Who Is The Baby In Fantastic Four? A Sleep-Deprived Investigation

When our twin girls finally arrived, the influx of advice was swift, unyielding, and entirely contradictory. My mother-in-law insisted I keep them perpetually encased in heavy wool lest they catch a phantom draft in our predictably stuffy London flat. The bloke who runs the local off-license suggested rubbing whiskey on their gums (which I assume was mostly a ploy to sell me more Famous Grouse). Meanwhile, our NHS health visitor casually implied that if the ambient room temperature deviated from precisely 19.3 degrees Celsius, I was essentially courting disaster.

So, naturally, when I sat down to watch the latest Marvel spectacle and saw Reed Richards frantically trying to babyproof a retro-futuristic skyscraper against cosmic radiation, I didn't see a brilliant superhero. I saw a profoundly tired bloke who had clearly just spoken to his own health visitor. Suddenly, half the internet is Googling "who's the baby in fantastic four," not because we care about the lore, but because beneath the spandex, it's the most shockingly accurate depiction of newborn terror we've had in years.

Explaining Franklin Richards to a sleep-deprived audience

For those of you who haven't waded into the deep end of Marvel comic history, the baby in question is Franklin Richards, the newborn son of Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic) and Sue Storm (The Invisible Woman). Because he was conceived by parents who had been heavily irradiated by space storms, Franklin is born with the "Power Cosmic," making him arguably the most powerful being in the entire universe.

His abilities are apparently so vast that Galactus—a giant purple space god who eats planets—attempts to kidnap the baby to satiate his endless hunger. Honestly, if a giant purple space deity had knocked on our door during month four and offered to take over the night feeds, there were days I might have handed over Twin A, asked for a receipt, and gone back to sleep. You do strange things when you're operating on forty minutes of broken rest.

Sometimes, when I look at the CGI in these massive blockbuster films, the infant on screen looks less like a human and more like some sort of algorithmic e baby generated by a wildly overworked visual effects artist. But the panic in Reed Richards' eyes? That's entirely, brilliantly real.

Cosmic radiation and other minor domestic hazards

There's a scene where Reed is obsessively building prenatal scanning technology and trying to babyproof the Baxter Building. It made me laugh out loud, waking up the baby I had just spent an hour rocking to sleep, because the impulse is so universal. You bring this incredibly fragile creature into your home, look around, and suddenly realize that everything you own is a lethal weapon.

I vaguely remember our GP casually mentioning something about heavy furniture being a tipping hazard, which somehow morphed in my sleep-addled brain into an absolute certainty that our IKEA Hemnes dresser was plotting to assassinate my children. This led to a Tuesday night where I found myself drilling fourteen holes into crumbling Victorian plasterboard, desperately trying to secure a bookshelf that weighed less than our arthritic cat.

You don't need a Ph.D. in astrophysics to babyproof your flat, but the anxiety feels just as cosmic. You end up buying corner guards for tables that are already round and locking cupboards that only contain plastic Tupperware.

The great nursery temperature panic

The thing the movie gets absolutely right is the feeling that you're entirely unequipped to keep this small organism comfortable. When the twins were six months old, trying to keep stable their temperature was my personal Galactus. Twin A was a furnace who sweated through her sleepsuits, while Twin B shivered if a moth fluttered its wings three streets over. I read a parenting manual that claimed you should just trust your instincts (page 47 suggests you remain calm, which I found deeply unhelpful at 3am).

We eventually stopped swaddling them in layers of synthetic panic and got the Mono Rainbow Bamboo Baby Blanket. I don't usually rave about fabric, but I genuinely love this thing. It actually breathes, which means I no longer wake up in a cold sweat wondering if I've accidentally roasted my daughters. It's made from a blend of organic bamboo and cotton, and it somehow manages to keep Twin A cool and Twin B warm, which defies the laws of physics in a way that Reed Richards would probably appreciate. Plus, the terracotta rainbow design looks vaguely sophisticated draped over the back of our battered sofa, giving the illusion that we're adults who still care about interior design.

Footwear for creatures who can't walk

While we're on the subject of dressing our offspring for survival, let's talk about the bizarre societal pressure to put shoes on infants. In the comics, the Fantastic Four wear those unstable molecule uniforms that perfectly adapt to their bodies. In reality, we've baby shoes.

We were gifted a pair of Baby Sneakers from Kianao. Look, I'll be completely honest with you: trying to put laced shoes onto a thrashing, furious six-month-old is rather like trying to put socks on an angry badger. They look absolutely brilliant, I'll give them that. If you need to make your infant look like a tiny, aggressive yachtsman for a family photo or a wedding where you're trying to prove to your relatives that you haven't entirely lost control of your life, these are genuinely your best bet. The soft soles are actually decent because they don't restrict their weird little foot movements. But be warned, if your baby is anything like Twin B, she will spend forty-five minutes methodically trying to eat the laces the moment you look away.

Speaking of eating things they shouldn't, when teeth start coming in, your sweet newborn transforms into a feral chewing machine that leaves everything covered in a thick, sticky layer of drool. My wife bought the Bubble Tea Teether in a moment of desperation. It's shaped like a little cup of boba, and it's entirely fine. The girls gnaw on it happily enough, and the silicone means I can chuck it in the dishwasher when it inevitably gets dropped onto the floor of the 38 bus. It doesn't perform miracles, but it does buy me approximately four minutes of silence to drink a lukewarm coffee, which is its own kind of superpower.

If you're currently trapped underneath a sleeping infant and only have one hand free, feel free to mindlessly scroll through our organic baby blankets collection while you wait for the feeling to return to your arm.

The truth about Agatha Harkness as a childminder

Deep in the Marvel lore, it's revealed that Franklin Richards' first nanny was Agatha Harkness, an ancient, morally ambiguous witch. Honestly, given the current state of nursery fees in London, I'd gladly hand over a sizable chunk of my income to a dark sorceress if she promised to teach the girls some basic manners and charged less than ninety quid a day.

Surviving the postpartum gauntlet

There's a important moment in the new movie where Sue Storm essentially dies from exhaustion while trying to protect her family, and baby Franklin has to use his cosmic powers to resurrect her.

It's a heavy-handed metaphor, but bloody hell, is it accurate. While mothers aren't physically fighting off cosmic entities, the physical and mental toll of the postpartum period is utterly brutal. I remember our GP looking at my wife about four weeks after the twins were born, muttered something about perinatal mood disorders affecting an absurd number of women (I can't recall the exact statistic because I was frantically trying to wipe spit-up off my trousers with a dried-out baby wipe at the time), and observing that human beings simply aren't designed to heal from major abdominal surgery while keeping two hostile, screaming potatoes alive on two hours of sleep.

The medical pamphlets make it all sound so clinical, but the reality is just incredibly messy. You're leaking, you're exhausted, and you're terrified. Rather than suggesting you implement a rigid self-care routine while ensuring your baby sleeps when you sleep and constantly drinking water to maintain your milk supply, I'll just gently offer that you should probably lower your standards until everyone is just surviving the day without crying, and maybe invest in some really decent nipple cream.

Franklin Richards might be the most powerful infant in the fictional universe, but every parent views their newborn as the absolute center of their own fragile cosmos. You don't need a high-tech scanner to keep them safe, just a bit of common sense, a good doctor, and the knowledge that every other parent is winging it just as much as you're.

Before you dive back into the trenches of parenthood, take a moment to explore our collection of sustainable nursery decor to make your own Baxter Building slightly more comfortable.

Frequently Asked Questions (Because Google Is Terrifying at 3 AM)

Why does Galactus want to eat the baby in Fantastic Four?
Because Galactus feeds on cosmic energy, and baby Franklin is basically a walking, babbling battery of the stuff. It's an extreme version of when your mother-in-law descends upon your house and insists on entirely draining your child's social battery right before nap time, leaving you to deal with the inevitable meltdown.

Is Franklin Richards considered a mutant?
It depends on which decade of comics you're reading, but generally, yes. He's often classified as an Omega-level mutant. Though, to be fair, when my girls are shrieking at a pitch that shatters wine glasses because I gave them the blue cup instead of the red cup, I'm fairly certain they possess the mutant X-gene as well.

Did Reed Richards really build a cosmic baby monitor?
Yes, he builds all sorts of absurd tech to monitor Sue's pregnancy and the baby's power levels. It sounds ridiculous until you realize I once spent £150 on an e-baby monitor that tracked my daughter's heart rate, breathing, and sleep cycles, which only served to give me clinical anxiety every time she shifted slightly in her sleep.

Can I actually babyproof my flat properly?
You can try, but toddlers are nature's ultimate escape artists. Anchor the heavy stuff to the walls so they aren't crushed by an armoire, put covers on the sockets, and accept that they'll still somehow find a single rogue Lego brick under the sofa and try to swallow it while making direct eye contact with you.

How do I deal with the anxiety of a new baby?
I honestly don't know if it ever entirely goes away. You just get used to carrying it around. You realize that you can't control everything, that dropping a pacifier on the pavement won't immediately result in the bubonic plague, and that sometimes, the best you can do is just keep them reasonably clean, fed, and loved.