In a recent interview, Fantastic Four writer Dan Slott revealed what he believed to be the main issue with Marvel's First Family—an issue he tried to fix during his tenure on the series. Slott introduced an entire alien race where everyone has either Asian or Black features because he felt that the Fantastic Four had a big issue with representation, and in the process, he also fixed what he felt was Johnny Storm's biggest problem.
Just like every other Marvel book created in the 1960s, Fantastic Four featured predominantly white characters. In July of 1966, the series introduced the very first American "mainstream" Black superhero, the Black Panther, however, T'Challa remained a secondary character, and he would soon the Avengers. The first Black hero to star in his own title was Luke Cage in Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, in June 1972. Fantastic Four remained a white-centric book. For instance, among the huge cast of villains and ing characters the only non-white character is Wyatt Wingfoot, a Native American who was Johnny Storm's college roommate and She-Hulk's love interest.
According to the Human Torch can not grow up and create his own family, contrary to everyone else on the team. Due to a process called "illusion of change," which is common in every superhero comic, regardless of how much progress Johnny could make in life, he would always go back to being the immature playboy who loves sports cars. To break the cycle, Slott gave Johnny a mystical bond with an alien woman, "a literal ball and chain that he can’t take off." Slott decided that Kaila, aka Sky, had to be a Black person because, according to him, "Fantastic Four is the whitest book ever. I created an alien race where everybody is Black or Asian or Black and Asian because, dear God, that was important to me. That’s where Sky came from."
Characters such as those that make up the Fantastic Four, who have been around for more than half a century, have to deal with the changes occurring in society during that time. This is because Marvel's stories are not set in a fantasy world. Comics attempt to portray the real one world as accurately as possible to encourage suspension of disbelief in the readers. As a consequence, what was "normal" in the 1960s, including the sexist and misogynistic treatment of the Invisible Woman, for example, is no longer acceptable today. On the theme of racial representation, however, Fantastic Four made very little progress, mostly because the of the team are "fixed." Dan Slott's decision to introduce Sky and the inhabitants of planet Spyre was a good step forward. Unfortunately, they are still secondary characters who will (sooner or later) be phased out from the book.
Even Slott's decision to "force" Johnny to grow up was soon reversed when Sky caught him cheating on her with the Latverian champion Victorious. However, at the end of Slott's run, Johnny leaves the Fantastic Four to permanently move to Spyre, which will hopefully bring forward a big shake-up in the Fantastic Four status quo and provide the opportunity to fix some of the book's most problematic issues.
Source: Marvel.com
