The Human Torch and “Alicia Masters”
The Fantastic Four are a family. And sometimes, things get strange inside families, especially super-families. Case in point: Johnny Storm’s marriage to Alicia Masters, the girlfriend of Ben “The Thing” Grimm. Alicia had always been Ben’s love interest, but when Ben decided to stay in an alternate reality, she turned her attention to Johnny. And Johnny, never one to turn down a date, reciprocated. Despite the very reasonable feeling that he was betraying his pal, Johnny married Alicia—and the two stayed married until “Alicia” revealed herself to be a shape-shifting Skrull called Lyja, sent to infiltrate the team.
Troubling as the whole debacle was, family can forgive a lot, and so all is well with the Fantastic Four. Ben and Alicia have long since married and are raising a pair of adopted kids. Lyja died, resurrected, and reformed. And Johnny… well, Johnny recently slept with Doctor Doom’s fiancée the night before their wedding, so Johnny’s still Johnny.
Iron Man and the White Queen
When Iron Man and the White Queen Emma Frost began dating in 2022, the coupling shocked everyone. After all, this was during the Krakoa era, when Emma and other mutants were living on their own sovereign island nation, and after the X-Men and Avengers have had a few fights. But the pairing soon made sense, as both Tony Stark and Emma were incredibly rich jet-setters who traveled in the same circles. Even knowing that their marriage was one of convenience to thwart the anti-mutant group Orchis, its hard to hate the couple, and Marvel is even currently publishing Iron & Frost, an alternate future tale in which Emma becomes the new Iron Man to honor her love, Tony.
Kitty Pryde and Colossus
Relationships in X-Men are always tricky, and not just for the usual superpowered reasons. Throughout his legendary 17-year run on the series, writer Chris Claremont was unable to make any of his characters explicitly queer, which resulted in a lot of symbolic and inferred pairings between, say, Mystique and Destiny or Storm and Callisto.
However, it’s one of his most steady pairings that stands out as the strangest today. Shortly after the 13-year-old Kitty Pryde joins the team in 1980, she catches the eye of teammate Colossus, who is 18. The age difference rarely gets mentioned in those original issues, but it’s hard to ignore now, even as writers keep putting them together. Hopefully, now that Kitty has left Colossus at the altar and now that she’s canonically bisexual, fans are hoping she’ll find a partner that’s more suitable, in every sense of the word.
Ms. Marvel and Marcus Immortus
To this day, Avengers #200 (1980) stands as one of the most ignoble, ugly comic book stories of all time. The storyline sees Carol Danvers, who was going by the name Ms. Marvel at the time, find herself pregnant and suddenly giving birth to a child called Marcus. She later learns that Marcus is in fact, Marcus Immortus, a time-traveling variant of Kang the Conqueror, whom impregnanted Carol with himself. Worse, Carol professes her love for Marcus and runs off with him, while Cap and the other Avengers let her go. Fortunately, a follow-up story not only revealed that Marcus used mind control on Carol, but also gave Carol the chance to chew out her heroic colleagues for not coming to her aid when something was clearly wrong.
