ICYMI! Fantastic Four #37: The Kree/Skrull Trick-or-Treat

Everyone knows Halloween is one of kids’ most beloved holidays.  Everyone, that is, except for Jo-Venn and N’Kalla, who are new to Earth and thus experiencing Trick or Treat for the first time.  The Kree boy and the Skrull girl have a plan to “conquer” Halloween on Yancy Street by using her shape-changing powers and Jo’s Kree warrior guile, and it works.  They end up with a roomful of candy after going out on separate Trick or Treat runs with Franklin and Valeria and Reed and Sue.  However, after everyone compares notes, the kids are found out, and Ben and Alicia make them retrace their steps through the neighborhood, giving back their ill-gotten treats and learning something about honesty.  

Meanwhile, the depressed Human Torch, confined to a containment suit but still throwing off enough heat to roast anyone but the Thing who comes near him, sets up one of his meetings with Spider-Man at the Statue of Liberty.  Having to stand on Liberty’s sleeve while the Webhead sits on her crown, the Torch explains to a sympathetic Spidey what Dr. Doom did to him and what happened to Sky as collateral damage.  Spider-Man, who has been through some odd changes of his own (remember the whole “Spidey with six arms” thing from way back when?), tries to be encouraging, but even he is at a loss for anything really constructive to tell Johnny.  

Back at the Baxter Building, Reed is sitting alone in a special “Void” room that he uses for contemplation.  What he’s pondering is the parting message from the late Nathaniel, asking Reed to find his sister.  Reed is as depressed as Johnny, remembering all the times that Nathaniel left him and Evelyn, Reed’s mother, and the time he finally disappeared into a time machine for good.  Why, Reed wonders, did Nathaniel keep abandoning his family and creating other families across time and space?  As Sue comes in and holds and comforts him, we see Mr. Fantastic as we’ve seldom seen him before, almost in tears, wondering why he and his mother were never “good enough” for his father.  

Though Reed is depressed, this is his only significant scene this issue; thus we are mostly spared having to look at that miserable beard covering half of his face.

Isolated in the Void room, Reed and Sue never get Alicia’s distress call when the Grimm family suddenly finds itself in trouble.  The Profiteer—remember her from Empyre?—is frustrated over her massive loss of revenues after Ben and Alicia adopted Jo-Venn and N’Kalla and took them away.  The Profiteer, as you’ll recall, was using the two kids as fighting dogs and making money from interstellar wagers on simulations of the old Kree/Skrull Wars.  Bereft of her biggest income stream, the cosmic capitalist wants the kids back and sends a squadron of warriors to collect them.  When the alien mercenaries gas N’Kalla and start levitating her away, Jo-Venn snaps, grabs one of their weapons, and begins to slaughter the aliens left and right, totally shocking Ben!  

When the Torch and Spider-Man arrive and help the Thing in sending their thoroughly whipped attackers running, the battle seems to be over.  There is, however, another drama going on that Ben, Johnny, and Spidey don’t see.  Inside the house, Alicia starts sculpting Jo-Venn in radioactive clay to control him and make him stop killing the aliens.  Their neighbor, Hiram Sheckerberg, walks in and catches her—and the blind Alicia cannot actually see what happens to him when the Puppet Master takes him over from afar!  With his neck bent and fingers mangled after the Hulk’s retaliation for what he did to Alicia’s honeymoon, the Puppet Master speaks through Hiram and makes her relent in her plan to control her children that way.  (Which explains the woman in that scene from last issue.)  

Fortunately, the end of the battle and the rescue of N’Kalla have already put an end to Jo-Venn’s killing spree.  Straight away, Ben and Alicia impress on the boy that slaughtering their foes is not the Fantastic Four’s style.  When Jo-Venn protests that he is Ben’s “soldier” and Ben corrects him, the boy is afraid he is going to be rotated out of the family.  Instead, Ben tells Jo-Venn that it is time for him to stop thinking of himself as a soldier and start thinking of himself as a son.  Jo-Venn hugs Ben and calls him “Father” for the first time in one of the most touching Fantastic Four moments we’ve yet seen.  

All that remains this Halloween night, then, is a solution to the problem of the Torch, in his get-together with Spider-Man, having inadvertently almost melted the Statue of Liberty’s arm off!  Dr. Doom’s revenge is obviously going to be an ongoing problem in a number of unexpected ways…