What a revoltin’ development! Marvel Studios on Wednesday dropped the final Fantastic Four: First Steps trailer, and in it, the ever-lovin’, blue-eyed Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is sporting a new bearded look. You might be thinking: Sweet Aunt Petunia! The Thing can grow facial hair? In fact, the Thing’s look has undergone various permutations since Ben Grimm became the rock-skinned superhero in 1961’s The Fantastic Four #1 from creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
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Take a look at the clean-shaven Thing and the bearded Thing from the new trailer:
The first time the Thing was depicted with a beard was in Fantastic Four #5, when Doctor Doom’s time travel machine sent Thing, Human Torch, and Mister Fantastic centuries into the past to find the legendary pirate Blackbeard’s treasure. To conceal their conspicuous costumes, the trio donned disguises, with Thing wearing a fake beard. (The black-bearded Thing, in turn, inspired the legend of Blackbeard in a timey-wimey twist.)
In 2005’s Wha… Huh? #1 — a parody comic of Marvel’s What If, which imagined alternate scenarios across the Marvel multiverse — Thing had a bushy beard in “Mark Millar asks, ‘What if the Avengers all had beards?’” In another alternate reality in 2010’s Hulked-Out Heroes, Thing remained in the year 1717 as Thingbeard the Pirate and was immortalized (with a beard) in a statue honoring America’s first president who took on the British at sea to start the American Revolution.
Most recently, the Thing grew a beard in 2012’s Fantastic Four #605 by Jonathan Hickman and Ron Garney. Hickman’s influential Fantastic Four run inspired the Future Foundation in First Steps, but in the future-set issue, a time-traveling Reed Richards and his father made a visit to a futuristic New York City in the year 3012. In this possible future, Ben had lived a thousand years due to taking a serum enabling him to revert to his human form one week a year — during which is the only time he aged. The bearded Ben Grimm was still alive by the years 4012 and 5012, and by the time he died in 6012 A.D., still had a lengthy beard.
As for how the Thing can grow a beard, his rocky orange skin is more like a rock-textured hide. The cosmic rays that gave the Fantastic Four their powers made Ben’s skin, as well as his bone musculature and internal organs, stronger and denser, but his rocky hide can be chipped.
Take, for example, Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo’s Fantastic Four #70, where Doctor Doom’s Mindless Ones beat the Thing into submission and began chipping away at his rocky hide, leaving part of Ben’s flesh exposed beneath his rocky exterior for a time.
Marvel Studios’ The Fantastic Four: First Steps — which stars Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/the Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/Human Torch, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/the Thing, with Julia Garner as Silver Surfer and Ralph Ineson as Galactus — opens only in theaters July 25.
