Fantastic Four #43: Doom it May Concern

Sixty years ago this month, the Fantastic Four first met their greatest foe:  the Monarch of Evil, Doctor Doom!  This chapter of “The Reckoning War” coincides with Doom’s first appearance (as it was no doubt planned to do) and spotlights the role of Earth’s greatest villain in the conflict that’s tearing the universe asunder.

He handles it pretty much the way you’d expect Doom to do.  

We begin with the alien Cormorant, whom we last saw destroying the previous Baxter Building and proving to be unstoppable when the FF and Doom went up against him in issue #25, in Washington, DC, flattening the former Great Lakes Avengers and painfully ripping off the alien armor-weapons of some characters named Gauntlet and the Grasshopper.  (Ow, that had to hurt!  Those armor parts were apparently grafted to those characters’ bodies!)  The things the Cormorant literally ripped off of them were apparently Watcher/Prosilican technology as old as the universe itself, and there is one last component that the Cormorant and his master, the Helmsman, are looking for:  something called the Tactigon, which right now is in the Florida Everglades, in the possession of Dr. Doom.  Of course Doom knows the Cormorant is coming and is just waiting for him…

Meanwhile, the Reckoning member called Ruin, with some of the Brotherhood of Badoon, has invaded the Baxter Building and taken Alicia, Franklin, Valeria, and the Grimm kids prisoner.  He would like to sabotage the Forever Gate, which the FF constructed out of a Nexus of Reality, and hasten the destruction of the universe.  Unfortunately for him, the mysterious “Protocol Zero” that Reed had Valeria initiate last issue, has made that impossible.  So instead, Ruin uses the last of the portal’s energy to teleport himself to the scene of the final battle of this ancient war, leaving the Badoon to destroy Alicia and the kids.  Franklin and Valeria bolt through the Gate themselves, using its lingering vestige of power to jump through it in the wake of their foe, while Jo-Venn and N’Kalla mop up the Badoon.  

In that sealed-off sector of the cosmos called “the Barrens,” Reed, the Thing, She-Hulk (my critique of her excessively massive and muscled frame as drawn by Rachael Stott still stands), and the gravely wounded Jack of Hearts face a slow death from the Barrens’ energy contamination.  Reed notes that even if they could escape, the limitless knowledge that he appropriated from the Watchers will soon be the end of him just the same.  It doesn’t look good for this part of our cast.  

On the Watchers’ home planet, Nick Fury, “The Unseen,” works to free our Watcher from the endlessly looping “What If?” that the other Watchers have jacked him into.  At first he succeeds in ending the playback loop and causing it to play what came after the end of that scenario.  The Watcher sees that in that alternate reality, the limitless energy source that that counterpart of Reed used to create a Utopian Earth overloaded and destroyed the world!  So our Watcher did the right thing, intervening in the first coming of Galactus to Earth after all!  Emnu the Watcher doesn’t want this information getting out, and prepares to execute both Fury and our Watcher to keep the secret.  But he is thwarted by…Sue Richards, the Invisible Woman, with a ray gun powerful enough to take down a cosmic-level being!  

Ever since Reed sent her incognito a couple of issues ago, this is what Sue has been up to:  shadowing Fury in case of just such a situation.  It may be disconcerting to see Mrs. Richards packing heat and shooting a Watcher, but we must remember that our heroine has for years had a side gig as a spy, for which there was a whole miniseries a couple of years ago.  There’s something else that Emnu and the other Watchers didn’t want anyone to know about:  a master Nexus of Reality called The Apex, to which all such nexi are connected.  Sue guesses that instead of actually destroying the universe, what the Reckoning is really after is control of the Apex.  

Elsewhere, the former Prosilicans and the Watchers prepare for a final showdown, while the Human Torch, Thor, the Wiccan, the Hulkling, the Shi’Ar Imperials, the Unparallelled, the Starjammers, various Heralds of Galactus, and the road company of Hamilton (just kidding about that last one) are joined by Ego the Living Planet in taking the final battle to the Reckoning.  Man, this is going to be one crowded showdown.  

Back to the main event of our story.  Dr. Doom battles the Cormorant, who seems to be winning, but the whole thing turns out to be a feint.  Doom has deliberately used “the Tactigon” to lure the Cormorant in so that he can hack into the interstellar comm signal between the Cormorant and the Helmsman and use his sorcery to conjure the Helmsman to Earth.  He puts the other alien in a mystic circle where Doom confiscates his mask, then banishes him.  (Doom doesn’t care when the Helmsman proclaims that in defeating him, Doom has earned the right to see his adversary’s face, which you realize means this is going to become important in some future issue.)  The mask is what Doom wanted all along.  It is the means of controlling the Cormorant.  

Then, in a surprising switch, Doom gives the mask to the Cormorant and strikes up an alliance in which the two of them will snatch victory from the Watchers and the Reckoning!  Yep, only Dr. Doom would be slick and cunning enough to make an end run around both warring factions and try to snatch all the power for himself.  This is a classic Doom move.

And that moves us all into next issue, which will be double-sized for the grand finale of this whole thing.