SDCC ’25: Spotlighting Four Fantastic Marvel Creators

By Shaun Manning

To celebrate the theatrical release this week of Fantastic Four: First Steps, Editor-in-Chief CB Cebulski dedicated his Marvel Fanfare panel at San Diego Comic-Con to spotlighting creators now crafting the comic book adventures of Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben. On hand were Executive Editor Tom Brevoort, artist Mark Buckingham, and the new ongoing Fantastic Four team of writer Ryan North and artist Humberto Ramos.

Cebulski kicked off the panel by asking the creators about their “origin story” as a comics reader and with the Fantastic Four specifically. Brevoort, who has worked for the House of Ideas for 36 years and served as Fantastic Four editor since 2002, spoke of picking up his first comic — Superman #268 — at a 7-11 spinner rack while his dad was buying cigarettes in the 1970s.

“My first Marvel was Marvel Team-Up #16 with Spider-Man and Captain Mar-vell,” he said. “I didn’t like it.” In fact, he adamantly refused to read any Marvel comics for many years. Eventually, he came to read a reprinted Fantastic Four adventure in Jules Feiffer’s comics history volume The Great Comic Book Heroes. “From that point on, I was a reader of DC Comics and the Fantastic Four.” Finally, though, further reprint collections would introduce the future editor to Daredevil and the X-Men, and from there the world of Marvel opened to him.

North’s story was simpler. Growing up in a small Canadian village with no comic shop, once he learned to drive he went out to the nearest shop and picked up three comics at random. “Two of them were great,” he said, noting that this felt like better odds than he’d get at a bookstore. It did not take much to make North love comics. “There’s something about the medium itself, of words and pictures interacting,” he said, adding that, like in the field of video games, creators are still exploring the boundaries of what’s possible.

Ramos found himself first drawn to Spider-Man, but discovered the Fantastic Four through the 1960s cartoon, dubbed into Spanish. He noted that in Latin American Spanish the Thing is known as La Mole (pronounced mole-ay), perhaps because the Spanish for “thing,” “la cosa” “doesn’t sound too epic.” Ramos also said that his Batman’s secret identity is not Bruce Wayne but Bruno Dias.

During Buckingham’s childhood, “I had a few months where I was ill,” the artist said. He was given art supplies and comics to help pass the time. “I wanted to tell stories immediately,” Buckingham said.

The panel then turned to the recently-released Fantastic Four: First Steps comic, written by Matt Fraction and illustrated by Buckingham, with a cover by Phil Noto. Brevoort described how, while walking around the film set in London, with its fully-realized streets and shops, “we got to talking about what Marvel Comics in that universe would look like.” They landed on the idea of telling the MCU Fantastic Four’s first mission, and producer Matt Shakman was “hoping we could capture some of that Jack Kirby style,” Brevoort said. This led him to reach out to Buckingham, who, in part, re-imagined panels from the original Fantastic Four #1 through the lens of the film universe. “That gave me an opportunity to pay homage to the very first comic by Stan [Lee] and Jack,” the artist said.

On the topic of getting the actors’ look just right for the comic, Buckingham noted this “wasn’t my first trip in the likenesses bus,” but even so he spent longer on getting them right “than we did on the whole rest of the comic.”

Coinciding with the movie’s launch, the regular Fantastic Four series is also getting a new #1 issue, retaining North as writer and bringing in Ramos as regular artist. North, whose previous run lasted 33 issues, said that the fresh start also gave him an opportunity to change up the pace of the series. Instead of focusing primarily on one-issue vignettes, the new series will be composed of longer arcs.

“I like the vibe we have where you can explore these wild ideas and move on to the next thing,” he said of the recently-concluded series, but that he would now be “walking the line to do bigger stories that you need five issues to actually explore.” He added, though, that he strives to make sure each individual issue can be read on its own.

While Ramos is an accomplished and fan-favorite artist, he was unsure if he’d be a good fit for Fantastic Four. “Science fiction is not my thing to draw,” he said, describing how he struggles to draw technology. Adding pressure, Ramos described Fantastic Four as “by far the most important book in the Marvel universe.” But Brevoort sent him North’s previous Fantastic Four comics and Ramos loved it. And now that he’s in the midst of it, “I haven’t been as excited to draw a comic for a couple years,” he said.

“It’s incredibly fun” to read North’s scripts, Ramos said. “I have to think a lot to draw a page, because what I draw on page 1 will have an effect on page 18, so I can’t forget what I did or I will have to redo it.”

Brevoort also complimented colorist Edgar Delgado who “does a tremendous job enhancing everything”

The panelists then debuted the covers of Fantastic Four #4-5, diving into discussion especially of the fifth issue cover, which features Black Cat stealing HERBIE and the Ultimate Nullifier, if not for an invisible Sue Storm standing in her way.

In the audience Q&A portion, North discussed how his tastes in sci-fi have changed over time. As a kid, North said, he liked science fiction but “I only cared about the science, I didn’t care about the characters.”

“As I got older, I started to care about other human beings,” he added. Now he appreciates how the genre allows the two to comment on each other.

Asked about writing Doom, North seemed to be having fun. “Doctor Doom is a man who’s never said ‘um’ in his life,” he said. “You get to bring your A-game for writing speeches when Doom opens his mouth.”

On the topic of other characters or corners of the FF universe he’d like to explore, North said that “Wyatt Wingfoot coming in issue #6,” and that he’s still amazed at how much there is to explore with these characters.

“There’s so much we haven’t done here.”

Stay tuned to The Beat for more coverage from SDCC ’25.