The Thing #5

Trivia · 8 facts

• The Thing #5 (2025) was published September 24, 2025, by Marvel Comics; it carries a November 2025 cover date and is the fifth and final issue of the 2025 limited series (designated Vol. 4 of The Thing's solo titles).
• Written by Tony Fleecs with interior pencils and inks by Justin Mason, colors by Alex Sinclair, lettering by VC Joe Caramagna, and a main cover by Nick Bradshaw (colored by Rachelle Rosenberg); a Greg Land variant cover was also offered.
• The central conflict of the issue is the Thing vs. Wilson Fisk / the Kingpin, as Ben Grimm fights to rescue a missing child named Sara and reunite her with her mother — a street-level, character-driven climax that keeps the focus on ordinary people rather than cosmic stakes.
• The series as a whole introduced Marty Flynn — a childhood bully of Ben Grimm from the Yancy Street days — as a new supporting character making his first comics appearance in issue #1; the arc of Ben's reluctant alliance with Flynn drives the plot through all five issues, including the emotional resolution in #5.
• Issue #5 is the series finale of what is only the fourth stand-alone Thing solo limited series in Marvel history, following the 2003 Evan Dorkin/Dean Haspiel Night Falls on Yancy Street mini, the 2005–2006 Dan Slott ongoing, and the 2021 Walter Mosley series.
• The series was editorially positioned as a companion piece to the MCU film The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025), with Marvel's own promotional copy stating it arrived 'just ahead of Marvel Studios' The Fantastic Four: First Steps,' making it a deliberate publishing strategy to introduce Ben Grimm to a new generation of readers drawn in by the film.
• The miniseries is set in a loosely mid-1980s-flavored continuity within the Baxter Building era of the Fantastic Four, deliberately insulated from current Marvel continuity to function as an accessible, standalone story.
• The story is a hard-boiled, street-level mystery — a genre that evokes Ben Grimm's long association with Daredevil's corner of the Marvel Universe — featuring a gauntlet of classic Marvel villains including Bullseye, the Juggernaut, the Wrecking Crew, and the Kingpin across the five issues before reaching its resolution in #5.

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