Despite there not actually being a Fantastic Four right now, the Human Torch and the Thing have decided that they are going to try to put the band back together and as part of this mission, they debuted new Fantastic Four costumes in the most recent issue of Marvel Two-In-One (by Chip Zdarsky, Valerio Schiti and Frank Martin). With the debut of the new outfits, we thought it might be fun to take a look back at the Fantastic Four's long history of costume changes.

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When the Fantastic Four debuted, it seemed pretty clear that Marvel was intending to ease into their return to superheroes. They had been having success with science fiction stories about aliens and monsters and they weren't sure if their return to superhero characters would be a hit (despite DC Comics having great success with the concept themselves with their Silver Age revival of the late 1950s/early 1960s). So when we first meet the Fantastic Four, they're wearing normal clothes, with Reed in a suit and Johnny Storm wearing a sweater over a button-up shirt and a tie. When they go into action, they basically just change into informal wear, including baseball caps...

In the next issue, they continue to just wear informal clothing. However, it is important to note that the issue opens with the Fantastic Four now public enemy number one (as part of a Skrull conspiracy to tarnish the reputation of the Fantastic Four ahead of an invasion of Earth). So the fact that they're wearing hunting gear suggests that they are dressed like this specifically BECAUSE they are on the run and not that this is what they would normally be wearing...

With the first issue being a smash success, Marvel knew that, okay, superheroes were cool again, so they decided to embrace the concept fully with the third issue of the series. Interestingly enough, the original concept by Kirby and Lee was that the Fantastic Four would wear traditional superhero costumes, in the sense that they would wear masks. Kirby even drew the pages initially with the masks, but then someone decided to erase them, figuring that the Fantastic Four were going to be different than your typical superhero team...

That's why the Thing was wearing his helmet. It was short-lived, of course....

It's important to note that the original version of the Fantastic Four's costume included very high black collars that took up most of the neck and the top of the uniform...

A few issues later, in Fantastic Four #6, Kirby dropped the high collars and now the black collar was barely there. It would be interesting to see if he actually put any real thought into it or just changed his mind one day (or if one of his inkers changed his mind that day). Things were a bit more fast and loose with designs back in the day, you know?

Anyhow, this would be the official Fantastic Four costume for the rest of Kirby and Lee's run together on the title, so well into the 1970s. The next change in outfits would not occur for over a hundred issues!

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As noted, the next major change took place over a hundred issues later, in Fantastic Four #132 (by Roy Thomas, John Buscema and Joe Sinnott). Reed Richards and Sue Richards got into a major fight over their son, Franklin, and Sue left the team. Medusa of the Inhumans took her place for a year or so, and this is the outfit she wore while a member of the group...

Meanwhile, Thomas and Buscema decided to mix things up and have all four members were distinct costumes, so Johnny Storm changed his outfit to an homage of the costume worn by the original Human Torch...

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By #150 or so, Johnny went back to the traditional costume and when Sue returned, she, too, kept the original outfit, so the costumes remained the same until the early 1980s.

The next major change occurred in John Byrne's first issue as the writer and artist on Fantastic Four. He brought back Jack Kirby's original design for the collars of the Fantastic Four costumes, so they now had high collars again...

As it turned out, this was almost a bit of a pretext for Byrne's next costume design (it wasn't literally a pretext, as I doubt Byrne already had specific plans for the new costumes in his first issue of the series), as in an adventure to the Negative Zone, the unstable molecules of the Fantastic Four's costumes were sort of turned "negative," like a photograph and thus the black became white and the blue outfits became black-tinged...

Soon after this, the Thing left the group to remain on the Beyonder's Battleworld post-Secret Wars and She-Hulk joined the team in her own modified version of the regular costume (most of She-Hulk's costumes have tended to show off her legs, so I guess a traditional Fantastic Four costume wouldn't work)....

The Byrne change to the costumes was a popular one and no one messed with it for over a hundred issues. Until...the 1990s happened!

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During their run together on Fantastic Four, Tom DeFalco and Paul Ryan (with Danny Bulanadi on inks) kept trying to keep up with the rest of the era as much as they could. As things got "extreme" in other titles, they tried to do their own versions of those concepts in the Fantastic Four. After all, certain things clearly were popular with the fans, so why not try them themselves?

One of the first major changes was when Sue, influenced by an alien being that had possessed her some time earlier and sometimes affected Sue's emotions, adopted a very skimpy outfit in Fantastic Four #371...

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Meanwhile, after being badly injured in a skirmish with Wolverine, the Thing decided to go back to his very first costume (in a way) and began wearing a helmet to protect his damaged face (which was now particularly sensitive to injuries due to it being sort of like an open wound)...

In that same issue (Fantastic Four #375), Reed Richards adopted the 1990s mantra of "Everyone needs more pouches, right?" with his vest and the Human Torch began wearing a special jacket designed by Reed to help increase and control Johnny's flames...

Then Reed seemingly died. The Fantastic Four had a bit of a rotating cast for their fourth spot, with Ant-Man, Namor and Kristoff (a young boy who was intended to take over for Doctor Doom in the event of Doom's death, which also seemingly occurred at the same time as Reed's death). Sue really came into her own as the team leader and eventually she realized that she probably should be wearing a less ridiculous costume, so she made the change in Fantastic Four #386...

Once the team discovered Reed was alive, the DeFalco/Ryan run came to an end and Carlos Pachecho joined DeFalco on the series for the final two issues of the original volume of the book. This was part of the Onslaught crossover and despite the Fantastic Four series ending in two issues, they decided, "Hey, why not introduce drastically different costumes for those remaining two issues?"

Then the Fantastic Four and the Avengers seemingly died defeating Onslaught in a final battle (Onslaught became a being of pure psionic energy and the non-mutant heroes realized that they could absorb his energy with their own bodies, so they all gave up themselves to absorb all of his energy and, in effect, kill him). However, they actually ended up on an alternate Earth (courtesy of the crazy-powerful abilities of Franklin Richards, who did not want his family and friends to die).

This was in a new series by Jim Lee, Brandon Chio and Scott Williams that rebooted their origin on this new Earth and in the second issue, they got their costuems for the first time and they are not bad, but also very much Jim Lee designs (check out the collars)...

After a year or so, the heroes returned to Earth....with new costumes, of course!!

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The original creative team on the newly relaunched "Heroes Return" version of the Fantastic Four was Scott Lobdell and Alan Davis and Davis designed these throwback costumes (with a twist) that the team used for the first year of the series (despite Lobdell and Davis leaving after just three issues)

Chris Claremont and Salvador Larroca were the new creative team and in Fantastic Four #12, they decided to go back to the Pacheco costumes from Onslaught...

These lasted, amusingly enough, until Pacheco took over the series himself as the writer/artist (with Rafael Marin as his co-write, Jeph Loeb as his initial scripter and Jesus Merino as his inker) and returned to the classic Jack Kirby outfits, complete with the high black collar (the big twist here was that the emblems on top of the costumes worked as special communicators and sort of bio-type connectors)...

These costumes lasted throughout Pacheco's run and then the Mark Waid/Mike Wieringo run that followed and the J. Michael Straczynski/Mike McKone run that followed that and the brief Dwayne McDuffie/Paul Pelletier run that followed that (McDuffie/Pelletier had Storm and Black Panther join the team, but they just used their normal costumes and not Fantastic Four versions of their outfits).

Then Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch took over and Hitch did a slight revamp on the costumes...

When Jonathan Hickman and Dale Eaglesham followed, they did another slight revamp, mostly working with the sleeves of the costumes...

Hickman's run, though, would soon have the biggest costume change of all for the Fantastic Four (including them not even being the Fantastic Four anymore)...

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Following the seeming death of the Human Torch, the Fantastic Four were no more. They then re-formed as a new team known as the Future Foundation, with Spider-MAn taking Human Torch's place on the main four-person superhero part of the team, but the name "Future Foundation" reflected that Reed was now wanting to devote a lot of his time to the young geniuses in his charge (including his own daughter, Valeria). Steve Epting designed the drastically different costumes, which, for the first time, dropped the color blue entirely from the costume (and, of course, the number 4) to go to a white and black motif that was quite striking...

As is the way these things go, Johnny Storm turned out to be alive roughly a year into the series and Nick Dragotta did a cute bit where he had the team gain numbers, with the original four being the "4" and then everyone else numbered after that, so the Fantastic Four was able to return without the Future Foundation concept being abandoned...

The FF, though, started a new trend where every time the Fantastic Four got relaunched (and remember, this was during the era where Marvel would do a relaunch every time a new creator took over a series - I guess that's technically an era that we are still in), they would get new costumes.

There was the Matt Fraction/Mark Bagley run, which saw the Fantastic Four go into outer space in costumes that were fairly similar to the Future Foundation costumes, just with a more traditional "4" bent to them...

Then the James Robinson/Leonard Kirk run, which introduced RED into the costumes for the first time, for the fall of the Fantastic Four...

That design notably was dropped a year into the series, soon before the Fantastic Four series ended period...

These were baaaaaasically the costumes that the Fantastic Four wore in Secret Wars, where Reed Richard and Sue (and the young members of the Future Foundation) decided to stay behind to help put the Multiverse back together.

However, we have recently learned that everyone else in the Marvel Universe believes that they died in the Incursion that started the Secret Wars event.

Finally, in the recent Marvel Two-in-One #4, the newest Fantastic Four outfits have debuted!!

These new outfits are one of the biggest departures yet, as they seem to stress functionality more than design, while the design is also very sharp. They're really nice costumes.