The fantastic director Matt Shakman reveals how Jonathan Hickman’s comic strip race inspired the first steps
After the beard WandavisionA television series still largely considered one of the best of Marvel Studios, the filmmaker Matt Shakman The Fantastic Four: First steps.
Spider-Man: No time at home Helmer Jon Watts was originally attached to Direct, but Shakman was not a last minute hiring and made the film. While Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are early Fantastic Four The comics were an obvious inspiration, just like the race that changed the game of Jonathan Hickman.
Variety shared Shakman’s preface for the new outing of the Marvel Premiere collection, Fantastic oven: solve everything. Who collects problems # 570 – # 588, written by Hickman with the art of Dale Eaglesham, Neil Edwards and Steve Epting.
We are sure that some of you will repercussions through these remarks for the clues, and the mention of Shakman of the bridge, for example, stands out as a concept that it is potentially suitable for the MCU.
The Fantastic Four: First steps‘The trailers have confirmed that Mister Fantastic investigates the multiverse, while Thunderbolts * has shown that the team arrives on Terre-616. Many fans hope that the Council of A reeds, also mentioned by Shakman, factor in Avengers: Doomsday.
You can read Shakman’s preface in the whole below.
I fell in love with Fantastic Four when I was a child growing up in Ventura, California. Meet a family of superhero who seemed so familiar to me amazed: humor, heart, sniper and catch, disorder. At the same time, I was taken by the optimism and wonder of their world. With their roots in the spatial race of the 60s, the F4 has always been a question of exploration – whether for the cosmos or the negative zone or deeply in the human mind. Reed, Sue, Ben and Johnny may have incredible powers, but they are first of all the family, scientists and second and superhero explorers only when they are absolutely necessary.
Each Marvel filmmaker tries to rely on what has been preceded in Publishing while simultaneously reinventing the characters at the moment. The same goes for comic book creators. What Lee and Kirby launched in the 1960s changed Marvel forever. Their daring bet to center a realistic family has turned into the greatest success of the age of early money. Since then, each artist and writer has tried to rely on this heritage while finding something in the characters who made them shine.
In preparation for Marvel Studios ” The Fantastic Four: First Steps, I immersed myself in the 60th and over the history of comics. Marvel’s first family was continuously taken care of by the best and brightest that the company had to offer. No one shone only Jonathan Hickman. The humor and the heart I liked when I was a child? It is there and better than ever. The disorderly family dynamics? Made even more interesting than Val and Franklin occupy the front of the stage. And this feeling of optimism and wonder? I don’t think the fantastic four were as fantastic as in the pages of this book.
While we were developing the scenario of the film, I returned again and again to this epic race – delighted by innovations to cerebral bending like the Council of REDES and riveted by heroic conflicts against Annihilus. But it was an in -depth overview of Hickman on the specific family dynamics of the four that affected me the most.
His reed Richards is part of Steve Jobs and partly Oppenheimer, always on the edge of saving the world or destroying it. The author takes place directly to the weakness of Mister Fantastic: to believe that he can and should do everything by himself. Reed is determined to “solve everything” – but he learns that the cost of resolution of everything is … everything. Ultimate knowledge risks ultimate sacrifice: the loss of his family.
Sue has traveled a long path of the “invisible girl” of the early 1960s. In these pages, she is part of the United Nations Secretary General and Marshal of Champ, supporting diplomacy forcefully if necessary. Hickman’s Sue is perhaps the most powerful member of the four – she is the glue that keeps the world together while Reed experiences the laboratory with things that could destroy it. She courts agreements as the best diplomat in the world, finding herself as the Queen of the sea. In one of my favorite F4 moments, she declared to Namor: “I am a queen who bows to no king”. Shit to the right.
How do these two very different people constitute the greatest marriage in the history of comics? We see, page after page, that secret is their unique balance of heart and mind. Before Jerry Maguire, these two ended.
Sue and Reed are relatable not only as partners, but also as parents. We understand their anxiety, worrying about the fate of Val and Franklin as I worry about the future of my 9 -year -old daughter. I cherish the family intimacy of the scenes in the Baxter building and I never doubt that these parents love their children and would do everything to protect their future. I know Johnny and Ben would do the same.
And we know that, as a superhero, they will fight just as hard to protect our world.
Having absorbed six decades of F4 publishing, many magical moments of Hickman and the dynamics of unique characters remain with me. And they entered our film in small and big ways. Of Sue as a diplomat to Reed trying to resolve everything even at the risk of jeopardizing his family. Johnny needs to be taken seriously. Ben’s sweet nature, still in disagreement with his appearance. The future foundation. The bridge. The mystery of children and the anxiety that we have as parents about their future.
Hickman is a poet, both everyday and extraordinary. His work beats with a heart as tall as that of Sue Storm, making an emotional journey that culminates in a scene that makes me tear each time I read it. (I will not ruin it … wait just “uncles”.) His writing is exciting, stimulating and tender … and, like the characters on which he writes, fantastic.
