Sunday Smackdown: Superman vs Fantastic Four: First Steps

Releasing Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps in the same month seems like it’s just shamelessly baiting comic book nerds into rekindling the old1 rivalry between DC Comics and Marvel, offering their take on “who won?”

And since I’m a nerd, and I’ve already got a short-lived series on here that was supposed to be about pitting two similar movies against each other, and it’s Sunday, I’m going to take the bait. (Kind of).

I went into First Steps not really knowing what to expect, since I was never a Marvel guy outside of the movies, I didn’t grow up with these characters, and I’ve bounced off of every attempt I’ve made in the past to read Fantastic Four comics.

But I had a lot of preconceived ideas about DC Comics and Marvel, as well as the tone of the existing movie franchises and what each was trying to accomplish. I had a strong expectation that while Superman made me feel like a little kid again, First Steps was almost certainly going to be a solid MCU installment designed to kick off a new phase or whatever, with a thick veneer of mid-century visuals slapped on top.

So I was pleasantly surprised that First Steps broke through my defenses pretty early on, and it won me over in ways that Marvel movies (as much as I like them) usually don’t. It’s possibly the first entry in the MCU, and possibly even the first movie based on a Marvel property, that has absolutely zero trace of being ashamed it’s a genre movie based on comic book super heroes.

That upends my entire notion of what the MCU is all about! I’ve always taken it for granted that one of the core goals of the entire 20+ year project was to translate comic book stories into a format suitable for movie-watching grown-ups. There’s always got to be a sense of “this shit’s crazy, yo!” to make it palatable for the normies.

It’s baked into the core branding of the two brands, at least throughout the time I was still reading comics: DC Comics are all about fantasy, and Marvel is all about heightened reality. It’s setting stories in Metropolis or Gotham vs New York City, basic Pop Culture Media Literacy 101 stuff.

One of the (many) things I loved about Superman was how it was so thoroughly and unashamedly a celebration of comic book super heroes, and how well it captured the feeling of a certain era of comics while still feeling contemporary.

So it was a big surprise to me to see First Steps pulling off that impossible feat as well, but for a different era of comics, which had a different tone. It’s actually a better-than-perfect adaptation of the comics from the 1960s that I’ve read, because it retains the overall feeling while updating all of the stuff that deserves to be left in the 60s: the characterization of women, ethnic minorities, and countries outside of the US2.

It essentially says that it’s pointless to be constantly calling out this stuff as silly, or naive, or juvenile, since that introduces this artificial layer between the material and audience, so that you’re at best appreciating it instead of feeling it.

For instance, a minute into the climax of Fantastic Four: First Steps, I could predict exactly what all of the story beats leading up to the end credits would be, and my predictions turned out to be entirely accurate. But it never felt predictable to me so much as inevitable: this stuff had to happen because it’s the only satisfying way this story could’ve played out3. Even if you’re already completely familiar with a piece of music, it still doesn’t feel satisfying hearing it again, without all of those final notes played in exactly the right order.

I read a great observation from Josh Labelle on Bluesky about David Corenswet and James Gunn’s interpretation of Superman in the latest movie: “I’m starting to think what I enjoyed about that interpretation of the character is that it’s the closest he’s ever been to Spider-Man.”

Which is core to how that whole movie works, once again the difference between Superman being aspirational vs being inspirational. The character is almost never presented as someone the audience can relate to, while that’s Spider-Man’s whole deal. And it’s the reason the introduction of the character was such a strong counterpoint to what DC was doing at the time. I already mentioned that one of Superman’s first lines in the movie was “Golly!” But the part that completely charmed me is soon afterwards, when he gets exasperated with Krypto and says “What the hey, dude?!”

Meanwhile, Fantastic Four: First Steps goes hard on the idea that its characters are paragons. They are all good at just about everything4; even the hot-headed, perpetually horny one usually intended to be comic relief proves himself to be an expert in alien linguistics. They’re celebrated with cartoons and comic books and variety shows, and they’re set apart from the rest of the city in the Baxter Building, working on their experiments that no normal human could possibly understand.

But even with that, they’re treated not so much as gods or even super heroes, but as celebrities. The public is fascinated with their private lives. They’re not reclusive; they make a point of making media appearances, or talking to the public directly to keep them informed of what’s going on. And Ben Grimm makes a point of staying true to his roots and walking the streets of New York, putting on shows for adoring kids.

They’re not really like any of the existing MCU characters5, because there’s a sense that their super powers aren’t some kind of curse that they overcame, but just something that made them even better able to do the kinds of things they’d probably be doing even without super powers. They’re both a human family that we can relate to, and also the best of us, the kind of people we should aspire to be.

I think the two depictions are interesting because they ask what does a 21st century audience want from its heroes? For a long time, I was wondering if we even want to see heroes anymore, as opposed to tortured characters with tragic back stories who happen to have super-human abilities. We either need them to be so far removed from our own experience that they exist purely as fantasy, or we need them to have some fatal flaw that keeps them from being too much better than us.

I love just having hundreds of millions of dollars poured into movies that say, “It’s good to have characters who represent the best of us and the kind of people we should try to be, actually.”

One of the most common story formats in comics from the Silver Age is to have characters who don’t know each other suddenly be thrown together, they have a big brawl based on a misunderstanding (or just a desire to fight so that the audience can see their favorite “who would win?” match-ups), and then they eventually come to an understanding and end up working together to defeat the real enemy.

So it feels like both Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps are both so good at capturing the feeling of super-hero comics, that they’ve kind of managed to do that. They seem to invite fans to slug it out, prove their loyalty to their favorite brand, and choose a winner. But the reality is that they’re both great, and they’re great because the source material has spent decades being cross-pollinated between creators finding out what works and what doesn’t, what are the best aspects of “the rivals” that they can adapt into their own characters.

Turns out my favorite incarnation of Superman feels a lot like early Spider-Man. And one of my favorite MCU installments ever works because it allows itself to be fantastic and makes no effort to be grounded in the contemporary real world. What the–?!

Winner: Life-long comic book and movie nerds getting to see the biggest studios pouring tons of money into adaptations of their favorite source material, which finally embraces the true appeal of super hero comics.

(But also: Superman. Because I loved that movie so much, you guys).

1
And completely propaganda marketing-driven

2
I loved the attention to detail that went into a quick shot of people watching television in a mid-century living room in Japan

3
I guess it might’ve helped a bit that I was already vaguely aware of what Franklin Richards’s character is all about going in.

4
Except parenting?

5
Although they’re closest to Steve Rogers’s Captain America, which I think might be the single best depiction of a comic book character in movies

1 And completely propaganda marketing-driven

2 I loved the attention to detail that went into a quick shot of people watching television in a mid-century living room in Japan

3 I guess it might’ve helped a bit that I was already vaguely aware of what Franklin Richards’s character is all about going in.

4 Except parenting?

5 Although they’re closest to Steve Rogers’s Captain America, which I think might be the single best depiction of a comic book character in movies