The Fantastic Four themselves are too uncomfortably familiar to be the baby-boom generation's midlife-crisis companions. Irreversibly bound to each other by traits they didn't choose, can't control and don't fully comprehend, they resemble nothing so much as a souped-up dysfunctional family -- which, cliché and all, is precisely what they are. Novelist and kindred belly-acher Rick Moody tapped into this aspect of the title in his 1994 novel "The Ice Storm," in which he made stinging, fanciful comparisons between the members of the depressive superteam and a 1970s suburban family morally adrift in Connecticut. (Screenwriter James Schamus toned down the Fantastic Four allusions in his 1997 screen adaptation, but it's worth noting that the film featured future Peter Parker Tobey Maguire in a leading role and was directed by Ang Lee, who is helming the upcoming Hulk film. Why does the Marvel Universe suddenly seem so small?)

As Moody recognized, the only sound option when ensnared in such a filial nightmare is to escape. But Marvel was understandably hesitant to alter the basic setup of the Fantastic Four, least of all by allowing its members to break away for good and rediscover their humanity. The minute their abnormalities -- the very things that oppress them but which also make them "fantastic" (not to mention profitable) -- recede, they're rendered redundant and unimportant. They become, in a word, normal. For comics fans hovering near 50, that feeling may hit a little too close to home.

Even if Marvel was agreeable to realistic temporal and emotional changes in its characters' lives (which in many ways were granted to Spider-Man by the film), middle-aged readers would probably welcome their erstwhile heroes' waning powers as much as they relish their own. This is doubly true of '60s kids, who came to equate the Four's double-edged weirdness with their own generational disaffection.

Despite radical influences from the decade of their inception, however, the Fantastic Four were restricted to a resolutely bourgeois framework, and their powers worked just as well as grotesque metaphors for the previous era's bankrupt ideals. Consequently, although the FF's dubious talents served them well in their careers, they also tended to make their home lives punishingly repressed. Haphazard stabs at normalcy were made: The Richardses had a child and even hideous Ben found a girlfriend. But little Franklin was summarily rushed into the care of a witch and sensitive, redheaded Alicia -- who eventually ran off with Johnny Storm -- was conveniently blind and, one presumes, more than a little kinky. Try as they might, these perpetual sad sacks remained more fallen heroes than superheroes: Marvel's grotesque lesser gods to DC's dully supreme beings.

Like Hollywood in the wake of "Spider-Man," Marvel cashed in on the chord such freakishness struck with the Four's readers by creating a whole new pantheon of twisted deities. By doing so, they unwittingly sowed the seeds of the genre's insignificance. Spidey represented -- and clearly still represents -- the young-adult contingent, but even though he was as burdened with his powers as the FF, he came off as more whiny than genuinely wretched. (Kudos to director Sam Raimi, screenwriter David Koepp and Maguire for excising this trait from their incarnation.)

For bona fide misery there was Thor, a disabled doctor who somehow channeled the Norse god of thunder (does anyone need to be reminded of what that's like?), and Iron Man, a walking rust bucket with no visible means of waste elimination. The Hulk, the Angel and Daredevil are pretty much self-explanatory.

This phenomenon culminated with the X-Men, of which the Angel was a founding member. Not especially popular during their initial run, this gaggle of mutants -- a spade at last being called a spade -- nevertheless gained a following and eventually inaugurated the current spate of Marvel-based blockbusters. In print, however, they were one collection of misfits too many, and their uneven exploits codified the whole troubled-superhero category until it became routine, repetitious and tediously self-mocking; '70s title "Howard the Duck," which spawned a universally derided George Lucas film of the same name, was a prime offender.

In any event, by then DC had breathed new, tortured life into war horses like Green Lantern and the Flash and had even generated a few intriguingly freakish gods of their own. What else to call a "hero" named Deadman? The inevitable result is that the Fantastic Four ceased to stand out. Lost in the glut, their built-in obsolescence was hastened and they became as firmly (though perhaps not as deeply) encased in nostalgic amber as Superman or Batman, dead men in their own right.

It's no help that the social conditions that informed the title and the freak-power that briefly encouraged it haven't survived into the new millennium. Weirdness as a badge of rebellion or affinity has either become so absorbed into mainstream culture (how else to explain the popularity of the decidedly Marvelesque Ozzy Osbourne and his brood?) or confusingly varied (browse the titles in any comics shop for proof) as to be irrelevant. Nowadays, everyone's either a superfreak or pretends to be one.

Spidey, apparently, appeals to the oddball in everyone. By failing to reflect the compromised hopes of his original fans or remind new ones of where they might be headed, "Spider-Man" neatly sidesteps the queasy existential baggage inherent all along in "The Fantastic Four." Little wonder that Raimi's film has received such a glowing reception, while Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben plod along as always, courted by Hollywood only as potential parody material or for substandard drive-in fare, their significance -- and their birthdays -- utterly forgotten.

This story has been corrected since it was first published.

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