Fantastic Four and the Asymmetric Return of Mid-Century Names

Marvel's Fantastic Four: First Steps opened on Friday to a hundred-and-seventeen-million-dollar domestic gross and a critical reception that has, finally, been kind to a Fantastic Four film. Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards. Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm. Joseph Quinn as Johnny. Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben. The retro-futurist 1960s production design has been the focus of most reviews, but the part of the film I found most interesting was the moment, about ten minutes in, when all four characters introduced themselves by their first names in quick succession, and I realized that the four names — Reed, Sue, Ben, Johnny — read exactly like the SSA top 100 of 1962. Which is, of course, what they were when Stan Lee wrote them.

The 1962 register

If you pull SSA's 1962 boys' top 100, you get a list dominated by a specific aesthetic: monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon names (Mark, Paul, John, Steven), surnames-as-first-names that had been respectable for fifty years (Reed wasn't on the chart yet but Lewis, Carl, and Wayne were), and the diminutive nicknames that midcentury America treated as full legal names (Bobby, Johnny, Ricky, Tommy). The girls' chart is thicker with the soft, rhyming, three-syllable names — Linda, Susan, Patricia — but it also has the Sue, Sandy, Cindy register that, as I wrote about Connie Francis, is having its TikTok moment right now.

Stan Lee did not pick the Fantastic Four's names by sitting down with the SSA chart. He picked them because, in 1961, they were the names that read as friendly and contemporary to him — the names of college students he might have known, the names of returning servicemen who might be visiting his neighborhood. The names were ambient. They reflected the SSA chart not because they were curated but because they were what every name was. That's the strange and slightly melancholy thing about reading old comics: every character has a name from the moment the comic was written, and you can date the work to within five years just from the casting.

What 2025 parents will and won't borrow

The interesting question, watching the new film, is which of the four names contemporary parents are willing to take back. I'd argue the answer is asymmetric, and the asymmetry tells you exactly how vintage revival actually works. Of the four names — Reed, Sue, Ben, Johnny — only one is currently available to a 2025 parent without significant cultural friction. That's Ben.

Ben has held remarkably steady. The full form Benjamin has been a top-25 boys' name for over twenty years, and Ben as a standalone given name (rather than as a nickname for Benjamin) sits in the top 700 and has been slowly rising. Ben works because it's monosyllabic, biblical, easy to spell, and doesn't carry any single dominant cultural reference. A child named Ben in 2025 will not be tagged with any decade's connotations.

Reed is the most interesting case, and I think the most likely to move based on the film. Reed has been climbing for the last decade — it's gone from the boys' top 700 in 2014 to the upper 400s in 2024 — riding the broader trend of surnames as first names that has been dominant in upper-middle-class naming since roughly 2010. Hudson, Brooks, Beckett, Sutton, Wells. Reed sits inside that register, and the Fantastic Four bump may push it into the top 350 in 2026 SSA data. Vanessa Kirby's Sue Storm, meanwhile, will not move the name Sue, because Sue is dead in a way that I want to be careful about claiming.

Why Sue cannot come back

Sue peaked in 1958, fell out of the top 100 by 1976, and has been below 1000 since 1996. The name has not been picked in any meaningful number for nearly thirty years, and the reason is not that the sound is unappealing. Sue is fine. Susan, the formal name, is also rare. The reason Sue is dead is that it has become so culturally tagged to a specific generation of women — women now in their late 60s and 70s — that picking the name for a baby would be an aggressive statement about generational distance. Parents do not want their daughter's first name to read as seventy years older than my daughter.

This is a different kind of friction than the friction on a name like Karen, which I wrote about last week. Karen has acquired a meme-driven cultural reference. Sue has not acquired a reference; it has just aged out, and the aging is so complete that the name now reads as someone's grandmother and not as a fashion-cycle revival candidate. The recovery cycle for names like Sue is approximately a hundred years — they need to skip a generation entirely before they can come back as deliberate vintage choices, the way Eleanor and Beatrice came back in the 2010s.

Johnny is locked in pet-name territory

Johnny is the fourth Fantastic Four name and the most awkward case. Johnny was a top-50 boys' name from 1923 through 1963 and a top-100 name through 1980. It has fallen steadily since, and it is now outside the top 800 and used almost exclusively as a nickname for John. The thing that's happened to Johnny, which I find genuinely interesting and which has not, as far as I can tell, been written about, is that the name has migrated into pet naming.

If you look at Seattle's pet licensing data, Johnny appears more often as a dog name than it does as a boy name in 2024 SSA data. Same in NYC. The name has crossed a kind of threshold from human to pet — it now reads, to most parents, as the kind of name you'd give a small enthusiastic dog rather than a son. Once a name crosses that threshold, the recovery cycle becomes much longer, because the parent considering the name has to actively override an instinct that the name belongs to a different species.

The Marvel asymmetry as a teaching case

What I like about the four-way comparison — Reed climbing, Ben stable and high, Sue dead, Johnny in pet-name territory — is that it shows how cleanly the rules of vintage revival actually operate. The names that come back are the ones that read as surnames or as biblical, that are short and easy, and that have not yet been tagged to a specific demographic of grandmothers. The names that don't come back are the ones tagged to a particular cohort, the ones that have migrated to pet naming, or the ones that carry too much weight from a specific real or fictional person.

Marvel didn't engineer this asymmetry. They just took Stan Lee's 1961 names and gave them back to a 2025 audience. What's interesting is what the audience does with the offer. By 2027 SSA data, I'd predict a small but visible Reed bump, a flat-to-slightly-higher Ben, no movement on Sue, and a Johnny that continues its slow decline as a human name and continues its slow rise as a dog name. The film will not change those trajectories meaningfully. But it will let us see them, all four side by side, in a way that's rare in name analysis.

And it will, incidentally, give us a film with four characters whose names sound almost identical to the names of every parent and grandparent of every kid who shows up in the theater. The retro-futurism is the marketing. The retro-naming is the actual gift.