Fantastic Four #34
J.A. Fludd
Recap
Now the last time I attended a wedding, all the guests got a nice big dinner, there was a lot of dancing, and everyone got a candle to take home as a gift. No doubt your experience has been similar. Suffice it to say the wedding of Dr. Doom and Victorious went a bit differently. Perhaps it’s only because Latveria is a different country with different customs. Or perhaps it’s because Victorious stopped the ceremony during the exchange of vows and confessed to her metal-masked groom that only seconds before he called her home for their wedding, she had the Human Torch in her bed.
Whatever the case may be, multiple kinds of Hell immediately broke loose. After the last time the FF were in Latveria (when Doom was set to execute them on live television with the whole civilized universe watching and the Invisible Woman cloaked his armor and mask and exposed him to everyone on Earth and thousands of other planets), Doom was taking no chances. He had the ceremony on a two-minute delay and cut the feed as soon as Victorious revealed her indiscretion. Doom then ordered his robots to open fire on the entire wedding party, which consisted of the Fantastic Four, the Sub-Mariner, the Black Panther, and the Panther’s two Wakandan female bodyguards, whom I call “Dawn.” (As in 1970’s pop music, “Tony Orlando and…”). When the Invisible Woman’s force field stopped him wiping them all out, Doom then ordered the robots to pursue and destroy every civilian who had come to watch the wedding, to make sure none of them talked. Worse yet, because of the subliminal-hypnosis lamps at the altar, the FF and company could not bring their powers to bear against Doom or the robots. What’s a hero to do?
Fortunately, the Torch remembers what he did the day before the wedding, when he tried to talk to Victorious and could only communicate with her through the security Doombot that came after him, which Victorious hacked. That’s all Reed needs to hear. Having Sue and the Sub-Mariner run interference for him in the air (with the shameless Prince Namor openly flirting with Sue the whole time—that guy just never gives up) while the Thing and the Panther draw the robots’ fire away from the civilians on the ground, Reed steals into Victorious’s bridal suite. There, he finds the tech that she used on that Doombot and uses it to hack all the Doombots, forcing a cease-fire.
Unfortunately, Doom sees Victorious—flying in her wedding gown, no less—protecting the Torch from an airborne Doombot that is chasing him. For Doom this is the last straw, and he thus activates the ominous device that we saw in his secret lab of Anti-Fantastic Four weapons last issue: the Armagedron! And what does the Armagedron do? Something truly awful.
The calamitous contraption takes aim at Johnny and shoots him full of so much cosmic energy that he “flames on” in pain, out of control—and can’t flame off! It is only because the energies of the Armagedron now pose a danger to Latveria that the Thing is able to break the hypnotic hold of Doom’s other tech and smash the device. But this is too late for the Torch, because once Doom has deactivated his weapon’s power core, this is where the “Sacred Vow” of this issue’s title comes in. It has nothing to do with Doom’s now-aborted marriage. It is Doom’s oath that Johnny’s power overload will not kill him. Instead, it will punish him for bedding Doom’s fiancée by rendering him unable to touch another person again without burning them to atoms for as long as he lives! Ouch!
With the wedding definitely off, the Fantastic Four, the Sub-Mariner, and the Black Panther take their leave of Latveria, while Doom and Victorious concoct appropriate lies to tell the press about what happened—after which Doom orders Victorious never to show her face to him again. Reed, on the flight home, is morose about this lost opportunity to make peace with their greatest enemy, and promises Johnny that he is already working on a way to bring his powers back under control. (Reed would have better luck getting rid of that damned awful beard on his face, but I’m not expecting him to have any success in either endeavor any time soon.) And back in Latveria, a contrite Victorious once again pledges her unquestionable fealty to her revered master—from behind the metal mask that she is now wearing! She may not have married Dr. Doom today, but in a way, she has become his “bride!”
Review
Thinking of the fate of our Human Torch in this issue, I’m reminded of a lyric from Mary Poppins: “I feel what’s to happen all happened before!” And in fact, this has happened before. Marvel initially hyped this issue by calling it the greatest change to happen to a member of the Fantastic Four since the very first issue. They walked it back a bit by proclaiming that in this story Dr. Doom would “profoundly change” the life of one of the FF. You’ve really got to love these people. Do you realize that ever since Fantastic Four #1 they’ve been hooking readers with some variation on the idea that “…the world would never again be the same”? Seriously, they always do this. Everything and everyone in Marvel stories is always going to “change forever and never be the same again.” These are the most forever-changing people I have ever seen in my life.
Which is why it cracks me up to think they want us to believe that the Human Torch being unable to flame off and becoming a prisoner of his own powers is such a shocking new development. Like that line in Mary Poppins, this is something we’ve seen before. Back in the Carlos Pacheco issues, Johnny was saturated with energy from the Negative Zone and—you guessed it—permanently “Flamed On.” (Fantastic Four vol. 3 #44.) Now, do you remember how Johnny regained control of his powers? That’s what makes this whole thing ironic. Are you ready?
Dr. Doom did it!
It’s true. Refer back to the story of the Hidden Ones, the offshoot of the Inhumans who took Reed and the Thing prisoner right when Sue went into labor with Valeria for the second time. Yes, Sue got a do-over. Valeria was stillborn the first time, but some weirdness with time travel, alternate realities, and Franklin’s powers brought her back as a teenager using the name Marvel Girl because Chris Claremont was writing The FF at the time and turned the book into X-Men stories in the guise of FF stories. Some other time travel shenanigans in the Pacheco stories turned Marvel Girl back into a fetus in Sue’s uterus, making the Invisible Woman the only fictional character who has been pregnant with the same child twice. But I digress. Anyway, Sue being pregnant is always dangerous because of the cosmic energy at work in her physiology; her life and that of the baby were in danger and Reed wasn’t around because the Hidden Ones got him and Ben. So the Torch went for help to the only logical person—Dr. Doom. And Doom agreed to do it, using magic with the Torch’s powers as an energy source to deliver the baby safely. (And christen the child Valeria and make her his familiar, setting up Mark Waid’s story of “Unthinkable.”) This had the side benefit of restoring Johnny to the normal state of his powers. See Fantastic Four Vol. 3 #51-54 for how this whole thing played out in detail.
The upshot of all this, for our interests here, is that the first time Johnny was uncontrollably “Flamed on,” it was Doom who fixed it. This time, it’s Doom who has caused it in a cruel act of vengeance for Johnny going to bed with Doom’s betrothed! Like I said—ironic.
Now, in all honesty, none of this was what I was expecting from a story called “The Sacred Vow of Victor Von Doom.” What I saw happening was the FF and their friends escaping from Doom’s reprisal over Johnny’s compromising his bride, and probably doing it with the help of Victorious herself, whose conscience wouldn’t let her watch Doom destroy the FF for something for which she took responsibility. This would further enrage Doom and perhaps even make him try to destroy Victorious (which he actually did in this story when she flew up in her bridal gown to save Johnny from that Doombot). If he did kill her, that would have caused greater anguish and trauma for Johnny and would have perhaps made Johnny’s conflict with him as deeply personal as Doom’s old conflict with Reed—a pretty “profound change” in the Torch’s life, if you ask me. The FF would get away from Doom’s wrath, but with a possibly slain Victorious at his feet, Doom would make a new and even more deadly “sacred vow” to destroy the Fantastic Four once and for all, no matter what he had to do to accomplish it!
I’m pretty sure that’s how I would have written this story, not that you asked. But Dan Slott has done something completely different here—and something that is effectively a repeat of a storyline from twenty years ago. It’s hardly what you’d call a breakthrough in storytelling. It will, however, doubtless be a source of unbearable grief for Johnny in the issues to come. The heartthrob of the Fantastic Four, who is accustomed to the company of beautiful women in bed, is now completely denied the touch of another human being. That’s got to hurt. As for Victorious, the girl has a basic problem of dishonesty with herself. She wants the Torch, but she expresses nothing but contempt for him. She beats him up, but she goes to bed with him. She says she loathes him, but she rescues him from Doombots. This gal seriously needs to figure herself out before her self-deception causes more harm to herself or someone else. But of course, that may be exactly what Slott has in mind…
With the 60th Anniversary issue of The Fantastic Four coming next, we may take heart in knowing that for this anniversary, at least they didn’t “kill off” Johnny, shut down the book, and restart it under another title with the three remaining members in a different uniform and Spider-Man added as a cash cow. We will mark sixty years of “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine” with an intact FF (albeit with Johnny in a bad situation), an epic story—and John Romita Jr. on board as artist!
Final Thoughts
How long will the Human Torch stay “changed forever?” Will Dr. Doom and Victorious keep their wedding presents or send them back? And what will Spider-Man say when he finds out what’s happened to his buddy Johnny? These questions and many others (yes, Spider-Man will be dropping in presently) will be answered in the next several issues of The Fantastic Four!
Fantastic Four #34: The Armagedron Will Get You If You Don’t Watch Out
- Writing - 9/109/10
- Storyline - 8.5/108.5/10
- Art - 9/109/10
- Color - 9/109/10
- Cover Art - 8/108/10
Hello J.A. Fludd
Great review and incisive insights.
Thank you, Cecil!