The first teaser trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps is here, and it seems like the whole world is watching Reed Richards’s team of astronauts with bated breath. One of those watching, at least in a poster released on Marvel’s website, appears to be a familiar face to longtime Marvel readers.
Or maybe that’s Marvels readers, as the man seen at the far right of the poster below looks suspiciously like Daily Bugle photojournalist Phil Sheldon, who served as the point-of-view character for the acclaimed series by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross.
In Marvels, Sheldon — as a reporter — was able to simultaneously appear at almost every major event that took place in the early days of the Marvel Universe, but also go mostly unnoticed. He was, after all, just a guy with a camera.
For much of the series, Sheldon wore an eyepatch over his left eye. There is no obvious sign of a patch in the poster image, and there’s certainly no guarantee that story will make its way into Fantastic Four: First Steps, even if Sheldon himself does.
After Stan Lee passed away in 2018, some fans have suggested that a good way to nod to Lee’s legacy of Marvel movie cameos would be to cast someone in the role of Phil Sheldon, effectively cementing a character into the universe who could appear in any project for any (or no) reason. It seems unlikely Marvel would go that far — especially given rumors that Fantastic Four will take place on a different world in Marvel’s multiverse — but it’s a fun idea to entertain…and, of course, Disney did buy the rights to use a digital recreation of Lee in future films.
Released in 1994, Marvels was the project that made Alex Ross a household name with most comic book fans. It also helped to elevate Busiek’s profile before he took on his fan-favorite run as writer of The Avengers. The series also won three Eisner Awards — including Best Limited Series — and was nominated for two more.
In 2008, Busiek returned to the world of Marvels with the miniseries Marvels: Eye of the Camera. The next year, Phil Sheldon passed away in the series’ final issue. He was featured once again in the 2019 one-shot Marvels Epilogue, which reunited Busiek and Ross.
Since Sheldon worked at the Daily Bugle, he has periodically made brief in-continuity appearances in Spider-Man titles. In Ross’s DC series Kingdom Come, the character of Norman MacKay — a minister who accompanied The Spectre, unseen, through the story — played a similar role to Sheldon’s.
Relatively little is known about the plot of Fantastic Four: First Steps, but the film’s central antagonist will be Galactus (who even got a brief cameo in the trailer). In Marvels, Sheldon was there for Galactus’s first, fateful battle with the Fantastic Four — even though editor J. Jonah Jameson tried to handwave the whole thing as a hoax.
Fantastic Four: First Steps will launch into theaters on July 25.
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