Fantastic Four #35
J.A. Fludd
Recap
The Fantastic Four return home from the debacle of Dr. Doom’s “wedding” with the Human Torch fully ablaze and unable to flame off because of Doom’s awful revenge on Johnny for going to bed with Victorious. Directly they arrive at the all-new Baxter Building, they are confronted with a new mystery. Someone, by means of time-travel technology, has planted a strange object in their home!
As Reed ponders this enigma, we the readers get to jump ahead of him to a place outside of time as we know it, where Rama Tut, the Pharaoh from the Future, makes his home and Immortus, Master of Time, also resides. Immortus has gathered together Rama Tut, the Scarlet Centurion, and Kang the Conqueror—who, along with Immortus himself, are the same person at different times and all happen to be the descendant of time traveler Nathaniel Richards—for a critical purpose. It seems that as the final act of his life, Nathaniel has created something called “The Prize,” which he has distributed in four parts along the timeline of his son, Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic. Whatever “The Prize” is, Immortus assumes it must confer awesome power on its user—power which the collective iterations of Kang want for themselves as Nathaniel’s heirs.
To their collective surprise, a further Kang iteration called Scion joins them in their quest, revealing that he is the final temporal counterpart of Kang! Because Scion genetically checks out as being related to Nathaniel, he is allowed to join them in their cross-time scavenger hunt to collect all the parts of “The Prize.” They will each go to a different time in the history of the Fantastic Four and collect the component hidden there—murdering the different temporal iterations of Earth’s greatest heroes as they go! (Never mind that Reed Richards and his family are their ancestors; family loyalty goes only so far when ultimate power may be involved!)
Where it gets really clever is that each attack on a historical iteration of the Fantastic Four has its own mock “cover” within the story, in the style and trade dress of the period. The best of these is what purports to be Fantastic Four #28 (the “real” FF #28 being our heroes’ first encounter with the old X-Men), in which Rama Tut battles the early Stan Lee/Jack Kirby FF and buries them in sand from “a rip in time beneath the deserts of ancient Egypt” to collect their hidden part of Nathaniel’s MacGuffin.
Next, the Scarlet Centurion appears during that dreadful period of the 1990s when everything in comics suffered from wretched excess and adolescent pandering. The FF are wearing vests covered with pockets and patches over their uniforms. The Thing’s face has been slashed by Wolverine (who got what was coming to him in a contemporaneous X-Men story when Magneto ripped all the Adamantium out of him) and he’s going around in a helmet harking back to FF #3. And Sue, her mind warped by Malice, is dressed up in a slutty-looking costume, looking like a White Queen wannabe, that we thankfully don’t have to look at too much. This is the period when I frankly should have dropped the book, but held on until FF #400 just because it was The Fantastic Four. Give me strength. Anyway, the Scarlet Centurion brings the Thunderbolts (who you’ll remember were really the Masters of Evil) from a short time forward in the future when that team of bogus heroes ensconced itself in the FF’s home after the FF and the Avengers disappeared into Franklin’s pocket universe at the end of Onslaught. While the FF battle the Thunderbolts, the Scarlet Centurion nabs another part of “The Gift,” then ages that floor of Four Freedoms Plaza by a thousand years and “brings the house” down on everyone. Ouch!
Next comes the attack of Kang, during the post-“Future Foundation” period when the Human Torch returned from being “dead.” The Fantastic Four in antiseptic white uniforms—another thing that wasn’t my favorite. Well, at least they got those bloody hexagons off their chests. Anyway, Kang disintegrates the Torch (who had only been “alive” again for about five minutes, figuratively speaking); then, when Reed temporally blocks all future tech from the building, Kang pulls Captain America’s shield and Excalibur out of time to go on a slaughtering spree, murdering everyone left and right, before collecting his part of “The Prize.” Charming fellow, that Kang.
And that leaves Scion, who relates his tale of entering the all-new Baxter Building in what is for us the present day, a time when John Romita Jr. has that damn beard on Reed’s face looking worse than ever! So help me, John Jr. is the last of my favorite artists left standing (Jack Kirby is dead and George Perez and John Byrne are retired), but the way he draws present-day Reed in this issue, the leader of the FF should be called “Pappy” Fantastic! If Marvel wants to give me a present for the FF’s 60th anniversary, they can get that wretched, repulsive growth of hair off Reed’s face and keep it off! ECCH! Regardless, according to Scion, he invaded the Baxter Building, reverse-aged Reed and the Thing into infants, and age-accelerated Sue and the Torch into a wizened state—and slaughtered the lot of them. Or at least that’s his first story. When the other Kangs recoil from this account, Scion then reveals that what he actually did was to travel into all the time periods that they attacked and rescue one of the FF from each. Why would he do this? Because there is no such person as Scion. The Kangs have been royally played—by Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic himself, who was onto them the whole time and has his temporally cherry-picked Fantastic Four plow into the Kangs and whip them to a fare-thee-well! You see, no matter who you are or what time or world you’re coming from, when you pick a fight with the Fantastic Four, you get your clock cleaned!
After the FF have handed over all the Kangs to the Time Variance Authority for attempting what the TVA calls a “legacy hit” on the Richards family, the temporal agents do a “reset” on the FF’s timeline to make it as if none of the above ever happened. Before Reed returns to our own time, the TVA agents mention something about a “Reckoning War” that is soon to come (in a separate comic next year), which Reed forgets as he vanishes back where he came from, where the rest of his family as we presently know them is waiting.
With the fully assembled “Prize” in his possession, Reed plays the holographic message that it contains. It’s from the late Nathaniel, expressing regrets over what an absentee father and husband he’s been to all of his mates and all of his children—including the daughter whose existence he now reveals to Reed, asking Reed to find and look for this hitherto-unknown sister! This gives the FF a new mission (along with Reed finding a way to restore Johnny to his normal powers): to track down this mysterious new member of their family. As we are reminded, family is what the Fantastic Four is all about.
In a backup story by writer and artist Jason Loo, an FF family outing to a museum turns into an impromptu battle with the Mole Man. It’s all done in two pages and the family decides just to go home and play board games for quality time. There’s not much to see here.
A second backup story by Mark Waid and Paul Renaud is yet another look at the origin of the Fantastic Four, dovetailing Mark Waid’s story from the well-remembered “9-cent issue” with Dan Slott’s recent retelling in the “Point of Origin” storyline. It’s as well-written as you would expect from Mark Waid, but it really makes you wonder how many different ways writers are going to come up with to tell this same story. However, the art by Paul Renaud is an eye-opener. He really has a nice style and is another artist, like Aaron Kuder, Sean Isaakse, and John Romita Jr., who should be put on this book full-time to give it a visual consistency and stability. These pages are nice work and it would be cool to have Renaud on board for every issue. Not that that’s actually going to happen…
Review
The main story in this book is something that should have been done a long time ago. People who have been with The Fantastic Four for decades will remember that Nathaniel Richards, Reed’s Dad, was introduced during the John Byrne issues, in FF #272 and 273 (1984). At the end of this story we learned something startling. In a distant alternate future, a descendant of Nathaniel grew bored with the Utopian world that Nathaniel created and fled back into the past—aboard a time machine built in the shape of a Sphinx—and traveled to ancient Egypt! In other words, in Fantastic Four #19, when the FF themselves went back in time to the land of the Pharaohs and battled Rama Tut, they were battling Reed Richards’s distant relative! That relative escaped being defeated by the Fantastic Four, traveled forward in time again, met Dr. Doom (in Fantastic Four Annual #2, 1964) and had that famous conversation in which they suspected they might be the same person at different points in time, then went on to become the Scarlet Centurion, Kang the Conqueror, and Immortus! For years it was assumed that Kang was a descendant of Dr. Doom when he is in fact a Richards! The tyrant of time is part of the extended family of the Fantastic Four! And for the last 37 years, no one writing The FF has done anything about Reed Richards’s relationship to one of Marvel’s greatest villains within a Fantastic Four story—until now.
Years ago, a fan who may have had this fact on his mind actually commissioned John Byrne to do a drawing of the FF battling Kang. That drawing has remained as a tantalizing reminder of an idea that Marvel writers were neglecting, but here now is a scan of it.
The one part of this story that may stretch your credulity a bit is that the different Kangs could so quickly, easily, and completely defeat all the different iterations of the FF, even by ambushing them. And didn’t you know from the very beginning that “The Prize” would turn out to be something that the Kangs would have found worthless, but is important to Reed? But the whole thing is done so entertainingly, and John Jr. draws it so well (leaving aside that beard on Reed that in this story makes him remind me of the creepy old neighbor in Home Alone) that you can sort of look past that. One of the really clever things this story does, structurally speaking, is the way it touches on the evolution of the Thing in both appearance and character, and his evolving relationship with the Torch from the early days of the FF to the present. The dialogue between Ben and Johnny during the “white uniform” period is especially touching.
Then there is the wonderful two-page sequence during the final battle when the Scarlet Centurion temporally folds the Thing’s entire existence into a single moment, making him experience being Ben Grimm and all of the different physical iterations of the Thing at the same time. John Jr. especially does a good job with these pages, and the panel in which the Centurion gets clobbered by Ben and all the Things at once had to hurt!
What begins in this issue is something that is apparently going to be a running theme in this book for a while: a change in the dynamic between the Human Torch and the Thing. In effect, what we’re starting to see is a role reversal between them. We’re accustomed to Johnny being the sort of Devil-may-care, almost happy-go-lucky member of the FF, enjoying life, enjoying being a celebrity hero, dating and sleeping around. Meanwhile, Ben was effectively a prisoner of his own powers, unable to live like other people, afraid that Alicia wouldn’t love him any more if he returned to normal, but also frightened of proposing to her. Ben is now married to Alicia (even if they can’t consummate it) and they have adopted children (a Skrull girl and a Kree boy, but still…) Ben is happier than he’s ever been, but now, thanks to Doom, it’s Johnny who’s the prisoner of his powers and he’s much worse off than Ben ever was!
Johnny’s despair at being trapped in flames and Ben’s attempts to support him seem as if they will now be an ongoing part of the story of the FF, as witness the tale that unfolds in Fantastic Four #36 (and we’ll be getting to that shortly). It pains me to see this happen to Johnny Storm. What Dr. Doom has done to him is not my idea of a “punishment” that fits the “crime,” but this is Doom we’re talking about. It’s just like him to retaliate far worse than the offense. If Johnny’s normal powers can’t be restored, Doom has effectively stolen a young man’s life from him. How this awful situation can be restored is something that I hope Dan Slott is going to work out…somehow.
A note about the art: While John Romita Jr. has drawn this very special Fantastic Four story with all the beauty and power that his style can bring to the pages, his presence for this issue alone, coupled with the fact that they brought in multiple inkers to finish the art, continues to point up the instability in the visual side of the book that has been a part of the series since the 2018 revival. I really would like to have The Fantastic Four drawn from month to month by a single artist with a clean, classic, attractive, no-nonsense style, with inking to complement him. This is the least that The FF deserves. It’s a shame that we are no longer in the days when someone like a John Buscema would get onto one book and stay with it for years. But it’s something that I’d really like this book to have again, with one penciler of the right style and an inker who will stay on for the long haul.
All things considered (even that gag-and-retch-inducing beard on Reed), I hereby declare the 60th-Anniversary Fantastic Four #35 (which in the original numbering should be FF #680) to be the best decade-anniversary issue of this series since the 20th Anniversary in FF #236. And speaking of that original numbering, this issue puts what ought to be Fantastic Four #700 at just twenty issues away. We can only wonder what Dan Slott has planned for that.
Final Thoughts
This issue is a love letter to Marvel’s first and best creation. It would be impossible to encapsulate everything that is great about The Fantastic Four in one 60-page story, but FF #35 captures the spirit of it. It’s a fun read and great to look at, and may be the best thing Marvel will do in 2021.
ICYMI! Fantastic Four #35: Kangs for the Memories
- Writing - 9.5/109.5/10
- Storyline - 9.5/109.5/10
- Art - 9.25/109.3/10
- Color - 9/109/10
- Cover Art - 9/109/10