By 1963, Marvel’s Fantastic Four battled some of the publisher’s most fearsome villains. By year’s end, they faced a threat with chilling parallels to today’s political landscape.
On July 25th, Marvel Studios will release Matt Shakman’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps. On the eve of the new film’s release—the fourth attempt at a summer blockbuster—it seems an opportune moment to look back upon the original Fantastic Four comic books and explore how Marvel’s first family plays a vital role in offering contemporary social criticism, both when the comics were released and today.
In December 1963, writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby published “The Hate Monger” in issue #21 of Marvel’s flagship comic, Fantastic Four. For two years, young readers adventured alongside the extraordinary quartet of Cold War heroes led by scientist Reed Richards and his wife, Susan Storm. Mutated by cosmic rays during a mission, the astronauts gain superhuman powers. Richards, now dubbed “Mr. Fantastic”, has the ability to stretch his body into nearly any shape, and Storm, making herself invisible at a moment’s notice. Rounding out the team, Sue’s brother Johnny morphs into the Human Torch while Ben Grimm, the team’s pilot, transforms into a monstrous, rock-like creature.
By 1963, Marvel’s first family had battled some of the publishing house’s most fearsome villains—the maniacal Doctor Doom, the Skrulls from outer space, and the communist-serving Red Ghost. At year’s end, however, the team faced a threat far closer to home, one with chilling parallels to today’s political landscape.
Fresh off a mission against the Molecule Man, our heroes are resting in their Baxter Building headquarters with the Invisible Girl trying on “gorgeous fashion wigs”. (These early issues clearly highlight contemporary gender norms, with the “most vulnerable member of the Fabulous F.F.” often passing out from exertion or overcome with “feminine” emotion.)
From a newspaper, Reed learns the “Hate Monger” is leading a mob to riot in downtown New York, and the team quickly runs into the boisterous rally. Center stage is a figure dressed in a purple hood and robes, a clear gesture to the Ku Klux Klan.
“Down with all foreigners!” he bellows. “Those who are not with us are against us! They must be destroyed!” Whipping the crowd into a frenzy, the Hate Monger roars, “We must show no mercy to those we hate!”
The astonished foursome looks on as the crowd attacks one of their own. “Kick the foreigners out of our neighborhood,” a man screams as another is pelted with rocks and sticks. “No! Stop! I am a citizen—the same as you!” As the Thing breaks up the violent mob, the Hate Monger uses his “hatred ray” against the Fantastic Four.
The remaining story has the team turning on itself before an intervention by CIA agent Nick Fury leads them all to South America and the fictional country of San Gusto, a “showcase of democracy…gone nuts.” There, we find the Hate Monger subverting a teetering local government.
By story’s end, our heroes have taken antidote pills and, alongside Fury, attack the evildoer and his henchmen. Thanks to the Invisible Woman ruining his aim, the Hate Monger accidentally blasts the minions with his hatred ray, and they quickly dispatch the “masked master of hate”. As Fury leans over the corpse, he offers the comic’s readers a short lesson in morality. “He used hatred as a weapon, and in the end it was that very weapon that destroyed him.”
Fantastic Four’s Realism
Marvel’s head writer and editor, Stan Lee, had always aspired for the Fantastic Four comic to be read as “realistic fantasy” with “real-life characters, locales, and situations.” In “The Hate Monger”, however, Lee and Kirby waded deep into contemporary politics and the burgeoning Civil Rights movement of 1963.
That April, Dr. Martin Luther King penned his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, asking his fellow citizens to “rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.” In August, some 250,000 Americans marched on Washington to protest racial discrimination.
On a far grimmer note, four young girls lost their lives in Birmingham the following month, victims of a bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. If Lee was seeking realism in his stories, the Hate Monger seemed an authentic avatar for racist bigots of the day.
Marvel, of course, had not been the first publishing house to proselytize on racial problems afflicting Americans. Back in the 1950s, EC—short for “Entertaining Comics”—produced hard-hitting social commentary. From stories like “Judgment Day” to “Master Race”, EC published “preachies” that, according to scholar Qiana Whitted, were “designed to challenge readers’ assumptions about racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice, Cold War paranoia, and other anxieties over social difference and American heterogeneity.” Thus, Lee was part of a longer tradition in which comics, as a medium of popular culture, could serve as social and political critique.
Nor would 1963 be the last time the famed editor used Marvel as a platform for speaking out against racism. Five years later, in his “Stan’s Soapbox” column, Lee labeled bigotry and racism the “deadliest social ills plaguing the world today” and argued it was “totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race—to despise an entire nation—to vilify an entire religion.”
Reading “The Hate Monger” today feels like an exercise in cultural déjà vu. Amnesty International recently maintained that the Trump administration’s travel ban would “harm people seeking safety” and “spread hate and discrimination.” Others have argued that the president and his supporters are more willing to express “open bigotry” than in the past.
Furthermore, and more pointedly, ABC News ousted correspondent Terry Moran for claiming that White House adviser Stephen Miller was a “man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater…. He eats his hate.” Perhaps the Reed Richards or Sue Storm of 1963 would not feel so out of place in the United States of 2025.
Given the current anxieties over immigration policies, racial politics, and many Americans’ apparent diminishing capacity for empathy, the Fantastic Four squaring off against the Hate Monger can inspire us to reflect more deeply on our ongoing debates over American identity and social justice. Perhaps, too, these comic book characters can remind us that hate has a tendency to turn against its users.