Fantastic Four #34: The Armagedron Will Get You If You Don’t Watch Out

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!