Reading the Fantastic Four comics from the start. Let’s catch up with the replacement team and the Future Foundation in FF #6. And let’s do it at the local internet café!

The Fantastic Four’s year-long expedition through time and space was supposed to be only four minutes back on Earth in the present, but they never returned. A replacement Fantastic Four – Ant-Man, Medusa, She-Hulk, and newcomer Darla Deering – have taken over teaching the genius kids of the Future Foundation as well as protecting the Earth. The previous issue had Medusa sneaking would-be supervillain Bentley-23 away with villains the Wizard and Blastaar the Living Bomb-burst.

This issue begins with Dragon Man asking around the new Baxter Building where Bentley has gone. This includes a fun full-page cross-section of the HQ in the old Jack Kirby style. Scott Lang, the current Ant-Man, wakes from a dream of his dead daughter Cassie (don’t worry, she eventually comes back), and then obsesses over photos of her on his phone. During breakfast, the whole FF sees pics of Darla in the newspaper, of her trying on various looks for her Thing suit from the previous issue. Turns out someone hacked her phone and stole her pics. Cut to an internet café (!) where a daily bugle reporter is buying the photos from the Yancy Street Gang, who want to make Darla’s life awful for her taking the place of the Thing.

And then this happens. There’s no other way to say it, so here goes: the Moloid Tong, wearing a pink dress, comes out as a trans female. But the comic doesn’t use those words. The actual text is, “I have a girl inside of me. I tried to be a boy like you, but there is no boy here. And I do not with to be what I am not any longer.” The other Moloids are happy to accept Tong as their sister.

What to make of this? On one hand, representation is good. On the other hand, having a trans character also be an alien creature is perhaps a mixed message. The real message, I suppose, is how everyone else loves and accepts Tong for who she authentically is. As I recall, a criticism many had at the time was that this had no relevance to the ongoing plot. But isn’t that the way life works? A person’s coming out should be an ordinary thing, and not a shocking plot twist, right? Was anyone buying this comic thinking, “I wonder what Tong is up to this month?” I’m not an expert on these things in the least, but it seems to be that this was tastefully done.

Moving on, the replacement four have a meeting. She-Hulk will take Medusa’s son Ahura back to the Inhuman city of Attilan to search for Medusa and Bentley, while Ant-Man and Darla will work on securing Darla from other cyberattacks. Except that popstar Darla has an engagement at Carnegie Hall that day. (If you’re playing Carnegie Hall, wouldn’t the people you live with know that already?) Darla sees Tong in a dress and says, “Good for her.”

At Carnegie, Darla is doing an acoustic show, without any of the backup dancers or outrageous costumes. But then we see that a bunch of the Yancy Street Gang are in the audience wearing Thing masks. They throw food at her and drive her off the stage. Darla runs to Scott for help, but he’s disappeared.

In Attilan, which is floating over in the sky over NYC, She-Hulk asks the Inhuman royal family where Medusa has gone, only to get the silent treatment. Ahura uses his psychic powers to communicate with Black Bolt. “He said a lot,” Ahura says, adding that Black Bolt gave giant teleporting dog Lockjaw permission to join them in the search for Medusa.

Darla and Scott reunite at the internet café from earlier, where they are confronted by the Yancy Street Gang. Scott knows each of their names, saying he beat them at their own game. During the Carnegie show, he shrunk down to ant size and followed the gang home, learning all their secrets. What’s more he sent out all their personal info onto the internet, including passwords and phone numbers, but also embarrassing photos and posts. The gang again insists that Darla is not the Thing. She agrees with them, saying she isn’t there to replace anyone. Scott tells the gang to go ahead with their pranks because Darla needs to toughen up, but also warns them that Darla will shock the world once she’s in fighting shape.

Back at HQ, Dragon Man discovers that the H.E.R.B.I.E. bots tasked with security had been dismantled, with traces of Medusa’s hair left behind. Scott starts to give everyone a pep talk about finding Medusa and Ahura when there’s a big pop, and the entire building is transported to another world. Where are they? The caption reads, “To be continued… in the Negative Zone!”

Fantastic fifth wheel: Remember that in addition to his shrinking tech, Scott Lang is an electronics whiz, so it’s a natural that he hacked the Yancy Streeters. He reminds them (and us) that just like Darla’s not the Thing, he’s not Reed Richards.

I googled it, and the song She-Hulk is listening to while Dragon Man searches the building is “Lose Yourself” by Eminem.

The strands of Medusa’s hair left behind still move by themselves. No word on whether she can control them once separated.

Darla is again shown leading the Foundation kids in some yoga. I guess that her official “teacher” role.

There’s several references to the H.E.R.B.I.E. bots being built from the remains of old Doombots. Some of them even wear replicas of Dr. Doom’s cape and hood, strangely. This issue also introduces Dr. H.E.R.B.I.E.s inside the Baxter Building’s medical bay. Freakin’ H.E.R.B.I.E. the robot.

Crystal is seen standing alongside the Inhuman royal family, but remains as silent as the rest of them.

Foundational: Because Ahura appears so rarely in Marvel Comics, his powers tend to get tweaked for each appearance. In this issue we see his telepathy, but his other powers have included creating clones of himself that he controls psychically, his father’s own sonic scream, optic blasts, flight, mind control, and even matter manipulation.

Trivia time: Googling “New York City internet café” takes you to all kinds of weird places. These places exist, but they’re really more coffee shops that have wi-fi, rather than “come here and surf the web in public” that we imagine. First there was the IDT Megabyte Café in New York, which got a lot of hype but only ran from 1996 to 1998. Then there was Easyinternetcafé (one word) a chain of cafés from England that opened a huge one in Times Square in 2000, with 800 PCs for customers to play with, not to mention sushi on the menu. I can’t find out when it closed, but a 2009 article in Newsweek is all about how it is failing. Considering that the characters in this 2013 issue of FF use smartphones to do their hacking, I’m guessing the café seen here is wholly fictional.  

Fantastic or frightful? The Scott/Darla story seemed a rehash of their concert adventure a few issues earlier. The search for Medusa should have been the push for this issue, but I guess it didn’t have the opportunity for as many hijinks. Each issue of this run of FF is one part of a bigger whole, though, so I accept it in that context.

Next: Go into the light.

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Want more? Check out my novel MOM, I’M BULLETPROOF. It’s a comedic/romantic/dramatic superhero epic! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08XPXBK14.