Invisible Woman

• 1. Introduction

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  Susan Storm, better known as the Invisible Woman, made her debut in The Fantastic Four #1, dated November 1961. Writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby created her for Marvel Comics. She was a founding member of the Fantastic Four, and she was the first female superhero Marvel published during the Silver Age of Comic Books.

  Her defining power is the ability to vanish. For years, readers were also invited to overlook her. Yet critics now argue that she is the heart of her team, and that she may be its most formidable member.

  Why did her creators choose invisibility over strength? What happened to a young woman from Long Island who lost her mother early and became a parent to her brother? And how did a hero introduced under a girl's name grow into someone whole universes rely on?

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• 2. Lee's Choices

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  Stan Lee said he did not want Sue "to be Wonder Woman and punch people," so super strength was ruled out early. He turned to invisibility instead, inspired by works such as Universal Pictures' The Invisible Man.

  Lee's original two-page plot summary for the first issue survives in reprints. The Marvel Masterworks and Marvel Epic Collection editions of the first ten issues both include it. In that summary, her powers worked like those in The Invisible Man, which would have required her to take off her clothes. Lee worried that this might be "too sexy" for a comic book. He also wrote that she could not become visible again, and would wear a mask recreating her face when she wanted to be seen. By the time the first issue was written and drawn, both ideas were gone. Susan could turn invisible and visible at will, and her clothing vanished along with her.

  Lee wanted the Fantastic Four to be driven by family ties rather than by action. That plan gave Sue her job. She would be a full member of the team and its female lead, opposite Reed Richards, who was known as Mister Fantastic.

  The tensions in that family were built in from the start. Her little brother Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, became one of several sources of friction. She also sat at the center of a love triangle with Reed and Namor, a sometime ally and sometime enemy of the team. In an early plan, Sue was even the only reason the villainous Ben Grimm stayed with the group. That idea was significantly toned down in the published series.

  Lee eventually told readers outright why she mattered. In one story, the team reads fan mail denigrating the Invisible Girl's value. The Fantastic Four respond by listing the occasions on which she played a key role in their victories.

  In issue 22, dated January 1964, the creators widened her abilities. She gained the power to make other people and objects invisible, along with strong force fields and psionic blasts. Under writer John Byrne, she grew more confident and assertive, and her powers grew more versatile. She learned to move matter through the air, to immobilize enemies, and to attack from a distance.

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• 3. Glenville to Baxter Building

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  Glenville, on Long Island, is where Susan and her younger brother Jonathan grew up. Their parents were the physician Franklin Storm and his wife Mary. One night the parents left the children alone and traveled to a dinner honoring Dr. Storm. On the way, a tire blew out, and Mary was injured. Franklin was unhurt and insisted on operating on his wife himself. He could not save her.

  After Mary's death, Dr. Storm became a gambler and a drunk, and he lost his medical practice. His downfall ended with the accidental killing of a loan shark. In court he did not defend himself, because he still felt guilty over his wife's death. With their father in prison, Susan had to become a mother figure for her brother.

  At the age of 17, while living with her aunt, Susan met a house guest who was attending college. His name was Reed Richards. She graduated from high school as the award-winning captain of her Girls' Varsity Swim Team. Then she moved to California for college, where she pursued acting and ran into Richards again. Romance followed.

  Reed worked in aerospace engineering and was designing a spacecraft for interstellar travel. Then the government stopped funding the project. Determined to see it through, he planned an unscheduled test flight with his best friend, Ben Grimm. Susan was instrumental in persuading him to let her and her brother come along. In space, the four were exposed to massive amounts of cosmic radiation and had to abort. After the crash landing, they found they had superhuman powers, and hers was invisibility at will. They became the Fantastic Four, and Susan took the code name Invisible Girl.

  The team set up its first headquarters in the Baxter Building in Manhattan. Of all the early villains, none competed for Susan's affections as hard as Namor the Sub-Mariner. She felt some attraction to him, but her heart belonged to Reed. The situation has been called the first love triangle in the Marvel Universe.

  Her father returned to her life in the middle of a crisis. After Susan was injured in a battle with the Mole Man, Franklin escaped from prison and operated to save her life. He made amends with his children and went back to prison. The Super-Skrull later kidnapped him and copied his appearance, then fought the team as the Invincible Man. In defeating the Super-Skrull, Dr. Storm gave his life to shield the Fantastic Four from a Skrull booby trap.

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• 4. Motherhood and Malice

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  The wedding of Reed and Sue was billed as the event of the century. Several of New York City's most prominent superheroes attended. Not long afterward the team met Galactus and the Silver Surfer. Then Sue became pregnant and stepped back from active duty. Crystal, an Inhuman elementalist and Johnny's girlfriend, took her place on the roster.

  Sue's blood cells, irradiated by cosmic rays, made it hard to carry the child to term. Reed, Johnny, and Ben traveled into the Negative Zone to take the Cosmic Control Rod from Annihilus. With that device, the baby was delivered safely. He was named Franklin, in memory of Susan and Johnny's father.

  Because of his parents' altered genetics, Franklin was a mutant with vast powers. Annihilus wanted to use the boy for his own sadistic purposes, and he set off a premature release of Franklin's abilities. Reed feared his son could release enough psionic energy to wipe out all life on Earth. So he shut down the boy's mind. Susan was furious that he had not asked for her input. She left the Fantastic Four and separated from Reed, and Medusa of the Inhumans took her place. With help from Namor, she reconciled with Reed and returned to the team with Franklin.

  A second pregnancy ended in a stillbirth, caused by the radiation Susan had absorbed in the Negative Zone. Grief left her depressed, and the villain Psycho-Man manipulated her into becoming Malice. As Malice she attacked her friends and family, using her powers at levels she had never shown before. Reed saved her by forcing her to hate him for real.

  Something happened off the page between Susan and Psycho-Man, and he let out a terrifying scream. When she rejoined her teammates, she said Psycho-Man would never hurt anyone again. The episode changed her profoundly. She dropped the name Invisible Girl and became the Invisible Woman. Along with Reed, she briefly left the Fantastic Four and joined the Avengers, though the couple returned before long.

  Malice came back during the Infinity War, resurfacing in Susan's subconscious. Susan absorbed her, and the personality left her more aggressive in battle. She even built invisible razor-like force fields to slice enemies. Her son Franklin, who had traveled forward and back in time, appeared as the adult hero Psi-Lord. He freed his mother and took Malice's influence into himself. Then he defeated her by projecting her into the mind of the Dark Raider, an insane alternate counterpart of Reed.

  Another daughter story began with Valeria von Doom, a girl from an alternate future who was the child of Susan and Doctor Doom. Susan came to accept her as a friend. During a conflict with Abraxas, Franklin revealed that he had saved Susan's stillborn child and placed it in another alternate future. Afterward, Valeria was restored to a baby inside Susan's womb. The birth was again difficult. Doctor Doom helped, and his price was the right to name the healthy baby girl Valeria. He also placed a spell on her to make her his familiar spirit. The Fantastic Four wrestled the child free of Doom's control and defeated him.

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• 5. Light and Force

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  Doctor Doom, the greatest enemy of the Fantastic Four, has said on numerous occasions that Susan Storm is the most powerful member of the quartet. He adds that she is one of the few beings able to rupture the shell of a Celestial.

  Her invisibility works by bending light around her. She can make herself wholly or partially invisible. She can do the same for other people or objects, within a volume of up to 40000 cubic feet.

  The Women of Marvel: Celebrating Seven Decades Handbook offers an explanation for how she sees invisible things. Her retinas do not work in the usual way. They also build shapes from reflected cosmic rays, which are always present in the Marvel Universe's atmosphere in small amounts. This lets her perceive invisible people and objects, but without color, because those reflections bypass the rods and cones in her eyes. She can also sense objects made invisible by science, and she can make them visible at will.

  Her second power is a field of invisible psionic force drawn from hyperspace. She can shape it into simple constructs or wrap a nearly indestructible shield around herself or a target. She can vary its texture, making it rigid as steel or soft and yielding as foam rubber. The softer versions cushion impacts more gently and carry less risk of psionic backlash to Susan herself.

  Her shields can be made opaque, or translucent like milk glass, to block light such as laser beams. She has used them to block out the sun for days at a time. She can also make them semipermeable to filter oxygen from water, though that effort is mentally taxing. Her solid constructs range from the size of a marble to 100 feet across. Her hollow projections, such as domes, can cover several miles.

  Add force behind a construct and it becomes a weapon, from massive invisible battering rams to small spheres and darts. If she forms a field inside an object and expands it, the target explodes. She can ride atop her own constructs to approximate flight, and she can move other objects with her fields to simulate telekinesis. She can run several fields at once. The only limit is her concentration, because a field simply ceases to exist when she stops concentrating on it.

  Her fields also interact with other psychic energy. Against Psi-Lord, the adult version of her own son, they shielded her mind from his telepathy. The psychokinetic abilities of Jean Grey could not pass through them either.

  Outside her powers, Susan is a capable unarmed combatant. Reed trained her in judo, and she received further coaching from Iron Fist, the Thing, and She-Hulk.

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• 6. Wars and Betrayals

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  When Reed was thought to be dead, Susan became a capable leader of the team. She kept searching for him, sure he was still alive, even as her old flame Namor made romantic advances. The Fantastic Four eventually rescued the time-displaced Reed. He found himself briefly doubting his own leadership, since Susan had proved so able.

  The 2006-07 storyline Civil War began after an explosion in a residential neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut, which led to calls for the government to register superhumans. Locals angry at Johnny's celebrity beat him up. Sue at first supported the Superhuman Registration Act. She changed sides after Ragnarok, a clone of Thor built by Reed and Tony Stark, killed Bill Foster. She left the Baxter Building and told Reed in a note that their children were in his care. She meant to join the underground resistance led by Captain America. Her last request to her husband was "Please fix this."

  In Civil War #5, the Storm siblings narrowly escaped a team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. They avoided detection afterward by posing as husband and wife, using false identities supplied by Nick Fury. Before the assault on the Negative Zone prison, Sue asked Namor for help. He refused and said she still felt attracted to him. She did not deny it.

  Civil War #7 brought the final battle. Taskmaster nearly shot Susan, but Reed jumped in front of her and took the worst of the attack. Furious, she beat Taskmaster into the ground. After the war, she and the other Secret Avengers were granted amnesty, and she went home. Hoping to repair their marriage, she and Reed took time off from the Fantastic Four. Storm and the Black Panther filled in for them.

  In the second issue of World War Hulk, the Hulk faced the team in a fight that Madison Square Garden would soon host. Reed had built a machine to imitate the Sentry's aura, but the Hulk saw through the trick. Sue raised her force fields to protect Reed. The Hulk shattered them with such force that she collapsed, and Reed took a vicious beating. She phoned the Sentry for help. Afterward the Hulk turned the arena into a gladiator pit and held the defeated heroes below, fitted with obedience disks.

  A stranger episode involved a nanny named Tabitha Deneuve, hired for the Richards children. She turned out to be Susan Richards from 500 years in the future. Her plan to save the future's people ended when she went to apologize to Doctor Doom, and he electrocuted her.

  During Secret Invasion, Susan was on a lecture tour in Vancouver, British Columbia. A Skrull posing as Mister Fantastic pressed an invisible force field against her skull and knocked her out. Another Skrull wearing her face opened a portal that pushed the top three floors of the Baxter Building into the Negative Zone. That impostor was Lyja, Johnny's ex-wife, who had once infiltrated the team by posing as Alicia Masters. The real Susan was recovered alive from a downed Skrull ship after the final battle.

  Later, when the Human Torch died, the Fantastic Four dissolved, and Sue's heroics moved under the banner of the Future Foundation, which Reed had started. Johnny was later revealed to be alive.

  Secret Wars brought her death. The Fantastic Four built a life raft against the coming death of the universe. Just before the final incursion with the Ultimate Universe, Sue's section broke away. She held it together with her force field, but the dying universe proved too much, even for her. She, Ben, and her children died at the hands of Oblivion while Reed screamed in agony. When Molecule Man gave his power to Reed, Reed used it to resurrect his family and began rebuilding the entire multiverse.

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• 7. The Critics' Verdict

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  George Marston of Newsarama placed the Invisible Woman among the "best female superheroes of all time." He argued she set the pace for modern heroines, and that motherhood is part of what makes her unusual. Many writers, he noted, say she has more raw power than anyone on the team.

  Garrett Martin of Paste said she has grown the most of the original four since issue #1. Early on she was written like a typical love interest, too demure and too squeamish to feel like a true superhero. Today, he wrote, she is the team's strongest member emotionally, morally, and in her powers.

  Joshua Isaak of Screen Rant was blunter about the early years. He said her codename stayed Invisible Girl all the way until Fantastic Four #280 in 1985. He pointed to a scene in which she tries on a black wig under the caption "A girl is a girl," and another in which she cleans house while the men lounge after a battle. Still, he judged her progressive for her time, since many comic heroines never fought at all.

  Gavia Baker-Whitelaw of The Daily Dot called her divisive. Her powers are often read as passive because they protect more than they attack. Several of her storylines also involve unwanted romantic attention from characters such as Doctor Doom. Laura Kelly of The Mary Sue argued that film versions kept reducing Sue to a single trait, which was being a girl.

  Brett White of CBR.com made a different point in 2019-era commentary: Sue had never headlined even a limited series. Unlike her brother and Ben Grimm, she had no series of her own. He suggested a role for her akin to Michelle Obama's, built on outreach and diplomatic missions.

  In April 2019, Marvel announced her first solo miniseries, titled Invisible Woman. Mark Waid wrote it, Mattia De Iulis drew it, and Adam Hughes painted the covers. Editor Tom Brevoort later confirmed that the miniseries was produced for trademark purposes.

  The first issue was the 15th best-selling comic book of July 2019, according to Diamond Comic Distributors. Joe Grunenwald of ComicsBeat praised De Iulis's coloring of Sue's powers and gave the book a BUY. Jesse Schedeen of IGN scored it 6.5 out of 10, finding the art too clean and pretty for an espionage story. Issue #2 ranked 81st in August 2019. Jamie Lovett of ComicBook.com gave it 4 out of 5 and called it an improvement. The collected paperback ranked 72nd among graphic novels in January 2020.

  The rankings lists tell their own story. In 2011, IGN placed her 66th on its list of top comic book heroes, and Wizard placed her 99th among its top 200 characters. By 2018, Paste ranked her second among Fantastic Four members. In 2021, Screen Rant named her the second most powerful member of the team, and CBR.com did the same the following year.

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• 8. Many Sues

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  In the WildStorm series Planetary, written by Warren Ellis, the villains are an evil version of the Fantastic Four called The Four. Their Sue Storm is Kim Suskind, the daughter of a Nazi scientist. She has to wear goggles to see while invisible. She wins fights by rapidly expanding a force field inside her opponents' heads.

  Marvel's own alternate worlds offer plenty of variations. In Age of Apocalypse, Susan is a civilian who joined the Human High Council as hired muscle. In Age of X, she betrayed the Fantastic Four to the government and took an anti-mutant stance. In Marvel 1602, she is permanently invisible and linked to the classical element of air. Marvel Apes makes her an ape who unwillingly became human, and the Marvel Mangaverse gives her the name Sioux Storm. On Earth-65 in Spider-Gwen, she is a former child star who murdered Doctor Doom and took his place. The Ultimate Marvel version is an eighteen-year-old biochemistry prodigy who grew up in the Baxter Building.

  In the series Exiles, one version is Empress Hydra, who controls Captain America and Wolverine and has killed billions. Another is Queen Susan McKenzie, who married Namor and had two children, Gambit and Valeria Fen.

  The What If? comic book series, in What If? #6 from December 1977, imagined the team getting powers that matched their personalities. There Sue could stretch and reshape her body, and she took the name Ultra Woman. Reed's vast intellect turned him into a giant floating brain. A later issue, from May 1978, had Skrulls expose the staff of Marvel Comics to cosmic rays. Secretary Flo Steinberg became the Invisible Girl alongside Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Sol Brodsky, working at the office by day and fighting crime in secret. Elsewhere, on Earth-772, Spider-Man joined the team, Sue felt sidelined, and she left to marry Namor.

  Parody has treated her less gently. In an episode of Robot Chicken, voiced by Emmanuelle Chriqui, she turns invisible against Doctor Doom, then gets hit and dragged by a car. None of her teammates ever find out. The Simpsons segment "Stop the World, I want to Goof Off!" casts Maggie as the Invisible Woman. In Rugrats, the parody character Miss Invisible appears, and Lil invents a similar hero called "Dotted-Line Girl."

  On screen, Rebecca Staab played her in the unreleased 1994 film The Fantastic Four. Jessica Alba followed in Fantastic Four in 2005 and its 2007 sequel Rise of the Silver Surfer. That Sue headed the genetic research department at Von Doom Industries and had briefly dated company CEO Victor von Doom. Kate Mara played a Kosovan adopted daughter of Franklin Storm in the 2015 film. Her powers came from a botched expedition to a parallel dimension called Planet Zero. Animated Sues have been voiced by actors including Jo Ann Pflug in the 1967 series Fantastic Four and Lori Alan in the 1994 series. In video games she was playable in Marvel Heroes until legal reasons forced her removal on the 1st of July 2017.

  Vanessa Kirby plays her in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film The Fantastic Four: First Steps, released in 2025. She is set to return in Avengers: Doomsday in 2026 and Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027.

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