So, are the Fantastic 4 the four classical elements? The Human Torch, fire. The Thing, earth. Reed Richards, the fluidity of water. Sue Storm, air.
Is this something I should have picked up on 20 years ago?
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Spider-Man has the proportionate speed and agility of a spider, Clark Kent doesn’t really need glasses and Batman is crazy prepared. And a jerk
Well, shit. I thought I was all profound and stuff.
They have been presented that way at times, but I’ve never seen anything suggesting that that was on the minds of Stan and Jack when they created them.
And it’s something of a stretch for Reed and Sue. While Sue is able to become invisible, or make other things invisible, that’s as close as she gets to being like air. Especially once her powers evolve into ‘invisible force fields’. And Reed, while he’s able to stretch and reform himself to fit different containers, he doesn’t flow like a liquid - he holds his shape unless he deliberately reshapes himself…and even when he loses control, he generally retains a particular, mostly humanoid shape, even if it is looser than his base form.
Perhaps a non-Newtonian liquid?
I just spluted my ravioli at the thought of…
NonNewtonianMan
His superpower is that he only exists for .0000000000000000000001 of a second.
Actually, they were a copy of the JSA/JLA.
Isn’t Reed more like silly putty than anything else? Maybe if the ancients had had silly putty, it would have been the element instead of water…
Yeah, this is one of those hindsight flashes that seem profound, but work better if you don’t think about them too long.
Lee certainly wanted to do a superhero group because of the success of the JLA, but a copy? That’s not even close.
Lee and Kirby definitely did not intend it. There’s no mention of the connection in the original series proposal or in Lee’s mid-seventies recollections. If you know Stan Lee then you know that he’ll never miss an opportunity to proclaim his own genius (he’s the comics medium P. T. Barnum) so if Lee wasn’t saying anything at that point then it’s unlikely that it was intentionally there.
Other creators have used it, though. The most recent I can think of was during Chris Claremont’s horrible run but he wasn’t the first.
Nearer 30 years ago, maybe. The first explicit reference to the idea I can remember is John Byrne’s first issue as writer/artist, #232 – cover dated July 1981.
This. In “The Origins of Marvel Comics”, Stan Lee based them on old, forgotten characters - Human Torch, obviously, was based on the Golden Age Human Torch, Mister Fantastic was based on the Thin Man, the Thing was just a variation of the various monsters Lee had written for the many sci-fi/horror books in Marvel’s line, and the Invisible Girl wasn’t based on anyone in particular, IIRC.
Custard (made with corn flour) can exist for longer than that and is non newtonian.
Enter, the Amazing Custard Man.
Back to the OP, I had never considered the FF in this way, but I suppose it’s a fair assumption to make, with the possible exception of Reed.
Look up non-newtonian fluids on YouTube to see people running across swimming pools that they sink into if they stop.