I'd love to hear your thoughts about The Invisible Woman, but it's hard to talk about her without talking about what she isn't.
Quite the opposite - maybe it would be easier to discuss and approach Sue Storm if it was easy to define or narrow down what she isn't. Sometimes a character is defined far more strongly, far more cleanly, with far more focus, by the things that they are not, by oppositional traits, flaws and contradictions and so on. So to try and organize thoughts on Sue Storm, there is an axis that defines the Marvel universe that I think needs to be established in order for us to get into the whys and why-nots of her. It's sadly fitting that we're gonna talk about the Invisible Woman by first talking about everyone but the Invisible Woman. Story of her life, really.
So the Marvel universe is defined, fittingly enough, around two sets of Fours: there are the four pillars that define the universe - Fantastic Four / Spider-Man / Avengers / X-Men - and there is a quadrant under which all of it's characters live on illustrated above, the scales of Hero / Menace and Celebrity / Freak. The degree to which these people are super-heroes or super-menaces, and the degree to which they successfully court celebrity status or are ostracized as outsiders. The latter is easier to define given the Avengers and the X-Men live fixed on the respective extreme ends of it. The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man are the ones who first defined this scale, but they are the ones who can most freely move around and ping pong between it's extremes.
In fact, although they pretty firmly occupy the defining heroic celebrity position opposite the freak menace who terrorizes innocent newspaper moguls, it's unspeakably important that the Fantastic Four very much did not start there: they began life as dysfunctional, volatile and unpopular outsiders who fought uphill battles to court stability and success and acceptance until they achieved mythic significance and cultural cache enough to build a new image for themselves as paragons of heroic achievement. But they are (or at least, should be) never more than a stone's throw away from people cursing Ben Grimm as a monster or ganging up on the Human Torch or hunting the Richards family. They get to set the parameters because they touched base first, they'd been on everyone's shoes first, and thus all of it's major members have done laps around this quadrant axis. That includes Sue - but we start to run into a problem here where it's hard to narrow down where is it that Sue stays specifically, or what position she occupies that the other 3 don't occupy more strongly. That's unfortunately gonna become a running theme: that the Invisible Woman is Fine, but always coming up short / fundamentally lacking compared to the other 3.
Is she a Celebrity? Well yes, she is, but that's downstream of all of them being celebrities, and that's way more heavily associated with Johnny and to an extent Ben than it's ever been with her. Is she a Hero? Yes, she is, and one can argue she is the most heroic and noble person on the team, we'll get back to that even...but she is not The Hero of the Fantastic Four, that's almost always going to be Reed or Ben, and she doesn't get to have solo outings as a Hero the way they do (nor the star tagalong position Johnny has). Is she a Menace? Well, definitionally so now, being the strongest and most powerful member of the team and all that, but she's also the most normal and composed and collected and restrained member of the team, so she's never actually any kind of menace or risk to anyone the same way Reed, Ben and Johnny are often posing a risk to people around them. Is she a Freak? Well, her early history is almost entirely defined around her being marginalized within her own team and her feelings over Marvel's original Freak, but it'd be a real stretch to say she's anywhere near that now, everyone on the team is more of a Freak than her. Sick of these asterisks and Buts and Yes But Actually Nos yet? Too bad, get used to them.
Let's backtrack to the question of what is it that she is not - I can very easily apply it for the other 3: Reed Richards is not a people person, he is not in touch with the concept of having limitations, he is not attentive, he is not someone with fixed ideas or opinions as he's constantly expanding his world and principles for better or worse, and so on. Ben Grimm is not someone with a particularly high opinion of himself, he is not prone to slowing down and thinking, he is not someone with a great lid on his temper, he is not a man the way he'd like to be a man (even if he's a better man the way he is now). Johnny Storm is not a mature person, he is not patient or deliberate or slow in the way he acts, he is not particularly thoughtful, and in general he's not a particularly deep person (more on that later). We can apply similar shorthand conflicts and contradictions to the other characters: Alicia Masters's visual impairment and lack of superpowers or any kind of advanced genius or skills perpetually puts her on the backseat, Franklin Richards cannot freely exercise his godlike powers nor can he freely just live as a normal kid, Valeria Richards is not a particularly moral or heroic person while also being held back from fully becoming Doom Jr, etc. So what is it that Sue Storm is not? What is it that Sue doesn't do? What defines her?
With Richards disconnected from the everyday management of the team's relationships, the responsibility to maintain order as well as good-feeling devolved onto her. Constantly juggling a host of roles which no-one could be expected to fulfill, she struggled to be mother and lover, sergeant and super-woman, society woman and social icon. By the standards of the age's dominant culture, she was the women who had everything, and it was that which constantly threatened to undermine her exhaustive and exhausting efforts
In so many ways, it's guilt that appears to have kept the original take on the Invisible Girl in the ranks of the Fantastic Four, and the consequence is a life that makes Sue Storm anything but happy. - Colin Smith
I mean, everyone knows the story, so it is said - that Sue used to be a weak and fainty damsel in distress in the 60s until the readers complained so they gave her forcefield powers and ultimately sidelined her with the marriage, and then they kept pushing those powers until she became the strongest person on the team. It's been repeated many times she is their powerhouse and strongest member. She fought Celestials and the whole Avengers and the Hulks and something something, you'll find pages and pages of her doing busted Green Lantern feats with her powers and lots of mentions that she's the strongest member that everyone knows to fear and all that snooze. But she is also The Heart and Soul of the team, she is the First Lady of Marvel (sometimes called that). She is a loving mother (to kids who simply don't have any kind of dynamic whatsoever with her). She is an attentive and headstrong wife who's not afraid to stand up to Reed (in stories that are almost always about Reed's decisions, not hers). She is a big sister to Johnny and raised him after a family tragedy (but we only ever get Johnny's feelings on that). She is a great friend to Ben and other superheroes (who always seem to have more interesting things to do than hang out with Sue whenever they're not in a Fantastic Four story). She is the heart and soul and emotional core and connective tissue of the team (so we're told), but she's also The Normal Person of the team who keeps everyone else's shenanigans in line, and she's also being the biggest powerhouse and strongest member in a fight and oh yeah she also does this a bunch.
They sure love those scary threats of all the things she can do that she will not actually do, and everyone knows she won't actually do, and they really like reminding you again and again and again about how she can put air bubbles in brains or make forcefield blades or beat Hulks or block the sun and threaten the entire world and, ah wait, I just looked it up, that was what the Planetary evil version on Sue did, that helps explain why did this kick into overdrive in the 00s and why this has stuck around. Joy. Starting to sense a bit of a problem here?
Because even putting this aside, "basically normal competent sane good person with an extremely busted swiss army knife superpower / a Lantern Ring that they use to Hype Moments and Aura their way out of every problem, and who lives in Perfect Team Player/Family Mode where they mostly show up so another character with an actual personality can bounce off of them until it's time to give them One (1) Cool Moment™" is, well it's more of a baseline for a DC character. She's functionally a Justice League reservist punching the clock in the Marvel Universe. And that's, y'know, fine, characters have gotten solo runs over less, but it's just not really cutting it compared to what everyone else in the Fantastic Four has to work with, and it contributes to her being criminally underserved to this day.
She can do everything and solve all the problems, except for the ones that matter. She'll get big "powerful" moments and no actual stories to go with them, because nobody writes stories for Sue Storm unless they're trying to prove a point by going "see, she does things too, don't you know how powerful/badass/mother she is", even otherwise all-timer Fantastic Four writers like Waid and Hickman. And when she's not doing that, the best she'll get is usually being referred to as the heart and soul of the team and, let's be real here, this is a fake idea, it's bullshit, we all know it, we all know being "the heart/soul of the team" doesn't actually mean anything on any superhero team it's applied to. People talked up how, in Ryan North's new run, he established her as having a doctorate and being an archaeologist, and yeah it is a good thing that he's trying to give her more of an inner life outside the F4, but I don't think an additional offscreen accessory is really cutting it, and I think it's kinda telling that for all the work that run has done in establishing character and tonal niche, Ryan North still hasn't really thought of anything to do with Sue other than give her bigger and more elaborate forcefield usages and have her be "the sensible one", identical to Alicia personality-wise.
The problems that Sue faces I think run a lot deeper than any individual run or decision, because Sue is operating out of a compromised and absent foundation. I do think for real that the problems she has are less that Lee and Kirby fucked up with her, and more so that everyone that came after fucked up in trying to overcorrect her.
Though Kirby was more likely to use her face as a vehicle for doubt and distress, he would also depict her as calm, determined and purposeful. Taciturnity fused with self-possession and fortitude, and the regrettably named Invisible Girl would radiate courageousness and ingenuity.
That the moral and practical bedrock of the team was simultaneously longing for the arms of a charismatic super-villain was a masterstroke on Lee and Kirby's part. The woman who, when captured by Doctor Doom, presented an entirely unruffled front while promising that her jailer would "live to regret defying the Fantastic Four", was also a profoundly unhappy individual. The frequent explosions of conflict between the FF's members could cut through her reserve and reduce her to desperation and the brink of tears.
With time, Lee and Kirby not only scaled-back Sue Storm's moments of stoical competency, they overwhelmingly increased the degree of her personal weaknesses. For all her occasional pluckiness, the Invisible Girl was becoming a model of vulnerable womanhood to protect rather than a equal member of the team.
As Lee slipped further and further into his habit of presenting women as largely subservient and inadequate bit players, the contradictions that had made her so compelling drained away.
No longer even a person so much as an expression of Richards' mental and physical accomplishments, the Invisible Girl was disappearing into the purest and least edifying of gender stereotypes - Colin Smith
The problem does start with Lee and Kirby, but not quite the way people attribute it to: it is true that Sue Storm is from the start marginalized and sidelined and subjected to hoary misogynistic tropes that don't afflict her male co-stars. Her perceived uselessness was enough that Lee and Kirby recognized and felt the need to textually address the fan mail in Fantastic Four #11 in a, actually oddly adorable fashion, if a very telling one. The intent with Sue was that she'd be someone who would overcome vulnerability - she was the girl of the team, she was the only team member who wasn't bulletproof, she wasn't much good in a fight and her powers weren't even that useful against most of their villains, which made it so that she was someone who had to steel up and clutch a victory against the odds, by doing what the boys can't do. When she proven unexciting to the readers, they started expanding her powers and came up with the forcefields, which gave Sue more to do in fights - but did nothing to change the fact that Lee and Kirby were clearly not that interested in putting Sue in fights or major struggles to begin with. Misogynistic bullshit aside - and I'm not denying it was there - that's simply not what they designed this character to do, all that action was what the boys were for. Her real asset was being the person who fights fire with water when everyone else wants to fight fire with fire, that's why she's the one who turns the Atlanteans and Inhumans and Impossible Man and Dragon Man into allies. She takes the soft grounded approach Reed cannot. Sue is the pacifist, and pacifists don't really have a shelf life in superhero comics.
So with the Fantastic Four fully transitioning into non-dysfunctional heroes, the tensions and contradictions that Sue has going for her vanish or go unresolved as she settles into greater complacency. In fact, things get exponentially worse for her when she and Reed finally do marry - Reed becomes far more of a sexist asshole to her to a degree that's genuinely shocking, she gets pregnant with Franklin and benched as a result and stuck on offscreen caretaker duty, Crystal comes in to take her place a few times, and so on. When they were trudging and struggling their way through Freak and Menace territory, Sue was indispensable, but when they enter Celebrity Hero mode for good and the others can find their own entertaining beats and themes to settle into, Sue is left with nothing, which does not go unnoticed over the years.
I seriously doubt whether any 1970s Marvel-loving boy ever had a sexual fantasy about Sue Storm. We had Valkyrie, Red Sonja, the Cat, Ms Marvel, Jean Grey, Mantis and innumerable others available for that. Sue Storm was truly invisible. She was a parent, a mom calling you home from where you played in the street, telling you it was time to brush your teeth. Not that she wasn’t a hottie, but Kirby exalted her beauty in family-album style headshots, and glimpses of her, nobly pregnant, in a housedress that covered her clavicle. The writers and artists who took over The Fantastic Four after Kirby and, later, Lee departed the series, seemed impatient with the squareness of Sue and Reed’s domestic situations. Surely, these weren’t the hippest of the Kirby/Lee creations - My Marvel Years by Jonathan Lethem
While Marvel is able to create and maintain such strong characters as Ms. Marvel, Black Widow, Medusa, Tigra, the new Scarlet Witch, and all the women of the X-Men, Susan Richards has been an insult to your readers - Carol Strickland's letter
Sue was left with an incomplete, half-baked, and pretty widely disliked absence where the other members developed foundations and other more powerful or pro-active or, let's be crude here, "hotter" women heroes started making a name for themselves, which culminates in Sue's major change. Possibly inspired by fan mail and criticism and suggestions from feminist writer Carol Strickland in 1980 and the debate it caused among readers of the magazine (as catalogued in the Fantastic Four: The Great American Novel website), in comes in the pivotal point credited with "fixing" and developing her, when someone had to step in and fill in the gap left by Lee and Kirby: John Byrne, who incorporated all of Strickland's suggestions and made her more aggressive and confrontational and expanded her force field abilities and, as the main kicker, marked her transition from Invisible Girl to Invisible Woman by giving her a BDSM evil persona to be beaten down by everyone else, and defined said evil persona as a side effect of her being soul-raped by Psycho Man, and that being the kick-off to her growing up, cause, as Byrne puts it, that's what it means to be a woman. That's what it means to grow-up, well past the point she had a kid. That's why she calls herself the Invisible Woman to this day. Unsurprisingly, no one ever brings this up, no one wants to reiterate this story, and the people that do bring up Malice do so without ever touching on the particulars of why it exists and what it represents, and usually do so because it is, sadly and by default, one of the most noteworthy things to have happened with Sue.
So obviously, the name change stuck, it was a long time coming, made as if it has always been this way. The force fields and change of attitude? Obviously stuck, because surely now they fixed the problem. Sue Storm will no longer have people writing angry letters calling her a weak fainty useless damsel, and nobody's gonna be mad if we keep the train rolling so long as we don't touch on that whole grody Malice business but run with all the other cool badass parts, so there you go, problem solved, Sue is a badass who uses force fields to beat up people and threatens to put bubbles in their brains and she is now officially The Most Powerful Member. It's what Ultimate Fantastic Four goes with, and it's how we get her role in Civil War and specifically that panel above, probably the most popular thing she's ever done. It's a great panel, it's a cool moment, and much of the past 20 years of Sue Storm have been entirely about writers trying to recapture that and nothing else. Credit where credit is due: being The Most Powerful Member of the Team has made it so nobody calls her useless anymore unless they're complaining on 60s Sue, and people don't really talk mainly or mostly about her through the lenses of the Namor thing anymore. In fact, people don't really talk about Sue a lot. I've gone this far and I'm still not really talking about her character.
I'm not going to say the force fields "ruined" Sue or that feminist critique "ruined" Sue, certainly not the latter at least. I don't think anything "ruined" Sue, I think she never really had much of anything to be ruined (I mean, I will say John Byrne ruined Sue, but John Byrne ruined everything he ever touched, and that's besides the point). But it does seem like all these efforts to make Sue uber-powerful and confident and badass have largely stripped her of whatever internality and conflict and flaws she may have once had - she's become a great superhero in-universe at the expense of being a lacking Marvel character out of it.
She's in a deeply unfortunate position: you can't acknowledge Sue's history and initial conflicts and traits because it makes the rest of the team (particularly Reed) look bad, you can't address where she started because it's incongruous with the image she and the team are expected to carry now, you sure as shit ain't touching the transition from Girl to Woman because, again, Byrne, and being Team Mom / Voice of Reason naturally gets you lost in a team of such loud and strongly defined voices - so you're left with a "badass" and writing almost entirely revolving around finding new applications for her omni-capable superpower and that's that. It kinda feels like all the discussion around her that isn't about the men in her life, or the male writers who wrote her, is based around the same rebuttal that a young Kurt Busiek wrote ages ago.
Like we're all still relitigating again and again how strong she is, and not bothering to answer the "Yes, And?" of it all. I truly do not like that I have to approach Sue Storm as a problem, let alone one so difficult to solve. I would have loved to knock this post out in a couple of afternoons and not wreck my head over more than a week to try and tackle her, to be as thorough as possible regarding why The Sue Problem exists and no one has really cracked it. Like, on the most basic level, what is the most important Invisible Woman story? I haven't read every Fantastic Four comic, where is the important and good Sue story that doesn't involve Namor or some sickening Byrne shit no one acknowledges or the other F4 members first and foremost? What does a Sue Storm story even looks like?
We do know how things are generally like when Reed or Ben or even Johnny fly solo or take the reigns. Reed is pretty much always taking the reigns to some degree, and even the absence of Reed is still defined by Reed. Reed is the ringleader, the vision, the inventor, the one who most directly solves problems as well as creates a good bunch of them himself, and he's the protagonist of his own personal epic sagas with or without the rest of the family. Ben has an instant tonal niche and struggle and one of the best-defined designs and personalities in superhero comics, it kinda goes without saying that he's the easiest character to "get" out of the Four and the easiest to write good solo stories for, even if you're ignoring his past arcs and development. The Storm siblings have historically been much less well-off by comparison, but Johnny Storm has a trick that's always served him well: he is shallow. It doesn't mean he has no traits or insecurities or whatnot, just that he's a skin deep guy who actively rejects too much interiority. That's his perk, that's his flaw, that gets him into trouble, that lets him save people from it, that allows him to be malleable and fun in any context - even if it's just to be a friend who annoys Spider-Man, Johnny will always have something to do. By comparison, when Mark Waid wrote an Invisible Woman mini, it was nothing. It was a big pile of nothing. It was a generic superhero going on a generic spy adventure doing forcefield/invisibility tricks and that was that. He can pitch her as a kaleidoscope of varying roles and conflicts and personas all he wants: as nice as it sounds, as much as it should be true, it doesn't mean anything if it's just not in the story.
So with all that context and grievances out of the way, I wanna reiterate again: I don't think Sue Storm is a bad character, I certainly don't dislike her (why the fuck would I be putting this much time and effort in writing this otherwise), I think she's just a frustratingly incomplete character who has always been underserved and underwritten by comparison to the people around her. I want her to feel like more than a generic Justice Leaguer trapped in the wrong universe. I don't think this is a fundamentally unsolvable puzzle though. Case in point: I REALLY love what Al Ewing's done with Sapphire Stagg in Metamorpho: The Element Man. Obviously, the fact that the Metamorpho cast function as farcical mirror spit-takes on the Fantastic Four means this is a different situation, and obviously she's not 1-to-1 for Sue, but he pulls a great trick with Sapphire that is worth paying attention to: she isn't just a funny character, she's every bit as integral to the joke/structure/routine as everyone else. He resets the group dynamics to Haney's original vision and then further expands on them.
She very literally pulls the group together as the sole reason any of these men bother working together/not killing each other (most of the time), and she's the tension always threatening to tear them apart further because they would all sacrifice everything for her in their own ways. She is the actual literal Idol-Of-Millions, and she's the one who is most insecure and afraid of not being good enough to be loved by the freak monster of the group. She is not as cartoonishly capital-E Evil as her old man, but she can be nasty and evil in a whole bunch of other petty ways that actually hurt worse, because everyone on the group loves her and cares about what she does. She's simultaneously hitting and enhancing everyone else's 60s Marvel Vibe (can't have that without the concerned damsel), AND she's supplanting and contrasting it with her own Archie shenanigans vibe that means she is just as disconnected and inappropriate to the reality of their situation as all the others also are in their own ways, and it means she can always escalate or solve a problem in a way only she can do. She is great and she is terrible and she is 100% indispensable as someone who cannot be pushed out or sidelined from the group and their stories, even if there's nothing for her to actually do in a given story or fight. I think she's an example of how a character like this can work.
I don't think Sue needs to become a fundamentally different character - that kind of thinking already served her poorly several times before - I think there just needs to be a focus on what's already there. Stop running away screaming from any degree of perceived vulnerability and from the 60s foundation and build on it, build on what it means to be the things they say she is, and start defining the things that she is not or can't be. Give her an emotional range again, make some of her flaws or less sanitized traits come up again, let her have a complicated or rich or turbulent life outside of superheroism again like the other 3 have. And if she doesn't have it? Maybe lean into that.
While all the Four members answer to duty and love for each other as a family, they all also have things they clearly and visibly enjoy and get out of their respective duties: Reed loves to be in the lab cracking cosmic puzzles and he loves the people in this journey with him, Johnny loves being a showboating celebrity and he loves the exciting life he and his family get to have, Ben lives for action and purpose and fighting for the people he loves…so what does Sue get out of it? What part of this is fun to her? The family? The adventures? Getting to connect with people? Threaten super-villains? As is, out of all of them, Sue is the one most purely committed to superheroics. From day one, from the first panel, she talks about the vow, "All that remains…is My Mission" kind of deal. Even Reed's whole deal would be heavily reframed through his guilt and regret over his hubris, but even before she gained absurdly strong forcefields, Sue was always the most committed superhero of the bunch, despite, and maybe especially because, of her initial weakness.
People talk a lot about how 60s Sue is weak and damsel-ish and girly and, vain for some reason? But people don't tend to talk about how sad she is: Again, obviously people don't bring it up because it kills the vibe and reflects poorly on the boys how much they took her for granted, but that sadness fundamentally informs her moments of heroism, and how much that makes her, by default, the easiest character to root for in early F4.
Sue Storm's extreme reluctance to express her emotions, desires and doubts left her isolated, torn and miserable. Forever striving to be the team's peace-maker, she was - with no little irony - the most likely to betray its most fundamental relationships. Had the Human Torch not revealed her attraction to Namor, it's hard to imagine her ever doing so. Driven, it seems, by a ferocious belief in the myths of the family, she ploughed on and on while secretly longing for a life far different. Reticence, fear, desire and obligation had made a hypocrite of her.
It was a profoundly damaging degree of repression and frustration, and it constantly threatened to undermine the FF as both a fighting team and a household. Whenever disorder threatened, Sue Storm would attempt to defuse it through a loving comment or a tender gesture. The result was a fascinatingly focused and loyal character who nevertheless seemed to feel obliged to betray herself. Caught between duty and desire, the Invisible Girl was a compelling fusion of heroic strengths and silently ruinous weakness - Colin Smith
All she wants is to rest from her struggle. Time for calm and beauty, time to reflect and talk with friends and a coffee. She just wants to hide, to be invisible. Her life is an unending series of duties to others: to Johnny, to Reed, to America and to the world. She is surrounded by males who do crazy, dangerous things and are likely to destroy the world, and even though the men have all the power and she is the most vulnerable, she must be the strongest.
She is genuinely shocked that they even remembered her birthday. This is well beyond what she has come to expect of them. It shows her loneliness: she need friends, people who understand, not people for whom simply remembering their best friend's birthday is an achievement.
Susan Storm never had a proper childhood. Her mother died when she was young, her father blamed himself, turned to drink, and ended up in jail. As a teenager, Sue had to raise her brother alone. When he finally grew old enough to look after himself, a new and greater responsibility appeared: to protect the world, despite being almost powerless. This is Sue's story.
Sue never had a childhood, she has never known anything ordinary or shallow. She craves shallowness because she almost never gets it! Any chance she gets, she wants to just do her hair or wear nice clothes and pretend that the world does not depend on her for a few minutes. Wouldn't you? - Great American Novel
And I find this to be very compelling, and extremely on-point for a woman in her circumstances: someone who had to raise her younger brother and has grown used to the thankless job all older sisters from torn households know in their bones, of what it's like to be always putting everyone else first because nothing gets done and no one functions without them. Getting blamed if everything goes wrong and getting ignored if everything goes right, because that's just the way things are supposed to be invisibly working for everyone. And even if your sibling or relatives love you and acknowledge you and treasure you deeply, and it is reciprocated, there's just no way they can understand, not really, you made it your life's mission that they never have to, you will never not be slightly isolated in your position, and you'll never net anywhere near the acknowledgement or respect afforded to birth parents who haven't given 1/100th of a shit for a moment of their lives. You will rarely, if ever, get to stop being the grown-up and have fun, and you'll feel bad for even wanting that, because you're a woman and you're not supposed to want things, and you've had to be the grown-up for so long that being anything else, being a girl, feels obscene and forbidden, like you're just waiting for everything to collapse without you again the minute you lapse. Okay, maybe I'm getting too personal, point being: I don't think 60s Sue is anywhere near as "vain" as people complain about, but if she was, so fucking what?
Oh Sue you dumb girly doormat, wanting to care about your hair and clothes and friends (at least when you still had non-superpowered friends), don't you know there's a mission on? Don't you see Ben and Johnny are fighting again, and Reed's too busy to care? Oh look the Inhumans are bickering again, oh look Doctor Doom's destroying your family over his college grudge again, oh look Atlantean business that involves you is happening again, oh look Stark roped Reed into his latest bullshit and now you're gonna have to foot the bill, oh look the mutants are being weird about your son again, oh look SHIELD's knocking on the door, either Nick Fury wants a new favor or Maria Hill's gonna threaten you over something or other, oh look Mole Man just crashed your Sunday brunch again, oh look Galactus, ad infinitum. Stop whining Sue, don't you know you're gonna have to be The Adult In The Room for the superhero community for the rest of your entire fucking life, because nobody else is as good at it as you?
If (Reed) is the most scientifically intelligent person, then she is the most emotionally intelligent person on the planet. Between the two of them, they're building an idealistic society. - Matt Shakman
It puts Sue in a position that I think should be better taken advantage of, that she's the one interfacing with what the others don't really have to deal with. She gets the jobs that don't show up on-screen and I think that could be one way to give her more interesting things to do - have her be running the Miss Pauling/Dr. Girlfriend protocols she has already been implied or occasionally shown to run. I think the upcoming movie is on the right track with putting her in charge of the Future Foundation, remains to see how that'll pan out, but I think this is something that's easy to integrate to her baseline deal. When Reed spooks the city with a science mishap, when Johnny gets a tabloid trouble, when Ben smashes another intersection, who has to do damage control? Who has to do press tours, who has to deal with SHIELD bastards, who has to attend Atlantean/Inhuman meetings, who has to negotiate toy deals and charity drives and public stunts, who has to work the finances, who has to keep the train rolling so Fantastic Four adventures can keep happening, who has to hold the line with or without force fields? Her, and it's good that she is a competent person at those things because everyone else in the bastardverse is not and her family, love them, are not up to it.
Sue is the person who allows for there to be such a thing as a Celebrity Hero mode for them - it was Reed's idea, as most things in their lives were, but she maintains it, she is the face of it, and now she has to apply her expertise to keep it rolling. She is overworked and attentive and she runs her brain like it's the fucking navy with the willpower to match - her son is the god savior of all reality and her daughter is the future greatest supervillain of all time, but those kiddos will be on bedtime when she calls it. She is the Big Sister of the superhero community with everything loving and complicated and stressful and even outright shitty that it implies and, by God she WILL have that spa day with Jen if it kills her and whoever complains about her day off or tries to keep her from it (it's gonna be The Wizard this time, poor bastard). Reed is the director with a vision, but she is the producer / AD who runs the show, which gets me to the final thing I think she has apart from the other 3 that should be emphasized: Ideology. She is the organizer who wills blueprints into reality and has kings bending the knee to her and forces the Fantastic Four to be more than just a project, but an institution, a pillar of the world and community.
She creates the team's style. Sue changes the team's direction, making it public (Reed wanted them to hide, but she created uniforms and to go out together, e.g. to the theater, forcing them to be noticed). She wows the media, which ensures that the public are usually on their side. On at least four different occasions her compassion turned the most powerful advanced races into friends.
Reed's idea is less intelligent: build the ultimate weapon. Sue's idea is more intelligent: to build networks (of Inhumans, Watchers, Dragon Riders, etc). Sue is more intelligent because in every case she sees the bigger picture: Reed sees the immediate threat, but Sue intuitively sees the values behind the threat: the emotional angle.
The bigger picture has to be encapsulated in emotions, not logic, because there are too many variables for the brain to compute. Emotions are simply summaries of a lifetime's experience, where it is not possible to stop and evaluate every cause. We evolved emotion for a reason! An emotion encapsulates orders of magnitude more data than a direct reading ever could.
Reed's idea of survival does not extend beyond the individual or the family. But Sue had a better understanding of identity: identity is values. We are values. Our bodies do not matter, our values do. Sue will sometimes hesitate, even if it means putting her or her family at immediate risk, in order to follow her values. That is, she puts values ahead of the physical body. All of Sue's efforts are in networking: spreading our values as widely as possible.
Frankly I will go so far as to advocate for a temporary removal of the forcefields or at least a serious parsing down from them, and it's not just because I want people to get creative with invisibility and light-bending and refocus that aspect of her (she's the Invisible Woman! she's THE character known for invisibility superpowers! that should not be a negotiable or neglectable part of her deal), not just because I want Sue to stop feeling like an interchangeably generic superhero with a Lantern ring, but because I think Sue's strengths are such that she doesn't truly need them, and they undercut her core of emotional intelligence and ideological commitment. I think if there's one thing to take away from the Invisible Girl days, if there's one area where I think Lee and Kirby actually were right, it's in their assertion that not every character needs to solve problems with force and fistcuffs.
The Fantastic Four are problem solvers with very distinct types of intelligence among themselves, and all of these are equally important - they make for the greatest super team in part because they can all out-think problems in areas where the others lack. Sometimes that is finding the better solution and inventing one in it's absence, sometimes that is jumping into a problem everyone else is trying to tackle from the wrong perspective, and sometimes that entails being the person who knows and understands the value of soft power. You know who thinks of power as a hard, badass force to be held by a singular vision to mete it out and threaten with as deemed fit? You know who thinks there is such a thing as the singular greatest most powerful and most valuable intelligence? Doctor Doom, and that's why he loses to them. That's why the Invisible Girl allowed the Four to defeat Doom the first time, and so many other times since.
I don't want Sue to stop doing cool things - quite the opposite. Blocking bullets and taking on planet crushers, and convincing them to play nice, is more impressive when you're not bulletproof or they are actually hard for you to do on top of everything else, and it's even more frustrating when nobody sees you do it or credits all your hard work elsewhere or is simply more interested in what others around you are doing. Lacking any kind of serious or ugly or dramatic internality and conflict and flaws in the Marvel Universe means you are the first to get sidelined, but maybe this doesn't mean Sue has to be fully overhauled from a personality standpoint - maybe this fact already helps to put her so far removed from the world around her that, paradoxically, it can make her work as a Marvel heroine in a similar way Squirrel Girl works as a Marvel heroine despite being perfect and unbeatable and nice and straightforwardly heroic - the superstructure of the Marvel Universe rests on Doreen Green being nice enough to be a goofy niche character so everyone else gets to have careers, making her a freakish anomaly as a result. Maybe the super structure of the Fantastic Four rests on Sue Storm being the singular perfect superhero on a thankless supporting role.
You can be the most powerful and most composed and most committed and most unfailingly ruthlessly competent superhero on the block, and you'll still always be coming up short of the expectations around women (which may be funny to say after complaining about her narrative shortcomings for several paragraphs straight), and you'll still never be as catchy for the crowd as a shlocky fishman romance story or your brother being the fire dumbass or having your daughter clearly like your family arch-enemy more. After all's said and done, maybe Sue Storm isn't really that lacking in complexity or appeal or compelling elements compared to the other 3 - but it's her job to be ignored. Story of her life. It's even in her name, ain't that something.
romaincrisis
gracieabrams
izzy806
tangentwithtanner
stormborns
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