The writer had to be cagey in his recent interview with ComicsAlliance - where he confirmed that our own David Uzumeri's Johnny Storm analysis was right on the money - but Jonathan Hickman has revealed more of his plans for Marvel's first family with the news that Spider-Man will be joining what's now called The Future Foundation. Along with the wall-crawler come radically new costumes for Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman and the Thing that make it plain that the old idiom of the Fantastic Four died with the Human Torch, and that March's FF #1 is going to be be a startling change in the history of these beloved characters.


The Spider-Man news came in the form of several new images at Marvel.com, including brazenly different costume designs by Marvel mainstay Marko Djurdjevic, who channels Hickman's own idiosyncratic design style with a hexagonal motif and invokes memories of Tron: Legacy. As for the name change and why Spider-Man is on the team to begin with, Hickman, whose large-scale plots are tesseract-like in their design, had to play the wait-and-see card.

"When I took this job, I spent a lot of time reading old issues and really trying to figure out exactly what makes the FF tick: What works, what doesn't work, what used to work, but no longer does... and finally, what has the potential to work - in other words, what new things I can do to enhance the book's legacy and not diminish it.

This - the relaunch and the renaming - will make a lot more sense once we get to the other side, but for now, everyone should hopefully just check it, enjoy the ride, and know that my motives are pure."

With specific respect to Spider-Man, Hickman added, "I will say this, he's really a lot of fun to write. That Dan Slott certainly has a killer gig [as writer of Amazing Spider-Man]."

[Via Marvel.com]