Fantastic Four – Full Circle: Accentuate the Negative

Marvel has been doing graphic novels with its characters since 1982.  In forty years there has never, not once, been a Fantastic Four graphic novel.  Collected editions, yes, but not an original-material book.  

Alex Ross has fixed that gross injustice.  And here is the story.

The Baxter Building has a strange nighttime intruder:  a corpse wrapped up in black alien gunk!  Ben Grimm, the Thing, recognizes the body.  It is none other than the Changeling!  Not the metamorph character from The X-Men and not Beast Boy from DC Comics, this is the embittered scientist from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four #51, the man who envied Reed Richards and tried to destroy him by stealing the physical form of the Thing!  What’s more, out of the corpse’s mouth pours an endless stream of vile, parasitic creatures that attack the FF until Reed calls out a security command “Z-Z-1-2-3” to annihilate the creatures.  Do you know the significance of this command?  Read on to the end of the review!

The narration in this page from FF #51 (1966) identifies the Thing’s body-snatcher as “the Changeling.”

To learn who is trying to get them, Earth’s greatest heroes must go to the source of the energies that Reed scans from the bodies of the creatures—through Sub-Space to the Negative Zone!  In through the Distortion Area they go, and into the antimatter universe itself, sneaking past Annihilus, who is having a snack of the same creatures that attacked the FF in their home.  (ECCH!)  No sooner are they clear of “He Who Annihilates” than they are set upon by more of those creatures and confronted with the one who sent them.  It’s the return of a surprise villain—Janus the Nega Man from Fantastic Four #107-109!  Janus has lured the FF into the Negative Zone so that he and his swarm of creatures can use them as they used the Changeling’s body, as host bodies from which they can invade Earth.  The scheme fails because Sue stops up the FF’s throats with force fields (the Thing finds that as unpleasant as it was necessary); then Annihilus shows up, murderous as ever (and well-fed on little Negative Zone beasties) and ready to attack.  The FF make a quick getaway and Reed then reminds the negative-energy form that thinks it is Janus that the real Janus perished in the explosive area of the Zone.  The Janus apparition goes berserk and hurls our fearless foursome across negative space right to that very spot, where they all face annihilation in the atmosphere of…the Anti-Earth!

Reed quickly figures out the nature of this Negative Zone counterpart of our planet.  He reveals that it is somehow—don’t ask me how, I’m still trying to figure it out myself—a positive planet in the antimatter universe, and that its inhabitants created the explosive area around it to protect it from antimatter falling onto its surface.  Meanwhile, Reed thinks that they can use Sue and Johnny’s powers and the protection of the FF’s special matter/antimatter-reaction-nullifying uniforms to enter the Anti-Earth’s atmosphere and travel safely to the surface.  The Thing, who got the bad end of Reed’s explorations back in FF #1, protests vehemently until Sue talks him down.  (Remember it was Sue who talked him into piloting Reed’s spaceship in that origin story.  At critical times she can have an influence with him that even Reed doesn’t.)  Then, it’s a descent in a force field propelled by the Human Torch’s flames into the atmosphere of the planet.  

The civilization of the Anti-Earth is ready for them when the FF drops down over one of their cities.  Johnny is quickly caught in an energy field, and Sue gets a force field over the armed welcoming committee.  A quartet of super-types then appears, led by an armored figure who turns out to be…the Changeling, very much alive!  Somehow, perhaps because of the Thing’s-body-replicating technology he was using, he wasn’t so much annihilated in the explosive area as he was duplicated, and the Janus entity used the duplicate as his lure to bring in our heroes.  When he crashed on the Anti-Earth, the inhabitants created a containment suit in which he has lived among them since then.  

In a further explanation, the Changeling reveals that the people with whom he lives are descendants of Iroquois who interbred with visiting aliens and learned to use their technology to create the antimatter-annihilating shield over the planet.  We’re going to talk about this in the review.  His years on the Anti-Earth have given the Changeling time to reflect on his former life and his destructive envy of Reed, which he now regrets.  And Reed actually does him a favor, using a portion of his uniform to create a new protective suit for the man who now tells them his real name—Ricardo Jones.  Using a body covering created by the man he once hated, Jones can now live without his armor for the first time in years.  

Jones returns the favor by bestowing upon the Fantastic Four a Cosmic Control Rod based on the same technology in the weapon that gives Annihilus both his power and his immortality.  (The technology of the extinct people of Tyanna from Fantastic Four #140.)  Cutting the rod into four segments, the FF are able to transport themselves back home to the Baxter Building, ending their wild adventure.  

Once they’re home, Reed speculates on the true nature of the Negative Zone, which he now thinks is somehow entangled with the human mind in a way that makes it a dark reflection of our normal reality.  Reed thinks the Negative Zone is the way it is because that is the way the FF imagine it to be, and that to survive there, Ricardo had to “bond with others who came to embody a positive energy to survive in a psychopathic ally ‘negative’ environment.”  The Thing brushes off his old friend’s speculations, and for once I’m with Bashful Ben.  This whole yarn just reinforces something I’ve thought for years:  the Negative Zone is just plain screwy!