![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nomadicwriter posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
doomfansIf you're not reading the Fantastic Four, now is one of the best times in decades to get into it. Since Dark Reign, the series has been in the hands of writer Jonathan Hickman, and he's slowly been unfolding a very well-planned story arc that gets more epic with each passing issue.
Reed's actions in Civil War and the seeming lack of consequences have been an elephant in the room in Marvel fandom for a long time. Hickman's finally come back to pick up that thread, but he's doing it in a smart and interesting way. Instead of just rehashing past events, one of the major underlying themes of his F4 run is digging into Reed's psychology, exploring how he ended up on this path and what kind of bad places it might be leading him. There's a lot of very clever character work going on behind the complex plots and big ideas.
The first act of Hickman's storyline has just drawn to a close, and we're now starting to see how the threads all pull together. There's a war coming, and a devastating future that needs to be avoided at all costs. Reed's own hubris may just be to blame for what's to come. And there's a message from the future warning that if they want to escape disaster, all hope lies in Doom...
Meta, some scanned panels, and a whole lot of enthusiastic rambling lie beyond the cut.
i. Solve Everything
Hickman's F4 run is building on things established in the JMS-penned Civil War issues. There, we saw that Reed believed he'd calculated all possible outcomes, and that participating in things like cloning Thor and building the Negative Zone prison was the only way to avoid Armageddon.
In a later three-part story by Dwayne McDuffie, Reed takes his calculating even further. Now he's working on a step-by-step plan to "solve everything" - ending hunger, war, and disease, and generally single-handedly fixing humanity's problems. In the McDuffie issues a version of Doom arrives from the future, claiming Reed became a tyrant after establishing his utopia. But after this is proved to be a ruse, Reed's more convinced than ever that it's his job to play saviour of humanity.
Then comes Secret Invasion, Norman Osborn's ascent to power, and the beginning of Jonathan Hickman's run on the title in Dark Reign: Fantastic Four. In this miniseries, Reed is bewildered as to how his game plan has gone so far off the rails. He builds a machine called the Bridge to study other realities, looking for ones where the Illuminati helped bring Civil War to a peaceful end.
As it turns out, not so many - and a lot of times it involved some pretty drastic measures. Among the more interesting of the 'success stories' are a reality where Doom and Magneto were also invited to join, and this, possibly my favourite single-panel AU ever:
(Reed Richards: nothing at all like Doom, except when he really, really is.)
Based on his research, Reed decides that saving the world by committee doesn't work, and the success stories were the universes where he acted unilaterally, not compromising his vision to accommodate other people's ideas. (At least, going by Reed's personal, somewhat flexible criteria for what counts as a success story. See: smoking corpses above.) So he comes to the conclusion that the best thing to do is work on fixing everything that's wrong with the world literally all by himself.
While he's been doing all this research, the Bridge has been causing some chaotic reality fluctuations for the rest of the family, and Sue makes him promise to destroy it. Reed reluctantly promises he'll take it apart piece by piece, and dutifully does so.
...Then immediately afterwards rebuilds it piece by piece, because he's still convinced that saving the future is on him and nobody else.
It turns out that many alt-universe Reeds have built Bridges too, searching for the same answers. They've banded together to form a Council, leaving their families and home realities behind to roam the multiverse Solving Everything. This includes some pretty high-handed stuff, such as terraforming entire planets to supply food, performing surgery on stars, taking out a Galactus... oh, and sticking mind-control collars on their versions of Doctor Doom and keeping them imprisoned in the basement. (Hard to imagine how that one could possibly backfire on you, Reeds...)
It's really all looking remarkably Doctor Doom-y, in terms of fixing the universe by taking drastic, ruthless measures for everybody else's own good, but in an echo chamber of his own brain Reed seems to find it a lot easier to talk himself into crossing moral lines that he normally wouldn't. Our version of Reed is almost convinced to join the group, but ultimately chooses staying with his family over joining them.
He does, however, go on to cut all his ties with the rest of the scientific community, rejecting them for being too paranoid in their visions of the future, and sets up his own Future Foundation, a think-tank made up of genius kids who aren't bogged down by politics and old-age conservatism.
ii. Falling Through Time
Another major thread in Hickman's plot involves time travellers trying to prevent disaster. At some point not too far into the future, reality is collapsing in on itself. (There are intriguing hints that the Council of Reeds may be involved in causing this.) The grown-up Franklin Richards is using his powers to hold off the end of the universe, long enough for him, adult Valeria, and their time-travelling grandpa Nathaniel Richards to make changes to the past that will ripple forward and replace their current reality.
First, Franklin pops in on his child self in issue #574, and reactivates his reality-altering powers. Then he gives his little sister a cryptic message, composed by her older self to prompt her to do what needs to be done as things unfold. Most of the elements it mentions have started to come into play by now, but how it all fits together remains to be seen.
It starts like this:
(The four cities are introduced in a series of issues that are, alas, probably the weakest part of the arc, since it's a whole lot of setup with no payoff yet. But anyway, they are: an underground city built by the High Evolutionary; a civilisation of ancient Atlanteans under the sea; an outpost of Celestial Inhumans on the moon; and the Negative Zone prison that Reed built, now taken over by the armies of Annihilus.)
The figures in the background here are all members of the Council of Reeds. Or at least they seemed to be, until issue #587 when the death of Johnny Storm cast an interesting new light on the flaming figure illustrating "The dead must not be forgotten". The future man is most likely Nathaniel Richards.
This part is obviously just plain awesome, and eventually leads to what's probably the most interesting development in Doom-F4 relations since he helped out at Valeria's birth almost a decade ago.
We also get a few bonus glimpses of the future in issue #581 when Franklin is shown travelling forward through time.
These two events have since happened, Valeria striking a deal with Doom in #583 and Johnny Storm's last words to Ben before he goes to his death in #587.
This one is still to come.
iii. The Future Man Returns
One of the most intriguing things Hickman is doing in this run is revisiting Reed's relationship with his time-travelling absentee dad. Adding Nathaniel back into the family makes for a fascinating new dynamic, because Reed's suddenly no longer unquestioned chief genius who's assumed to know what he's doing, but has to start defending his ideas to his father and deal with being shot down.
Nathaniel's rather variable personality over the years is retconned with the explanation that the accident that gave him his time-travel powers affected all the Nathaniels across every reality. They were all dragged into the same universe (ours, as usual) and forced to take part in a Highlander-style 'there can be only one' battle to wipe each other out. Now there are only two left: our universe's native Nathaniel, plus the ruthless killer Nathaniel who's been taking out all the rest.
Our Nathaniel travels back to visit Reed in his college days, ostensibly so he can say goodbye while Reed's still too young for him to be tempted to ask his son for help. Of course, Reed jumps in anyway, bringing Ben along for the ride and even asking the young Victor Von Doom to help them out with weapons tech. (Victor makes him beg first. He likes making Reed say please.)
They face off against the other Nathaniel, but neither Reed nor our Nathaniel can bring themselves deliver the final blow, so it falls to Doom to be the one to do it. Given that the Council of Reeds might just turn out to be the bad guys, this looks an awful lot like foreshadowing for why Doom's going to be needed in the end.
(As an aside, though, I must sadly admit that Hickman's take on college age Victor is one of the few missteps in this series for me. He's too aristocratic, too close to full-on supervillain Doom when several events that made him that way are still in the future. Neil Edwards' art makes him look much older than Ben and Reed too. It reduces the impact of what, when you think about it, is not Nathaniel asking ruthless dictator Doctor Doom to do his killing for him, but rather him asking a teenage boy who - if you believe Books of Doom - has only ever killed once, pretty much in self-defence, and was actually quite shaken by it.)
Now that he's the last one left, Nathaniel returns to the collapsing future and meets up with Franklin. He wants to stay with his grandkids through the ending of their reality, but Franklin insists on tossing him back into the past where he can become part of the new timeline. (He shows up at the end of F4 #588.) Explaining to his grandfather why he has to go back, Franklin makes a very intriguing speech:
In the very first scene of F4 #570, we see a young Reed being urged by his dad to jump down from his treehouse. It's pretty high and he doesn't want to do it, but Nathaniel tells him this:
The third and final flashback is to a sullen and unhappy teenage Reed on the day his father leaves him. Nathaniel says he'll be around if Reed truly needs him, but that he knows he's raised Reed well enough to make his own decisions, and that Reed should remember that:
The paradigm shift completely blew my mind, because it's a brand new angle for looking at one of my long-time favourite characters, and yet it's built out of elements that have been part of Reed's established backstory for decades. I would never have thought to join those dots together, but it just makes so much sense that it's going to be part of my concept of Reed forever onwards. It's the flaw underlying his genius that I guess I was trying to get a grip on all along.
And that character revelation is not even my favourite thing about this storyline. No, that would have to be...
iv. Uncle Doom
Valeria starts acting on the message from future Franklin in issue #583. She breaks into her dad's secret lab and discovers the Bridge, then goes to visit her 'Uncle Doom' in Latveria. (And yes, she calls him that to his face. Doom makes no comment on the matter.)
When Val arrives, he's just in the process of arranging to have Kristoff Vernard recalled from his exile. (I must give yet more points to Hickman for rescuing both Kristoff and Boris from the wilderness of abandoned minor characters. Doom's Latverian supporting cast have been MIA for way too long.) Doom's planning on abdicating due to the brain damage he suffered in the Fall of the Hulks storyline, and that gives Val the leverage she needs to get him to agree to help them.
It's an absolutely fantastic sequence. Steve Epting's art for the Castle Doom scenes is beautifully dark and moody, and the dialogue between the two of them is just perfect. I've always wanted to see more made of the potential links between Doom and Valeria. For a start, she's kind of a reincarnation of Valeria Von Doom, who was raised as Doom's daughter in another timeline. Doom delivered her as a baby, named her after his childhood best friend and first love, and declared her to be under his protection. (He also mind-controlled her for a short time before she was even old enough to talk, and I'm still half convinced that's the origin story for her early onset superintelligence.) There's so much to explore with this connection.
I deeply loved the interaction Hickman gave them here, but at the time I assumed that this one great issue would be all we'd get until Doom swept in at some dramatically appropriate last moment. Not so! It now looks as if Doom is going to be right in the thick of the storyline from here on out. At the end of issue one of the new FF series, Val comes clean about the deal with Doom to her dad. He's naturally extremely unhappy, but with Nathaniel taking Val's side he gets pushed into reluctantly accepting it.
And now Doctor Doom has just turned up at the Baxter building. Next week, FF #2 comes out, and we'll find out how the rest of the team react.
So seriously, even if you've never been able to get interested in the Fantastic Four before, now is great time to take a second look. This is definitely the best writing this comic's had in years.
Reed's actions in Civil War and the seeming lack of consequences have been an elephant in the room in Marvel fandom for a long time. Hickman's finally come back to pick up that thread, but he's doing it in a smart and interesting way. Instead of just rehashing past events, one of the major underlying themes of his F4 run is digging into Reed's psychology, exploring how he ended up on this path and what kind of bad places it might be leading him. There's a lot of very clever character work going on behind the complex plots and big ideas.
The first act of Hickman's storyline has just drawn to a close, and we're now starting to see how the threads all pull together. There's a war coming, and a devastating future that needs to be avoided at all costs. Reed's own hubris may just be to blame for what's to come. And there's a message from the future warning that if they want to escape disaster, all hope lies in Doom...
Meta, some scanned panels, and a whole lot of enthusiastic rambling lie beyond the cut.
i. Solve Everything
Hickman's F4 run is building on things established in the JMS-penned Civil War issues. There, we saw that Reed believed he'd calculated all possible outcomes, and that participating in things like cloning Thor and building the Negative Zone prison was the only way to avoid Armageddon.
In a later three-part story by Dwayne McDuffie, Reed takes his calculating even further. Now he's working on a step-by-step plan to "solve everything" - ending hunger, war, and disease, and generally single-handedly fixing humanity's problems. In the McDuffie issues a version of Doom arrives from the future, claiming Reed became a tyrant after establishing his utopia. But after this is proved to be a ruse, Reed's more convinced than ever that it's his job to play saviour of humanity.
Then comes Secret Invasion, Norman Osborn's ascent to power, and the beginning of Jonathan Hickman's run on the title in Dark Reign: Fantastic Four. In this miniseries, Reed is bewildered as to how his game plan has gone so far off the rails. He builds a machine called the Bridge to study other realities, looking for ones where the Illuminati helped bring Civil War to a peaceful end.
As it turns out, not so many - and a lot of times it involved some pretty drastic measures. Among the more interesting of the 'success stories' are a reality where Doom and Magneto were also invited to join, and this, possibly my favourite single-panel AU ever:
(Reed Richards: nothing at all like Doom, except when he really, really is.)
Based on his research, Reed decides that saving the world by committee doesn't work, and the success stories were the universes where he acted unilaterally, not compromising his vision to accommodate other people's ideas. (At least, going by Reed's personal, somewhat flexible criteria for what counts as a success story. See: smoking corpses above.) So he comes to the conclusion that the best thing to do is work on fixing everything that's wrong with the world literally all by himself.
While he's been doing all this research, the Bridge has been causing some chaotic reality fluctuations for the rest of the family, and Sue makes him promise to destroy it. Reed reluctantly promises he'll take it apart piece by piece, and dutifully does so.
...Then immediately afterwards rebuilds it piece by piece, because he's still convinced that saving the future is on him and nobody else.
It turns out that many alt-universe Reeds have built Bridges too, searching for the same answers. They've banded together to form a Council, leaving their families and home realities behind to roam the multiverse Solving Everything. This includes some pretty high-handed stuff, such as terraforming entire planets to supply food, performing surgery on stars, taking out a Galactus... oh, and sticking mind-control collars on their versions of Doctor Doom and keeping them imprisoned in the basement. (Hard to imagine how that one could possibly backfire on you, Reeds...)
It's really all looking remarkably Doctor Doom-y, in terms of fixing the universe by taking drastic, ruthless measures for everybody else's own good, but in an echo chamber of his own brain Reed seems to find it a lot easier to talk himself into crossing moral lines that he normally wouldn't. Our version of Reed is almost convinced to join the group, but ultimately chooses staying with his family over joining them.
He does, however, go on to cut all his ties with the rest of the scientific community, rejecting them for being too paranoid in their visions of the future, and sets up his own Future Foundation, a think-tank made up of genius kids who aren't bogged down by politics and old-age conservatism.
ii. Falling Through Time
Another major thread in Hickman's plot involves time travellers trying to prevent disaster. At some point not too far into the future, reality is collapsing in on itself. (There are intriguing hints that the Council of Reeds may be involved in causing this.) The grown-up Franklin Richards is using his powers to hold off the end of the universe, long enough for him, adult Valeria, and their time-travelling grandpa Nathaniel Richards to make changes to the past that will ripple forward and replace their current reality.
First, Franklin pops in on his child self in issue #574, and reactivates his reality-altering powers. Then he gives his little sister a cryptic message, composed by her older self to prompt her to do what needs to be done as things unfold. Most of the elements it mentions have started to come into play by now, but how it all fits together remains to be seen.
It starts like this:
(The four cities are introduced in a series of issues that are, alas, probably the weakest part of the arc, since it's a whole lot of setup with no payoff yet. But anyway, they are: an underground city built by the High Evolutionary; a civilisation of ancient Atlanteans under the sea; an outpost of Celestial Inhumans on the moon; and the Negative Zone prison that Reed built, now taken over by the armies of Annihilus.)
The figures in the background here are all members of the Council of Reeds. Or at least they seemed to be, until issue #587 when the death of Johnny Storm cast an interesting new light on the flaming figure illustrating "The dead must not be forgotten". The future man is most likely Nathaniel Richards.
This part is obviously just plain awesome, and eventually leads to what's probably the most interesting development in Doom-F4 relations since he helped out at Valeria's birth almost a decade ago.
We also get a few bonus glimpses of the future in issue #581 when Franklin is shown travelling forward through time.
These two events have since happened, Valeria striking a deal with Doom in #583 and Johnny Storm's last words to Ben before he goes to his death in #587.
This one is still to come.
iii. The Future Man Returns
One of the most intriguing things Hickman is doing in this run is revisiting Reed's relationship with his time-travelling absentee dad. Adding Nathaniel back into the family makes for a fascinating new dynamic, because Reed's suddenly no longer unquestioned chief genius who's assumed to know what he's doing, but has to start defending his ideas to his father and deal with being shot down.
Nathaniel's rather variable personality over the years is retconned with the explanation that the accident that gave him his time-travel powers affected all the Nathaniels across every reality. They were all dragged into the same universe (ours, as usual) and forced to take part in a Highlander-style 'there can be only one' battle to wipe each other out. Now there are only two left: our universe's native Nathaniel, plus the ruthless killer Nathaniel who's been taking out all the rest.
Our Nathaniel travels back to visit Reed in his college days, ostensibly so he can say goodbye while Reed's still too young for him to be tempted to ask his son for help. Of course, Reed jumps in anyway, bringing Ben along for the ride and even asking the young Victor Von Doom to help them out with weapons tech. (Victor makes him beg first. He likes making Reed say please.)
They face off against the other Nathaniel, but neither Reed nor our Nathaniel can bring themselves deliver the final blow, so it falls to Doom to be the one to do it. Given that the Council of Reeds might just turn out to be the bad guys, this looks an awful lot like foreshadowing for why Doom's going to be needed in the end.
(As an aside, though, I must sadly admit that Hickman's take on college age Victor is one of the few missteps in this series for me. He's too aristocratic, too close to full-on supervillain Doom when several events that made him that way are still in the future. Neil Edwards' art makes him look much older than Ben and Reed too. It reduces the impact of what, when you think about it, is not Nathaniel asking ruthless dictator Doctor Doom to do his killing for him, but rather him asking a teenage boy who - if you believe Books of Doom - has only ever killed once, pretty much in self-defence, and was actually quite shaken by it.)
Now that he's the last one left, Nathaniel returns to the collapsing future and meets up with Franklin. He wants to stay with his grandkids through the ending of their reality, but Franklin insists on tossing him back into the past where he can become part of the new timeline. (He shows up at the end of F4 #588.) Explaining to his grandfather why he has to go back, Franklin makes a very intriguing speech:
"It's Dad. See, when you collapsed every you into our reality... When Immortus commanded the Great Hunt and the culling of all the Nathaniel Richardses- and even though you didn't mean for it to happen... You made every Reed Richards that's ever existed into an orphan. It's what's wrong with him. It's what's wrong with all of them."So. There's something wrong with all the Reeds. In the original timeline, our Reed went down the same path, but Franklin thinks that him having his father there will fix it. So... what exactly is it that's 'wrong' with Reed? Well, the answer might just be in a series of flashbacks to Reed's childhood that appeared in the Council of Reeds arc at the beginning of Hickman's run.
In the very first scene of F4 #570, we see a young Reed being urged by his dad to jump down from his treehouse. It's pretty high and he doesn't want to do it, but Nathaniel tells him this:
"It's okay to be afraid. It's okay to fail. But to say that you're not even willing to try... That's unacceptable, Reed."In the second flashback, a slightly older Reed is depressed about the fact that though he has friends at school, none of them are anything like he is. Nathaniel tells him that he's special, and one day he's going to have the opportunity to help lots of people - maybe everyone - because there's nothing Reed can't do.
The third and final flashback is to a sullen and unhappy teenage Reed on the day his father leaves him. Nathaniel says he'll be around if Reed truly needs him, but that he knows he's raised Reed well enough to make his own decisions, and that Reed should remember that:
"It's a terrible thing for someone not to reach their full potential... I know. As I've grown older, I've realized that I do not have the character to be both good and great at the same time. But you do, Reed... and as such, all of my hopes and desires rest in you becoming what I am not. When you grow up, I expect more. Son... I expect better."Going back over those flashbacks, it suddenly clicked for me that Reed's whole arc in this story is about that childhood abandonment. It's about the fact that his father told him that the worst thing he could do was not try, that he said he believed Reed could do anything, and then he left. And so Reed is always going to keep pushing and pushing for greater achievements, heading for that inevitable disaster when he overreaches, because somewhere down in his subconscious he's still that kid whose father left him, trying to do something impressive enough that it will make his dad come back.
The paradigm shift completely blew my mind, because it's a brand new angle for looking at one of my long-time favourite characters, and yet it's built out of elements that have been part of Reed's established backstory for decades. I would never have thought to join those dots together, but it just makes so much sense that it's going to be part of my concept of Reed forever onwards. It's the flaw underlying his genius that I guess I was trying to get a grip on all along.
And that character revelation is not even my favourite thing about this storyline. No, that would have to be...
iv. Uncle Doom
Valeria starts acting on the message from future Franklin in issue #583. She breaks into her dad's secret lab and discovers the Bridge, then goes to visit her 'Uncle Doom' in Latveria. (And yes, she calls him that to his face. Doom makes no comment on the matter.)
When Val arrives, he's just in the process of arranging to have Kristoff Vernard recalled from his exile. (I must give yet more points to Hickman for rescuing both Kristoff and Boris from the wilderness of abandoned minor characters. Doom's Latverian supporting cast have been MIA for way too long.) Doom's planning on abdicating due to the brain damage he suffered in the Fall of the Hulks storyline, and that gives Val the leverage she needs to get him to agree to help them.
It's an absolutely fantastic sequence. Steve Epting's art for the Castle Doom scenes is beautifully dark and moody, and the dialogue between the two of them is just perfect. I've always wanted to see more made of the potential links between Doom and Valeria. For a start, she's kind of a reincarnation of Valeria Von Doom, who was raised as Doom's daughter in another timeline. Doom delivered her as a baby, named her after his childhood best friend and first love, and declared her to be under his protection. (He also mind-controlled her for a short time before she was even old enough to talk, and I'm still half convinced that's the origin story for her early onset superintelligence.) There's so much to explore with this connection.
I deeply loved the interaction Hickman gave them here, but at the time I assumed that this one great issue would be all we'd get until Doom swept in at some dramatically appropriate last moment. Not so! It now looks as if Doom is going to be right in the thick of the storyline from here on out. At the end of issue one of the new FF series, Val comes clean about the deal with Doom to her dad. He's naturally extremely unhappy, but with Nathaniel taking Val's side he gets pushed into reluctantly accepting it.
And now Doctor Doom has just turned up at the Baxter building. Next week, FF #2 comes out, and we'll find out how the rest of the team react.
So seriously, even if you've never been able to get interested in the Fantastic Four before, now is great time to take a second look. This is definitely the best writing this comic's had in years.
