Susan and Reed
 Art
by Alan Davis
Sue and Reed have one of the few comic book marriages that is relatively stable and happy. The Fantastic Four has never been a comic for the soap opera elements and betrayals of the X-Men, which leaves readers wondering if they're reading Marvel Mutants or Harlequin Mutants. Reed and Sue married soon after the rocket flight that gave them their powers (married in Fantastic Four Annual #3), and not long after that, Susan gave birth to their son Franklin Benjamin Richards (in Fantastic Four Annual #6), and named him after her father Franklin Storm and their best friend Ben Grimm.
I subscribe to a version of the Marvel timeline that takes the Fantastic Four into their fateful space trip about twelve years ago. Using this, Reed and Sue have been married approximately ten years. Franklin is approximately eight years old. I know, that's hard to believe considering he is written with the speech patterns of a four or five year old most of the time.
Sue became pregnant with a second child that died during birth in Fantastic Four #268. She can no longer have any more children.
John Byrne did a lot to nail down the exact ages of Reed and Sue during his run of the Fantastic Four. In Fantastic Four #271, Reed celebrates his fortieth birthday, making him approximately eleven to twelve years Sue's senior. Reed had entered grad school at Columbia University when he took residence at a boarding house that belonged to Sue's aunt. There, the young Susan fell for him immediately. According to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, Reed was 23 and Sue was 12 when they first met. Give ol' Reed some credit, though. They didn't start dating until she was legal.
Strangely, only recently has this aunt of Susan and Johnny's been named. She was "Mary" or "Marygay."
Interestingly, What If #42, which I realize is far away
from canon, alleges that Sue attended Columbia University herself and it was there that she developed a relationship with Reed, who was teaching by that point. Though the chronology doesn't seem to match at first glance, it is possible that they returned to the east coast for a spell under these circumstances.
It's hard to have a deputy leader of a team that has only four members, but when Reed is unavailable, Sue leads the team. Generally, there have been a number of storylines that do nothing but retread what was done before wherein Reed is abducted or assumed dead and Sue has to lead the team to find him or make sure the rest of the team isn't done in by the same force that apparently got Reed. Though these stories are tiresome, they have provided some opportunity for Sue to exist outside of Reed's shadow. Recent Fantastic Four issues, however, seem to be aware of that pitfall of poor writing, and the two coexist more equally now than they ever have.
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