Pop star Darla Deering is used to being in the spotlight but when she stands-in for the Fantastic Four as Ms. Thing, she faces all new challenges while protecting the Baxter Building and the genius kids of the Future Foundation.
Pop Star Turned Super Hero
Darla Deering sings her heart out, signing her first recording contract at 14 years old, which launches her career as a pop star. Up until she’s 18, she records seven number-one hits, two golds, and one platinum record. During that time, she receives all the music video awards she’s nominated for and wins a Grammy at 19. She boasts 29 million Yamblr followers and 67 million likes on Facespace.
She starts seeing Super Hero Johnny Storm, AKA Human Torch, of the Fantastic Four (F4), who is no stranger to fandom. They casually date for many months until things get serious when Storm takes her to the Negative Zone, and he gives her his actual phone number. When his fellow founding members of the F4 plan to time-travel extradimensionally, Storm asks his girlfriend Darla to join a group of stand-ins to act in their place while they’re away for only four minutes. To help convince her, Storm takes Darla back in time, precisely 2.66 million years in the past, to return a mutated genetic offshoot of Homo Habilis, Moon-Boy, to his correct era. There, they are nearly attacked by his partner Devil Dinosaur. Amazed, Darla joins fellow stand-ins Jennifer Walters, AKA She-Hulk, Medusalith Amaquelin Boltagon, AKA Medusa, and Scott Lang, AKA Ant-Man.
While taking the F4’s place, the stand-ins are also expected to care for the Future Foundation (FF), a group of gifted children under the F4’s care. But the F4 fails to return as scheduled. Darla soon meets Dragon Man, the pacifist android and guardian to the FF kids. When Dragon Man receives word of an attack on the city by Harvey Rupert Elder, AKA Mole Man, he suggests that Darla join the F4 team to help. Refusing at first, she’s convinced when Dragon Man equips her with Ben Grimm, AKA the Thing’s super-suit, designed by Reed Richards, AKA Mister Fantastic, and formerly worn by Grimm when he reverted to his human form. With the super-suit, she joins the fight near the end but promptly quits, feeling that she has no business being a hero and afraid she could hurt someone. But Lang soon convinces the uncertain Darla to rejoin the team.
Thing Super-Suit
Darla’s super-suit mimics the Thing’s powers, offering her enhanced strength and durability. Eventually, Darla wears an invisible helmet, which protects her head and allows her signature pink hair to remain recognizable. She also wields a set of Thing Rings, which contain the suit’s particles, so that when struck together, the vacuum the rings create is then filled by the Thing particles, and the Thing Suit forms around her body.
A Thing About Foes
The Yancy Street Gang has it out for Darla when she stands in for the Thing. Known for their famous hatred towards the Thing, they see her as a fraud and publicly humiliate her. THough Lang comes to her aid and gets the gang off her back.
While on the F4 team, she faces off with the WIzard’s ally, Blastaar in a fight to protect the FF students. She also helps defeat Victor von Doom, AKA Doctor Doom.
Rock-Solid Allies
As a pop star with millions of fans, Darla keeps a close circle of friends. She dates the F4’s Johnny Storm for several months. He trusts her enough to ask her to stand-in for the F4 while he and the original team go on an adventure through time.
While acting on behalf of the F4, she becomes close with the Future Foundation’s resident android, Dragon Man, who upgrades her Thing Super-Suit. She also works alongside her F4 teammates, and grows close with fellow member Scott Lang, even sharing a romantic relationship with him. Though it comes to an end when he spends less time with her. In her adventures with the F4, she gains an ally in the Impossible Man.
A Thing of History
In the beginning of her time with the F4, Darla tried on several different types of helmets with her Thing Suit, and took photos of each to help her decide between them. None worked until Dragon Man gave her one of Reed’s invisible helmets and modified it to fit her suit, so that she could protect her head and remain seen. Though the Yancy Street Gang hacked Darla’s phone and used her personal photos to publicly humiliate her. Lang then stopped the Gang by threatening to reveal the gang’s identities and passwords to the world if they persisted.
When Medusa was hypnotized by the Super Villain Wizard into kidnapping his clone, Bentley-23–one of the FF students, Darla fought the mind-controlled Medusa. She also fought the Wizard’s ally Blasaar, who shattered her suit.
As time passed, and the F4 were looking less likely to return, Darla faced a few strange things, including the arrival of an older future version of Johnny Storm, while her teammate Lang grew distracted with a plan to defeat Doctor Doom, who was responsible for killing his daughter, Cassie. Help for the F4 soon arrived in the form of the long-lived alien that posed as Julius Caesar, who came to fulfill a debt to the original Fantastic Four by helping the new F4 to find the time-lost team. He offered them his space-time ship, and Darla joined the F4 to save them. Though as soon as they had unmoored themselves from the timestream, the Impossible Man snatched them up and begged them to admit his son, Adolf the Impossible Boy, to the Future Foundation. Darla suggested that they meet him. When they did so, he was so overwhelmed that he used his impossible powers against them, nearly crushing them all in boxes. But Medusa came through and helped settle his emotions and worries, and he agreed to attend the school. Darla’s friendship with Lang started to turn into romance.
When one of the Foundation’s kids, Alex Power, was compromised by Doom, Lang moved both the F4 and the FF to Uatu the Watcher’s lunar home, the moon, where they couldn’t be observed by Doom. To do so, he shrunk everyone down using Pym Particles, and hitched a ride inside their latest ally and Adolf’s father, the Impossible Man. From the moon, the F4 launched an assault against Doom, which ended in Lang defeating Doom in hand-to-hand combat. The founding F4 returned shortly thereafter, leaving Darla and the rest of the stand-ins to be backup support against the Wrecking Crew with the Wizard, who called themselves the Frightful Four.
Darla and Lang took a break from heroics, but Darla found civilian Lang boring. When heroes and villains’ personalities inverted, Doom became heroic and in stealing Wanda Maximoff, AKA Scarlet Witch’s reality-altering power, resurrected Lang’s daughter, Cassie. With the pair reunited, Lang neglected Darla and the couple split, though Lang never called or texted Darla to break up with her.
Darla later encountered Ant-Man and gave her a piece of her mind in the form of fists because of the way he broke it off, or rather didn’t. It turned out that Darla’s publicist Marlena Howard had Lang protect Darla from the Magician, son of Lee Guardineer, AKA Magician. The former couple resolved their differences, though in secret Darla and Marlena had arranged the encounter for Darla’s new reality show.
When Darla’s new boyfriend, comedian Paul Scheer, used a villain-for-hire app, believing it was a game, Jason Cragg, AKA the Voice, caused participants and competitors at a celebrity charity basketball event Cassie was attending to attack each other. Lang defeated the Voice.
Later, when Cassie, now Stinger, was manipulated by the new Power Broker into helping him plant a virus in his competitor’s servers, Cross Technological Enterprises (CTE), run by Darren Cross. Though Cassie was caught and Lang started a gang, which included Darla. Though Lang ended up entangled in a trap while Cassie was liberated. She found Darla and the gang and they coordinated a smash and grab–to steal a gamma field destabilizer cannon and save Lang. They succeeded but it was all caught on camera since the producer of Darla’s reality show, Marlena, had them followed with drone cameras. Darla immediately called her to stop the cameras but it was too late, and though she promised to edit Darla out for the theft she committed, she couldn’t save Lang and he ended up in jail.
Feeling guilty about her role in Lang’s prison sentence, Darla visited him to apologize and share good news that her reality show became a hit because of Lang and could be a boon for his upcoming trial’s jury selection. During Lang’s trial, the courtroom was attacked by Cross as Yellowjacket along with his allies William Cross, AKA Crossfire, and Dr. Elihas Starr, AKA Egghead. Darla joined her fellow F4 allies, Lang and She-Hulk, to defend the court–a reunion she realized her producers would have loved.
When the original Fantastic Four faced off with the destructive cosmic monstrosity known as the Griever at the End of All Things, Darla joined the fight with the F4’s extended family against the tremendous foe. Thanks to working together, and Reed outsmarting the Griever, Darla and her allies defeated their enemy.
