Fantastic Four #6
Recap
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!
Review
For the last five issues we have watched Dan Slott gradually put The Fantastic Four back together after three years of being shelved with its characters in different books, different worlds, different universes, and different roles. With this issue, everything is finally in place, and the payoff is what I’m calling the best issue of The Fantastic Four since Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo. The script is practically a checklist of everything you want to see in this mag. The FF, back in uniform (though it’s not the classic one, at least Gracia and Arciniega have colored it well) are working their “argumentative super-family dynamic” in the midst of an awesome, super-cosmic threat. (People say The Incredibles are an analogue of The Fantastic Four, but as much as I love The Incredibles, they represent exactly half of what The FF is about—the “super-powered hero family” half, not the “super-science adventurer/explorer heroes” half.) Doom has been restored to proper villainous form; no more of this “I once was evil but now I am good” business. (Doom could never be a pure hero anyway; as we remember from Marvel 2-in-One, no matter how “good” he tried to be, his “evil” reflexes kept taking over.) Being an arch-villain and then switching roles to ambiguous goodness is what Marvel has Magneto for. There are scenes of slamming, awesome, epic-scale super-action. And the art…the art is such an improvement over the first three issues. Why didn’t they have Aaron Kuder on board from the beginning? I liked what I was seeing, artistically, in his sections of the last issue, and he’s only gotten better from there. This issue has so many pages and so many panels that just cry out, “Behold, you are reading The Fantastic Four! This is what it looks like when you are reading The Fantastic Four!” And I say this in spite of Reed’s beard, which I am just not going to like. Marvel, please do whatever you must to keep this man on this job; I’m serious. Let’s see him continue to do the kind of job he did with this issue, or better.
Now, about Galactus. Something is going on with him and we’re not getting what it is—yet. The last I heard of him, over in some Avengers/Ultimates book, Galactus was somehow changed from a planet-consuming predator into a being who pumps new life into dead planets. This issue has not told us how he went from being that to being the gourmand of the galaxies again. And just what exactly is this hold that Dr. Doom seems to have over him, and what is this freaky, almost zombie-like state into which he has fallen? (Walking Dead-type zombies are bad enough; Galactus as a zombie is too awful to contemplate.) Once again Doom is tampering with forces of the universe as if it were his divine right to do so, and once again only our Fantastic Four stand between the world and Doom’s cosmic-sized ego. So I guess all is as it should be, and that’s a good thing. There is no more satisfying conflict in all of comics than the unending clash of The Fantastic Four and Dr. Doom.
Six issues in, it looks like The Fantastic Four are really back, all the way. May Fantastic Four #6 be the standard to match or improve upon going forward.
Final Thoughts
Victorious is a well-designed character and I hope Slott has some interesting twists in mind for the story that I suspect lies ahead for her. Aaron Kuder, please don’t leave. Gracia and Arciniega, keep up the good work. This issue of The FF leaves us eager to see more.
Fantastic Four #6: Victor/Victorious
- Writing - 9.5/109.5/10
- Storyline - 9/109/10
- Art - 9.5/109.5/10
- Color - 9.5/109.5/10
- Cover Art - 9/109/10