Invisible Woman

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This article is about the comic book character. For the 1940 film, see The Invisible Woman.

The Invisible Woman (real name Susan Richards, née Susan Storm) formerly the Invisible Girl (alias changed in Fantastic Four #284), is a fictional superhero, who is a member of The Fantastic Four in the Marvel Comics universe. She was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, in The Fantastic Four (Vol. 1) #1 (Nov. 1961).

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Publication history

Invisible Woman has primarily appeared in issues of Fantastic Four since the very beginning. Unfortunately, Susan's powers of invisibility alone proved to be of relatively little use in team's earlier missions, especially compared to the more aggressive ones of the rest of the group. Eventually, creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby realized this and gave Susan other powers, such as the ability to project invisible telekinetic force fields and the ability to make other people and objects become invisible.

Despite her abilities, Susan served primarily as an assistant and second-in-command to Reed, and the comics tended to treat her in a condescending stereotypical manner. This changed when John Byrne began his celebrated run on the title. Under his authorship, Susan became much more confident and assertive in her own abilities which themselves became more versatile and impressive. For instance, she found she could use her force fields to carry herself into the air, immobilize enemies, or use them as an offensive ranged attack. This revision, also marked by Susan changing her nom de guerre to the Invisible Woman, has become the standard with Susan being recognized as the most powerful member of the team and has served stints as the team's leader on occasion.

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Character history

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Origin

This native of Long Island is a daughter of a physician, along with her younger brother, Jonathan. Their mother, Mary, died because of a car crash. Even with his medical expertise, their father was unable to save her life. Life began to spiral downward for her father. After his wife's death, Dr. Storm became a gambler and a drunk, which led him to accidentally killing a loan shark. With their father in prison, Susan had to become a mother figure for her younger brother.

While living with her aunt, Susan, at the young age of 12, met her future husband, Reed Richards, a house guest who was attending college. When she graduated high school, she moved to California to attend college, where she persued an acting career and encountered Richards again. The two of them began to become romantically involved with each other.

Reed Richards, working in the field of Aerospace engineering, was designing a spacecraft for interstellar travel. Everything was going well until the government stopped funding of his project. Richards, wanting to see his project through, decided to make an unscheduled test flight. Originally, it was only going to be Reed and his best friend, Ben Grimm, involved, but Susan was instrumental in persuading Reed in letting her brother and herself join them on the dangerous space mission. In space, the quartet was exposed to massive amounts of cosmic radiation. As a result, they had to abort the mission and return to Earth. After the crash landing, they realized that they gained superhuman powers. Hers was the ability to become invisible at will. Realizing the potential use of their abilities, the four of them became the Fantastic Four, for the benefit of mankind.

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Early career as a super hero

As the Fantastic Four, the team found themselves setting up their first headquarters in the Baxter Building in Manhattan. The Fantastic Four encountered many villains in the early part of their career, but none of them contended for Susan's affections more than Namor the Sub-Mariner. Sue felt an amount of attraction to Namor, but her heart belonged with Reed. Susan later found herself getting injured in battle with the Mole Man. Her father escaped from prison and operated on her to save her life. Franklin made amends with his children before returning to prison; however, the Super-Skrull found a way to kidnap Dr. Storm, mimic his appearance, and then fight the Fantastic Four as the Invincible Man. In the process of defeating the Super-Skrull, Dr. Storm sacrificed his own life to protect the Fantastic Four from a Skrull booby trap.

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New life as a wife and a mother

Reed and Sue's relationship progressed more, with the two of them deciding to get married. The wedding was the event of the century, with several of New York City's preeminent superheroes in attendance. Even several super-villains wanted to attend, even if it was only for the chance to attack the Fantastic Four. Sue later became pregnant with her first child. Because of this, she wasn't able to remain an active member of the team. Johnny's then girlfriend, the Inhuman Crystal, joined the team, taking over Susan's roster spot.

Susan's powers became a problem for her to allow her to carry her child to term. Knowing this, Reed, Johnny and Ben went into the Negative Zone to take a Cosmic Control Rod from Annihilus. The baby was safely delivered and was named Franklin, after her father. Due to his parents, Franklin was born a mutant, who one day will have powerful abilities. Because of those powerful abilities, Franklin lost control over his powers. Reed was unable to find an immediate solution as to how to control Franklin's powers and was forced to shut his son's mind down. Angry with Reed with not seeking her input in the matter, Susan left the Fantastic Four and had a marital separation from Reed. Taking her roster spot was Medusa, of the Inhumans. With the help of Namor, Susan reconciled with Reed and returned to the Fantastic Four with Franklin.

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Malice

Susan eventually became pregnant for a second time. However, if she thought that her pregnancy with Franklin had had its share of trauma, this one was going to be even worse, for several reasons. This second child was birthed stillborn due to Susan having been exposed to radiation inside the Negative Zone on a previous trip. A depressed Susan was later manipulated by events set into motion by Psycho-Man into becoming Malice. Susan, with this new identity and emotions as Malice, attacked her friends and family in the Fantastic Four. Reed was able to save Susan by forcing her to hate him legitimately. Susan then turned the tables on Psycho-Man by making him use his own technology upon himself.

Susan found herself a changed person after these events and because of this, changed her codename to the Invisible Woman. Finding a life outside the Fantastic Four, Reed and Sue were invited into the membership of the Avengers. The two of them were Avengers only briefly, only to rejoin the Fantastic Four later on.

During the Infinity War, Susan was forced to absorb an evil doppelganger of herself. After the absorption, Susan's personality was influenced by the doppelganger, causing her to once again become Malice. Franklin, who had become Psi-Lord, was able to free his mother and absorb the influence of Malice into himself. He was able to eventually destroy her from within his own mind.

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Effective leader

After the apparent death of Reed, Susan found herself becoming a capable leader. Around this time, Susan, who felt Reed was still alive, kept searching for him and began falling in love with Namor. The Fantastic Four eventually rescued the time-displaced Reed, who found himself temporarily losing confidence in his leadership skills, since Susan was also a capable leader. Not too soon afterwards, the team found themsleves on an alternate Earth created by Franklin following the battle with Onslaught.

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Valeria

Following their return to their Earth of origin, The Fantastic Four encounter Valeria Von Doom. This new Marvel Girl came from an alternate future, where she was the child of Susan and Doctor Doom. Susan eventually became to accept the young girl, as a friend. During a conflict with Abraxas, Franklin revealed that he used his abilities to save Susan's original stillborn child and placed it in another alternate future. After the ordeal involving Abraxas, Marvel Girl was restored to a baby again inside Susan's womb.

This time around, Susan, yet again, had a difficult birthing. Due to the help of Doctor Doom, Susan was able to give birth to a healthy baby girl, which Doom named Valeria. Doom placed a spell on the baby, which made her his familiar spirit, to be used against the Fantastic Four. The Fantastic Four wrestle Valeria free from Doom's control, defeated him, and sent him to Hell.

Due to their actions involving the country of Latveria, the Fantastic Four separated temporarily. The remaining members banded together to bring Ben back from Heaven.

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Sue, the Human Torch

Zius, leader of group of Galactus refugees, kidnapped Susan to be used as a weapon to hide the presence of planets, from the arrival of Galactus. Reed found a way to make Zius believe that her powers were gone, by swapping powers between Susan and Johnny. After gaining respect for what Johnny goes through everyday life with his abilities, Reed reversed the swapping.

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Sue and Captain Universe

Captain Universe, having hit a dead end with Dr. Gilbert Wiles' research, approached Mr. Fantastic to study itself in order to determine the cause of its power and memory loss. However the study is interrupted when Gladiator of the Shi'ar Empire comes to take Captain Universe back to his homeworld for evaluation and depowerment. Under the belief that Captain Universe is going critical, he will not allow any to stand in his way of capturing it. However when he makes his move, Captain Universe takes residence inside Sue's body so that she can protect it from him. A battle ensues between Captain Uni-Sue and Gladiator, which eventually causes a massive tsunami. Briefly empowering Gladiator, Captain Universe brings him to understand that he is not going critical. Gladiator takes Sue and Captain Universe to stop the tsunami. At the end of the issue, Captain Universe and Gladiator depart for the Shi'ar Empire with Captain Universe being a guest, not a prisoner.

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Fantastic Four: A Death in the Family

Susan will apparently die in the upcoming 1-shot Fantastic Four: A Death in the Family. (This isn't actually a spoiler because it's the main selling point in solicitations for the book). More than likely, she will be resurrected in the same book because the following month she will be on Captain America's side (with Reed siding with Iron Man), during Marvel's Civil War event.

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Powers and abilities

After being exposed to cosmic radiation, Sue developed the ability to generate a form of energy native to hyperspace. At first, she could only use this form of energy to bend light waves at her command, generating a tightly knit field of energy around herself to render her body and clothing invisible to the naked eye. Sue's vision has also adapted to this ability, extending partially into the cosmic spectrum so she could still see objects cloaked by this energy. After some training, she eventually developed the ability to project this energy outwards to render other objects invisible. As a side effect, Sue also discovered that she could send her invisible energy in waves and sweeps to disrupt other invisibility effects, rendering them visible. Sue's power has been depicted as based on visualization, not vision - by focusing on a building's pipes, she could turn everything in the building invisible other than the pipes, without actually knowing where the pipes were.

When Sue developed her ability to render other objects invisible, she discovered she could shape the same energy into solid forms and use them as offensive weapons. Most commonly, Sue generates near-indestructible, invisible force fields around herself or other targets. The strength and durability of Sue's forcefields have not been tested; however, Sue was capable of shattering a Celestial's armor when she projected her energy inside of the being and expanded it rapidly outwards, causing the armor to break under the pressure, a task even Thor's Mjolnir could not do. Sue can shape her force fields into anything she can imagine, usually simple shapes such as barriers, columns, cones, cylinders, darts, discs, domes, platforms, rams, ramps, slides and spheres. By generating additional force behind her energy constructs, Sue can turn them into offensive weapons, ranging from massive invisible battering rams to small projectiles such as spheres and darts. She can generate solid force constructs as small as a marble or as large as 100 feet in diameter, and her hollow projections such as domes can extend up to several miles in area. By forming one of her force fields within an object and expanding the field, Sue can cause her target to explode. She can also travel atop animated constructs such as ramps, stairs, slides, columns and stepping discs, enabling her to simulate a limited approximation of levitation or flight. She can vary the texture and tensile strength of her field to some extent, rendering it highly rigid or as soft and yielding as foam; softer variations on the field enable her to cushion impacts more gently, and are less likely to result in a psionic backlash against Sue herself (in rare cases, sufficiently powerful attacks on her force fields can cause her mental or physical pain).

Originally, Sue was incapable of utilizing both uses of her powers - either she could turn something invisible or generate a forcefield. However, as of current, Sue has demonstrated the ability to generate multiple forcefields of varying strength while simultaneously rendering herself and other objects invisible.

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Ultimate Invisible Woman

The Ultimate version of Susan Storm is very similar in appearance and ability to the Marvel Universe Sue Richards, but differs somewhat in her history. As the rest of the Ultimate FF, she has only appeared as a teenager and young adult. A biophysics prodigy, she has grown up in the Baxter Building in the gifted program supervised by her father. She remains romantically involved with Reed Richards, but was briefly displayed interest in the Ultimate Namor.

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In other media

Image:And A Blind Man Shall Lead Them - FF.jpg

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Animation

Invisible Woman has been featured in three animated series throughout the years with her assertiveness increasing with each series along with society's growing acceptance of basic feminism principles. She has been voiced by Jo Ann Pflug, Ginny Tyler-Hilton, Lori Alan in the 1994 series.

Image:InvisibleWomanFilm.jpeg

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Film

Susan is played by actress Jessica Alba in the 2005 film version of the Fantastic Four. In the film, she is a brilliant young scientist who leads Victor Von Doom's Department of Scientific Research. She is Reed Richards' ex-girlfriend and dated Von Doom at the beginning of the film. Immediately before the cosmic storm grants her the ability to generate force fields and to become invisible, she is offered a proposal of marriage from Victor, but she later turns him down. Her powers seem to respond to her emotions such as anger, confusion, and frustration, which she manages to control by the end of the film in the final battle against Von Doom. She accepts Richards' proposal of marriage at the end.

Jessica Alba's portrayal of Sue is generally considered by fans as the weakest of the Four, although many such criticisms defer at least partial blame to the script for depicting Sue as a somewhat petulant and fundamentally disempowered, almost prefeminist woman who seems to essentially spend the film waiting around for Reed to declare his feelings for her whilst also needling him to do so. UK Empire magazine has described the film's mischaracterization of Sue as alternating between being a "whiny, pushy bitch and hollow lust object."

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References, parodies, spoofs and homages

The Invisible Woman has been parodied many times through the years. One notable homage is in Miss Invisible of the Mega-Hyper Heroes featured in an episode of Rugrats (a spoof of both the Teen Titans and the Fantastic Four). Lil, a fan of Miss Invisible, has a superhero counterpart called Dotted-Line Girl who has similar abilities, but can be seen, as a dotted line. And it is quite obvious that Violet, in the Disney/Pixar movie The Incredibles is modeled after the Invisible Woman.

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Bibliography

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List of titles

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Significant stories

  • Fantastic Four #400 (May 1995); "Even the Watchers die!" - Invisible Woman is able to enter the body of a Celestial and destroy it from within.
  • Fantastic Four Vol. 3 #2 (February 1998); "Be it ever so humble..." - Susan was the only person able to fight and defeat the mysterious creature, Iconoclast.
  • Fantastic Four Vol. 3 #21-22 (September 1999 - October 1999); "Rascals 4" - "Lost Hope!" - Susan meets her daughter, Marvel Girl, from a possible future.
  • Fantastic Four Vol. 3 #54 (June 2002); "A Choice of Dooms" - Doctor Doom helps deliver Susan's baby and names her Valeria.
  • Fantastic Four #509-511 (March 2004 - May 2004); "Hereafter" - Reed finds a way to bring back Ben from the afterlife.
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External links

fi:Näkymätön nainen pt:Mulher Invisível sv:Invisible Woman

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