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Marvel readers have an interesting relationship with superhero marriages. Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson’s marriage was erased from the timeline in 2007, yet Marvel and their readers continually bring it up - and it gained a new life thanks to the Soider-verse in Ultimate Spider-Man. While the reaction  was smaller, readers also pushed back when Marvel ended the marriages of Black Panther and Storm, and Hawkeye and Mockingbird. However, there’s one superhero marriage that most Marvel readers didn’t mind losing.

In 1986's Fantastic Four #300 the Human Torch marries Alicia Masters, ex-girlfriend of his teammate the Thing. Johnny Storm and Alicia spent the next five years having newlywed soap opera drama, until it was revealed that Alicia had been a Skrull all along in 1991's Fantastic Four #357. The real Alicia, who had never married Johnny and was still in love with Ben, was rescued, and the status quo was reset.

When writer Tom DeFalco took over Fantastic Four, he made the decision to end the Johnny/Alicia marriage. He thought fans would be upset, but their reaction surprised him.

“John Byrne had Johnny start dating Alicia,” DeFalco says during a panel at Dragon Con. “When Alicia was first introduced, she was supposed to look exactly like Sue Storm, and we thought, ‘He’s dating someone who looks exactly like his sister? Ewww.’ And then he married her, we all thought it was kind of freaky. A lot of us older fans thought it made no sense.”

Marvel editorial spent years wondering how to end the Johnny and Alicia marriage. DeFalco recalls one of those discussions.

“One day I was at [Marvel editor] Ralph Macchio’s house, and he and Mark Gruenwald were talking about the whole Alicia thing and how it could be fixed. And they said, ‘We could always say she was a Skrull.’ And they turned to me and said, ‘Tom, what do you think.’ And I said, ‘I’m not writing the book, I don’t care. I’m worried about coming up with my own characters, my own stories. It’s not up to me to worry about how to fix things on the Fantastic Four.’”

It wasn’t long before it became Tom’s problem.

“A couple of years later, I found myself writing the Fantastic Four, and I thought, ‘How could we start this off with a bang?’ We wanted to juice the sales up for Fantastic Four. And I thought, ‘What if Alicia is a Skrull?’ And I went to Ralph and said, ‘This is my first plot.’ I turned it in without telling him what the story was. And he got to the end and he goes, ‘Alicia is a Skrull? That’s a good idea, where did you come up with it?’ And I said, ‘You and Mark came up with it.’ And he said, ‘I don’t remember that.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I’ll take credit for it. But you and Mark came up with it.’ And then we just went from there.”

DeFalco expected reader backlash, but he was surprised to see that readers loved the plot twist. Lyja, the Skrull who replaced Alicia, became a fan favorite character. DeFalco originally planned on killing Lyja after Alicia was rescued, but the fan reaction was so strong that he brought her back and made her a regular supporting character for the next few years.

 “A lot of the fans just seemed to latch on to it. They had no problem with Alicia being a Skrull. I was surprised, I thought for sure that we would get complaints, that we would get angry letters, and that sort of stuff. We had them go rescue the real Alicia, and I thought that was the end of Lyja, and that we would never see her again. But we just kept getting mail demanding her return. How many times did you see in the old comics, ‘By popular demand.’ That was actually real. Because in those days we got a lot of letters, and people said they wanted to see the character back.”

Fans may have been lukewarm on the Human Torch’s marriage, but they sure loved his divorce.

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