Fantastic Four #6: Victor/Victorious

Every writer who works with The Fantastic Four must do a Galactus story.  It’s as inevitable as Dr. Doom, who’s also back in this month’s issue.  Back in Fantastic Four #50, at the conclusion of that original classic “Trilogy,” The Watcher advised Reed, Sue, and the Thing as they witnessed the battle between the Silver Surfer and Galactus, “Emulate The Watcher!  Stand and observe!  Try to fathom the cataclysmic forces which have been unleashed—for you shall never see their like again!”  Since then the Devourer of Worlds has been back to Earth so many times, our Solar System should have a “Galactus Crossing” sign in it. 

Nevertheless, Dan Slott is on board now, and here he’s trotting out his inevitable Galactus story.  And here’s what’s going on. 

Galactus is hovering over Doomstadt in Latveria, firing up the old George Foreman Planet Grill, and Dr. Doom is on the attack.  And Doom is not alone.  Remember that Zora Vukovic character from issue #1, the young insurrectionist who got the wounded and brooding Doom out of his castle and inspired him to take back Latveria from the totalitarian regime (and reinstate his own)?  Doom has now hopped up this lass with a charge of artificial Power Cosmic (which we’re going to discuss in a moment) and made her his new enforcer.  It is Zora, in her new, cosmically empowered guise as Victorious, who takes the point in battling Galactus. 

After Victorious wails on the intergalactic Iron Chef for a bit, Doom dispatches her to the Latverian border to deal with the intruders he has just detected:  The Fantastic Four, zooming in aboard the Fantasticar (with Sue and Johnny changing into new uniforms en route), direct from the wedding of the Thing and Alicia Masters.  (And is Bashful Ben ever miffed about that!  This was supposed to be his wedding night!)  Victorious knocks the Fantasticar clean out of the air, forcing Reed to parachute Sue safely down to the ground and poor Ben to hit a Latverian woman’s farm like a meteor.  (And is she miffed!  Like many Latverians, this farm woman has swallowed Doom’s Kool Aid and thinks our Fantastic Four are the bad guys.)  Overhead, Victorious complies with the official Bylaws and Regulations for Super-Villains and Their Accomplices and tells the Human Torch her origin.  After she got Doom out of his funk and back into villainous form, he hooked her up to an apparatus resembling the patented Von Doom Power Cosmic Extractor (which he used on the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four #57) and juiced young Zora with cosmic energy.  Reed immediately doesn’t like the sound of this.  The FF remember the fate of Tyros the Terrible (who had been Terrax the Tamer) in issue #260, and we should also recall the fate of Doom’s treacherous scientist lackey, Hauptmann, two issues earlier.  Endowing people with artificial Power Cosmic does not end well. 

Having thus fulfilled the rules of super-villainy, Victorious knocks the Torch out of the air with the same alacrity as she did the Fantasticar, contemptuously sneering at Johnny for mocking her homeland with his “perfect hair and empty words” and calling him “nothing but a rich, decadent celebrity!”  Reed catches Johnny, who has gone hormonal over Victorious admiring his hair.  Oh, please tell me that this isn’t what it looks like.  It probably is, but for the moment, just say it isn’t so. 

While this has been going on, Doom has been distracting Galactus with magic while Doom’s robot servitors have been taking apart Galactus’s cosmic Grillmaster.  Galactus goes into a hungry madness that a whole planet full of Snickers bars wouldn’t fix, and makes a beeline for Victorious and the energies that she is emitting.  As the Fantastic Four confront Doom, and Galactus latches onto Victorious, Reed calls Doom out for his “miscalculations” attracting Galactus back to Earth and putting everyone in danger.  Doom, who has always had serious issues with Reed thinking he has “miscalculated” things, reveals that this is no error on his part.  Everything is proceeding exactly according to his plan—whatever that is, which surely will not bode well for anyone!