A
comic book character published by
Marvel Comics and created by
Stan Lee and
Jack Kirby in 1961.
Sue Storm went along with her boyfriend,
Reed Richards, her kid brother,
Johnny Storm, and Reed's pal,
Ben Grimm, to test an
experimental rocketship. But the ship's
shielding was faulty, and all four were exposed to
cosmic radiation. While Reed became the
stretchy
Mr. Fantastic, Johnny became the
scorchy
Human Torch, and Ben turned into the
rocky Thing, Sue acquired the ability to turn
invisible, so she called herself
the Invisible Girl. The four of them, of course, became the
Fantastic Four.
For a while, Sue wasn't much more than a handy
plot device. She was frequently used as a
hostage that the three men could
rescue. She had a few
flings with the
Sub-Mariner before
marrying Reed. And her lone superpower wasn't used for anything much more than making sure the
bad guys couldn't see her. Basically, Stan Lee wasn't much good at writing female characters, and he defaulted to treating Sue as a helpless, lovesick
stereotype.
Before long, Sue's powers were expanded beyond just
invisibility. She was now able to turn objects other than herself invisible, and she gained the ability to project invisible
forcefields, which were
useful for both
defense (stopping
bullets and
death rays) and
offense (
squashing
tanks and smacking
Dr. Doom around with big invisible fists). But it wasn't until the
1980s -- after she'd been married and had a
child (
Franklin Richards, who was a mega-
powerful mutant-
baby) -- that Marvel finally changed her name from "
the Invisible Girl" to "
the Invisible Woman".
Nowadays, Sue is still seen largely as the FF's
token female, but she's widely acknowledged as the team's most powerful member (those
nifty forcefields again) and was even the team
leader for a while when Reed was temporarily dead.
Research from http://www.toonopedia.com/inviswom.htm