need more Batman comics from DC.
If I seem a bit unperturbed about a comic with a fifty-year history getting turfed, it’s because this isn’t going to last. The FF have been rebooted, canceled, rebooted, retooled, re-canceled and on and on. They’re going to be back. Just, hopefully, they won’t have this rumor following them around.