On the 13th Day of Jack Kirby Tribute Month 2025 (curated by Howard Simpson), the theme (as you know by now) is the Fantastic Four and related characters. Today’s prompt is Franklin Richards, son of Reed and Sue.
Franklin was a late cast addition during Jack and Stan’s FF run. Just making sure Sue could safely give birth to Franklin resulted in the rest of the team having to risk their lives by leaping into the Negative Zone in FF Annual #6 (more on that in a future post).
I initially thought about trying to do something fancier with my depiction, show Franklin using some of the powers later creators gave him. But with all of these Kirby Tribute FF images, I’ve made a rule for myself to stay within the limits of what Jack and Stan did during their run. And during that time, Franklin was pretty much just a normal, healthy baby.
It might throw some of you to see him with brown hair, but that was how Franklin was depicted for a long time, even after Kirby left the book. I’m not sure at what point he was shifted over to being depicted as blond, but that was how Franklin was being shown by the time John Byrne did his FF run. And doing some Googling, it seems there are now images of him also having black hair. No idea what that’s about.
That’s it for Franklin. If you like, come by tomorrow to see who’s up next.