Johnny-Storm

As you’ve no doubt already heard, the new Fantastic Four movie has cast its Human Torch. Meet Michael B. Jordan, the new Johnny Storm: Even though this is a topic that Eric has already covered, I’d like to offer my thoughts on why casting an actor of color for Johnny Storm isn’t just a good idea, but a really important move. It’s no secret that representation in media is a big deal. There has been a push in the past ten years for the superhero genre to expand past the cookie cutter of “white heterosexual man,” and while the comics have been slowly expanding their repertoire, the movies… have not. The Avengers movie universe has War Machine, Black Widow, and Falcon, who have all been relegated to sidekick status; the X-Men movie franchise has revolved around the trio of Wolverine, Professor X, and Magneto, even when the stories they’re trying to tell really revolve around other characters. DC’s movie division has made movie after movie featuring Batman and Superman while outright refusing to focus a movie on Wonder Woman; their Green Lantern movie focused on Hal Jordan, the most stereotypical white guy in all the Lantern Corps.

(The following contains lots of spoilers! So you may want to read Fantastic Four #600 first if you haven’t yet) Predicting the fallout from any given issue is a difficult thing to do within this storytelling medium. Authors are fond of misdirection. Small, seemingly unimportant events within any issue may later become extremely important via a planned storyline by the same writer or by a future writer who, like Grant Morrison, takes something that was never meant to have meaning and grants it utmost importance. Given that, let’s take a look at the possible important changes to the Marvel Universe post-F4-600. We’ll start with the obvious one - Johnny Storm’s return. ...