Fantastic Four – The Reckoning War Alpha #1: I See a Bad Moon Falling

Just in time for that new Roland Emmerich movie, Earth is showered with pieces of a falling Moon.  The super-heroes of New York come out in force to protect the city, and fittingly, leading the way are the Fantastic Four!  

But just what is going on here?  Remember back at the epilogue of Empyre, when Nick Fury, “The Unseen,” became the cosmic foot-soldier of the resurrected Watcher?  And remember when they learned that the Cotati had been armed with weapons technology from the earliest history of the universe?  On a recon/spying mission for the Watcher, Fury found that someone has been going around the cosmos supplying such arms to a variety of species including the Brotherhood of Badoon and the Snarks.  When the Watcher tried to alert the rest of his people to what was happening, a ship of someone called “The Reckoning” opened fire on the Moon and blew it into asteroids.  Now, as pieces of the Moon rain down on Earth, our planet faces not only that disaster but also the attack of the Badoon themselves!

While all this is going on, She-Hulk faces members of the Time Variance Authority who inform her that for some reason she is responsible for the terrible thing that’s happening to Earth.  This harks back to a story from She-Hulk Vol. 2 #3, back in 2005.  This whole thing has been percolating away in the background of Marvel stories for years, and it goes way back even farther than it looks.  As the TVA retreats to Null-Space, another dire encounter is happening elsewhere in the universe.  

The Silver Surfer is suddenly confronted with the Griever at the End of All Things.  She has been drawn back here because this universe is ending, torn apart by war and devastation everywhere.  Accompanying the Griever is yet another abstract being, the Never Queen, lover of Eternity.  (How many of these characters who are the embodiment of ideas are there, anyway?)  The Never Queen, who represents possibility (if she’s about possibility, why is her name “Never?”), informs the Surfer that Eternity has been poisoned by this conflict and only one thing can stop it.  The Surfer must find and use…the Ultimate Nullifier!  Back on Earth, Dr. Doom realizes the meaning of the attack of the Badoon and leaves Victorious to protect Latveria while he speeds off to “save the very fabric of reality.”  Not too much pressure, then, is it?  

After the Invisible Woman confiscates a Badoon weapon and Mr. Fantastic studies it and makes a similar realization to what Doom has learned, the Fantastic Four take off into space to find the Watcher.  What they find is Nick Fury, trying to attack the Reckoning and firing on the FF instead.  When Sue de-cloaks Fury and Johnny brings him aboard the FF’s ship, Fury reveals that the Reckoning was after a strange orb floating amid the debris.  Once they’ve recovered the orb, Reed accesses the Watcher AI that it contains and learns the story of the Reckoning.  

In a nutshell, what the Fantastic Four are now facing is a spinoff of the origin of the Watchers from Tales of Suspense #53, which you can read all about in this Blog post:  https://cokeandcomics.com/tales-of-suspense-53-story-c/.  The Reckoning used to be the people of the planet Prosilicus, whom the Watchers—who weren’t the Watchers yet—once gifted with their technology.  The unwise Prosilicans used the Watchers’ gifts to attack other planets that the Watchers had thus gifted, plunging the early universe into “the First War”.  In the aftermath of that war, their would-be benefactors became the Watchers.  They took their oath of non-interference with other species and sealed off the Prosilicans from the rest of the cosmos behind a Great Barrier.  Having hooked up his mind with the Watchers’ equivalent of Google, Reed seems to have suddenly taken on Cosmic Awareness, while behind that Barrier, a being who calls himself “Wrath” plots his further assault on the Watchers and everything else in existence!  To be continued…