The All-New Fantastic Four Inverts Marvel’s 1991 Swap

Al Ewing’s Queen in Black #4, on sale September 16, 2026, has Johnny Storm name a street-fighting All-New Fantastic Four while Hela’s living armor hits Earth. The Human Torch and the Thing pick up Nova and Captain Alliance and treat the old brand as a battle cry.

Reed Richards, still inside the Baxter Building with Sue Storm, answers with a second label and a stack of 5 logos. The original four are all still in the fight, on two doors.

Johnny Storm Named an All-New Fantastic Four

The fourth chapter of the five-issue Queen in Black event, drawn by Iban Coello and Paco Medina, puts the founders on two clocks at once. Hela has taken the King in Black’s power and sent alien hosts in symbiote plate at Earth. Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm take the streets of New York. Reed and Sue stay home to build a weapon out of other people’s powers.

Marvel’s own September 16 Queen in Black issue listing prices the comic at $4.99 for 20 pages, rated T+. Ryan Stegman drew the cover, Jordan White edited, Guru-eFX colored it, and Clayton Cowles lettered it.

THE SEPTEMBER 16 ISSUE

• On sale: September 16, 2026, as the fourth chapter of a five-issue event.
• The price: $4.99, for a 20-page T+ comic.
• The street name: Johnny Storm calls his quartet the All-New Fantastic Four.
• The house name: Reed Richards brands the Baxter Building group the Fantastic Five and hands out 5 logos.

Johnny’s line is the one that will travel, because Marvel has sold that phrase before, and the last time a Skrull was involved she was the one doing the selling.

1991’s New Four Lasted Three Issues

Walt Simonson and Arthur Adams built the last famous “new” Fantastic Four in Fantastic Four #347 through #349, a run of three issues in 1991. A Skrull named De’Lila crashed on Earth, walked into Four Freedoms Plaza, and used a synapse disrupter to knock the real team out. Then she posed as Sue Richards, told four other heroes the family was dead, and sent them after monsters.

The stand-ins were the hottest characters of that moment: Spider-Man, Wolverine, the gray Hulk in his Joe Fixit years, and Danny Ketch’s Ghost Rider. Marvel’s recap of the 1991 New Fantastic Four story notes that De’Lila even used the team’s own computers to pick them. The truth came out across those three issues. The unusual foursome helped the originals finish the fight, then split.

Marvel has never really let the gag die. The group turned up again in Fantastic Four #374. Franklin and Valeria Richards later pulled Spider-Man and Wolverine back into matching blue-and-black costumes during a Kree-Skrull-Cotati fight in Fantastic Four #21 through #23, using image inducers to fake Hulk and Ghost Rider. In 2022, Peter David and Alan Robinson got a limited series that sent the 1991 lineup to Las Vegas. Paco Medina, who drew that kids’ restage, is back on Queen in Black #4.

Fill-ins around that gag were quieter and more domestic.

THE OTHER SUBSTITUTES

• Crystal: Took Sue’s spot when Invisible Woman was pregnant with Franklin.
• Luke Cage and She-Hulk: Each filled in for the Thing at different times.
• Black Panther and Storm: Joined when Reed and Sue needed time away.

Those swaps kept the number at four while the missing member sat out. 1991 needed a fake funeral. Queen in Black #4 leaves the funeral out, 35 years later, and runs the plot in reverse.

THE NAME’S PRIOR LIVES

1. 1991: De’Lila fakes Sue’s grief and fields Spider-Man, Wolverine, the gray Hulk, and Ghost Rider in Fantastic Four #347-349.
2. Fantastic Four #374: The same odd four resurfaces a few years after that first three-issue run.
3. Fantastic Four (2018) #21-23: Franklin and Valeria restage the look with Spider-Man and Wolverine.
4. 2022: Peter David and Alan Robinson revive the 1991 lineup in a limited New Fantastic Four series.
5. September 16, 2026: Johnny Storm applies the name to a living street squad in Queen in Black #4.

The through-line is not “Marvel loves shake-ups.” It is that the phrase All-New Fantastic Four has almost always meant someone else wearing the number because the family was unavailable. This issue keeps the family on payroll.

The Original Four Never Left

The 1991 trick needed a hole. De’Lila had to hide Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben for the substitute four to exist. Queen in Black #4 does the opposite. All four founders are on-panel and working. They just stopped sharing a logo for the length of a war.

Johnny and Ben are the muscle on the pavement. They have fought Kree soldiers for years, and those soldiers now wear Hela’s living armor as Symbiote Legion Blue. Reed stays with Sue at the Baxter Building because the fight they want is not a punch. It is a way to turn other heroes’ powers against Hela and Knull.

Black Cat is out on her own job. With the house short-handed, Reed names the remaining group the Fantastic Five and prints new 5 badges. Johnny, out in the smoke, names his quartet the All-New Fantastic Four. Two brands, one family, no funeral.

A Skrull once faked a widow to borrow four celebrities. Now a Skrull in a flag stands next to Ben Grimm because the widow is alive, leading the other team, and strong enough to take the sun away.

Who Fights With the Thing and the Torch?

The All-New Fantastic Four is Johnny Storm, Ben Grimm, Richard Rider, and R’gars. Two of them have been Fantastic Four since 1961. The other two arrived from the wreck of 2025’s Imperial war, and the issue treats the four as a combat unit that wins by stacking powers.

THEN AND NOW

Johnny is using a new layer of flame control to build ‘Flame-O’, a living-fire copy of himself that seems to follow his unstated thoughts. The double lasts only while Johnny is awake, which means the street team can field extra fire without Reed’s permission.

Ben is still the heat sink. His rocky hide lets him grab burning enemies and hold them still, and against Firelord, a former herald of Galactus now serving Hela, that grip is the whole plan. Nova carries the Nova Force and the Xandarian Worldmind stored in Rider, the last big remnant of a corps that keeps dying. Queen in Black #4 shows he can charge that power off Johnny’s flame, which is not a trick the 1991 four ever had. If Rider empties the tank at 100 percent, the Worldmind as the issue frames it will shut down for good.

Captain Alliance is R’gars, a Third-Class Power Skrull who still wears the colors of the Kree/Skrull Alliance after that empire came apart. He heals from wounds that should end a fight, changes size and density, and fights with a shield he can grow from his own body. He trained in eleven Skrull martial arts. He has apparently never heard of Captain America. Spider-Man called that “parallel evolution.”

Reed Richards Handed Out New 5 Logos

While the street four hits Noh-Varr and Firelord, the Baxter Building group tries to turn the event’s own biology against it. Sue Storm is the team’s leader in current comics, and Marvel’s own power roundup has been stacking the reasons. She held a force field against Galactus long enough for the others to drop him. She once smashed a Celestial’s brain through armor that Galactus could not crack. In Fantastic Four (2022) #6 she went to space with Johnny and made sunlight invisible for three days to starve a parasitic outbreak. Recent stories have her building a working jet from invisible constructs.

Reed is still the smartest stretch of human tissue in the building. He has been treating his own shape as optional, moving his eyes to his fingertips when the work asks for it.

THE BAXTER BUILDING FIVE

• Invisible Woman: Leader, force fields, light control; the strategic ceiling of the house team.
• Mister Fantastic: Tactician, trying to turn Eganrac into a weapon against Hela’s hosts.
• Spider-Man: Longtime unofficial extra, now wearing the 5, with a danger sense recently shifted toward pure instinct.
• Venom (Mary Jane Watson): Bonded since Venom War and unable to separate; her suit carries Eganrac, which hurts Carnage’s line and also caps her own peak strength.
• Codex (Dylan Brock): Eddie Brock’s half-symbiote son, whose Chain-Breaker sword should cut a host off the hive and currently cannot.

Spider-Man’s placement is the quiet joke on 1991. He was the face of that substitute Four. This time he is upstairs with Reed and Sue, and the “new” Four is two founders plus two aliens. Mary Jane as Venom is the other new physics in the building. Reed spends the issue probing Codex and Eganrac, and Hela’s magic has blocked the Chain-Breaker, a gap the book ties to Asgardians being wiped from human memory in The Immortal Thor.

Will the end of Venom’s golden era coincide with the end of Planet Earth?

Marvel, Queen in Black #4 issue listing

That line is the house team’s whole job in one question. The street four can pin a herald. The Five have to make a god of death let go of a planet.

Captain Alliance Still Wears a Dead Flag

R’gars is the character the name change actually introduces. Al Ewing and Carlos Gómez brought him into Earth-616 in 2025 as a captain in the Kree/Skrull Alliance, a Third-Class Power Skrull sent to spy on Chitauri Prime. He jumped from his ship, walked into a palace line, and found the Chitauri being fitted with newborn symbiotes. The Imperial war cut him off from command. Kree at a refueling station told him the Alliance was already dead and the Skrulls had burned the trust. He would not take that as the last word.

He fought through a station that had gone over to Knull’s cult, blew the core, and aimed a warning at Venom on his way to Earth. The recording was lost in an alley after the crash. He still showed up in time to stand next to Ben Grimm with a shield and a flag for a government that no longer exists.

In Queen in Black #1 he called himself a super-soldier still loyal to a shared dream after his society changed, and asked Earth’s heroes if they had one of those too. The costume invites the Captain America comparison. The biography does not. He is not a spare Steve Rogers. He is what is left of Hulkling’s peace once the peace failed, which is why he belongs on a team that is also wearing a retired number.

The Combo That Dropped Firelord

The street name would be empty without a new move, and Queen in Black #4 gives them one. Ben holds Firelord still. Johnny pours flame into Nova. Rider, fed by that heat, puts out a blast the herald cannot tank. Heat-sensitive living armor is a bad match for a man who is on fire and a friend who cannot burn. Noh-Varr is in the same pile of Hela’s strongest, and the book treats the four as a unit that wins by stacking powers, not by taking turns.

That mix is what the 1991 four never had. Wolverine, Ghost Rider, Hulk, and Spider-Man were a bill of popular names. They did not complete each other’s voltage. Johnny charging Rider does. It is the one trick in the issue that would not work with any other quartet, which is the only test a new Fantastic Four has to pass.

Reed’s lab is the other unfinished machine, because Codex cannot cut Hela’s army free and Eganrac should. The issue ends on whatever Reed just made of that collision.