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Reading the Fantastic Four comics from the start. A new story arc begins in issue 517, one that kinda/sorta ties into a bigger Marvel event. Oh Marvel, you and your events.  

It’s Halloween! Ben is hilariously dressed as Johnny while taking Franklin and Valeria out trick or treating. Sue scares him by using her powers to make a Jack o’ Lantern look like it’s floating in midair. They discuss how no kids are wearing Avengers costumes after the government recently disbanding the Avengers initiative (this is our crossover with the Avengers: Disassembled event).

At the new Baxter Building, Johnny is still the FF’s chief financial officer, he and fellow executive Jian meet with Reed about possible new inventions. Finances are still struggling after putting more money towards the FF’s PR department to help save their public image after the Latveria incident (it’s a long story). Jian insists that despite all the FF’s recent troubles, she’s not looking for other work.

The windows in Johnny’s office shatter, and Reed announces a city-wide atmospheric disturbance. Crazy winds blow all over New York, and then gigantic green pillars fall from the sky, embedding themselves in the water around Manhattan. The NYC mayor calls for the Avengers, only to learn they have disbanded. He’s then told not to call the FF because they are a political liability. But the FF are already on the scene, saving civilians from tidal waves caused by the pillars.

New Yorkers see the FF in action and fear that the team is taking over NYC like they took over Latveria. While everyone at the mayor’s office debates whether to cooperate with the FF, the city is rocked with a huge quake. Turn the page, and we see that Manhattan is being lifted upward into the sky. The mayor reaches into his desk, pulls out an old-school FF flare gun, and fires the “4” signal into the sky.

To be continued!

Unstable molecule: Some confusion here about the FF’s finances. First we’re told that Reed invented a self-inflating basketball (!) that is selling well. But then he has a prototype for x-ray sunglasses that’s not ready for market, because it causes blindness. (How does Reed know this? Did he test it on someone?)

Fade out: Sue struggles to hold back the tidal wave, and Ben jokes that Marvel Girl could’ve done it better. I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me forever to remember that Marvel Girl is Jean Grey’s codename.

Clobberin’ time: Ben intimidates a suburban dad into giving the kids all of his Halloween candy, so sometimes it’s good to be a giant rock monster.

Flame on: Johnny wants to give Jian a raise, but she refuses. He looks through the papers in her office trashcan (not cool!) and finds she has rejected offers from headhunters for better jobs, simply because she still believes in the FF.

Four and a half: Franklin has a cowboy Halloween costume. I suspect he’s supposed to be Woody from Toy Story, but it’s hard to tell.

Our gal Val: Valeria has now aged up from baby to toddler, walking on her own while trick-or-treating. She has a clown costume.

Fantastic fifth wheel: In the background there are trick-or-treaters dressed as FF alternate members Luke Cage and Ant-Man. Future alternates Storm and Spider-Man are also represented as Halloween costumes.

Trivia time: What’s Avengers Disassembled about? There was a huge battle among all the Avengers, with some of them being hospitalized and even killed (!). This was due to the Scarlet Witch driven to violence over the loss of her children she subconsciously created (sound familiar?). The follow-up comic, Avengers Finale, is the one where the UN and the US government both sever all ties with the Avengers because of this incident.

In the hardcover collection’s bonus materials, Mark Waid states that this issue’s original ending was the mayor dialing Reed’s cell phone to ask for help. Writer Karl Kesel came up with the idea to bring back the classic signal flare, for a more dramatic and visual cliffhanger.

The mayor is not named. There’s disagreement online among fans whether this character is generic unnamed mayor, or if it’s real-life NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The Marvel Wiki states that the entire run of Marvel Knights: 4 took place between last issue and this one. I’m planning to cover that series in upcoming blog posts.

Also, the Marvel Wiki makes it a point to mention that both humans and mutants appear in this issue. Do they mean Franklin?

Fantastic or frightful? The first half of the issue is slice-of-life stuff with a lot of family banter, and then some disaster movie rescue action in the second half. It’s a light, breezy read, setting up bigger things, but Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo continue to get the characters just right.

Next: “I love you, Dr. Zaius!”

• * * * *

Want more? Check out my new ongoing serial, THE SUBTERKNIGHTS, on Kindle Vella. A man searches for his missing sister in a city full of far-out technology and hidden dark magic. The first three chapters are FREE, so give it a shot! Click here for a list of all my books and serials.

Reading the Fantastic Four comics from the start. In issue #516, we’ve got the Fantastic Four in one corner and the new Frightful Four in the other corner. They both come out swinging.

 Recap: We met the new Frightful Four, made up of the Wizard, the Trapster a.k.a. Paste-Pot Pete, Hydro-Man, and Salamandra. Along for the ride is Cole, a beautiful young woman with gravity-defying powers, who turned out to be the Wizard and Salamandra’s long-lost daughter. The Frightful Four attacked and defeated the FF, with the whole thing televised, for the sole purpose of humiliating the heroes in public. While the Frightful Four fell apart with in-fighting, Cole ran back to Johnny and asked for his help. The FF plan retaliation.

The issue begins with an incredibly kinky scene. Salamandra is taking a bath, and the bath water is… Hydro-Man?!? An alarm goes off, and the two of them join the Wizard to find Cole sneaking back into the Wizard’s HQ. The Wizard spies on Cole talking to someone, and he deduces that the Fantastic Four are there, unseen thanks to Sue’s invisibility powers. Cole makes it inside, and the villains confront her. The Frightful Four attack, but they hit nothing. Then the Wizard learns that Cole’s ring, which he gave to her, was a high-tech signal ring that Reed hacked into his teleporter. The Fantastic Four teleport into the hideout, standing alongside Cole.

Fighting! Sue goes after Salamandra, who transforms into a dragon (!) to bust free of Sue’s force fields. Johnny and Cole make a run for it. They talk about how Cole wants Reed to remove her powers, and Johnny reminds her that he can’t do it without access to the Wizard’s data. Johnny tells Cole she’s worth the risk, and they kiss.

The Wizard and Reed seem evenly matched, until Ben picks up Hydro-Man and throws him at the Wizard. Hydro-Man recovers, chases after Cole and gets attacked by Johnny. Cole uses her powers to defend herself. The Wizard also recovers, trying to subdue Ben with one of his gravity discs, but Reed steps in and grabs the disc for himself. He uses the disc to de-gravitize Salamandra, and Sue traps Hydro-Man in a force field.

Reed checks on Johnny and Cole, only to find her weakened to a barely-alive state. He says her powers have a transference effect, and that when she increases an object’s mass, she decreases her own. Reed goes off in search of the Wizard’s data, while the Wizard confronts Johnny. The Wizard alters the gravity inside his hideout, throwing Johnny and Sue around the room and freeing Hydro-man.

The Wizard nabs Cole and takes her to his lab. He saves her life by hooking her up to a machine that replenishes her depleted mass with gravitons from a cable. It works and she is healthy again, but then he wants to experiment on her, asking to see what happens when she absorbs excess mass. Reed attacks, only to be held back by more gravity discs. The Wizard says Cole can’t trust Reed, and that Reed won’t be able to cure her.

Cole then reconfigures the Wizard’s gravity, so he attaches to one of the Trapster’s glue traps, sealing the Wizard inside fast-hardening super-strong glue. Cole then demonstrates her ability to absorb extra mass, making the whole place go haywire. The hideout, secretly located within abandoned NYC subway tunnels, breaks up through the street flies into the sky over New York. This effort transforms Cole into a blob-like monstrosity. The Wizard says he loves her, and she says that even through the Wizard has done terrible things, she can’t let him die. She says, “If I don’t care what happens to you… who will?” Turn the page, though, and this heartwarming scene turns deadly, when Cole adds, “But I can’t let this go on, either.” She drops the hideout and the two of them in the water outside the city.

Later, the FF conduct a search, but find no trace of any of the Frightful Four. Johnny wants to keep looking for Cole, but there’s no trace of her. It’s a melancholy ending, where Johnny insists that Cole is not a bad person, and her fate should not be tied in with the Frightful Four. Ben responds with, “Ya can’t pick your family, kiddo.”

Unstable molecule: Reed says he could have successfully removed Cole’s powers, because the Wizard’s genetic procedures were nineteen years old, which he says is “very simple” by present-day super-science.

Fade out: How, exactly, does Salamandra break free of Sue’s force fields? It’s hard to tell because it happens in one panel, but my guess is Sue dropped the force field out of shock upon seeing Salamandra transform into a giant dragon monster.

Clobberin’ time: When the Wizard thinks he has the upper hand, he quotes Ben’s “It’s clobbering time.” Ben, weirdly, has no comment on this.

Flame on: Johnny asks why Reed can’t use his graviton detecto-graph to find Cole like it did before. This is appropriate, since Johnny is the one who gave Reed the idea for the device in the first place. Reed says the Wizard saturated the area with free-floating gravitons, making the detecto-graph useless.

Trivia time: Cole never returned after this, with the Marvel Wiki listing this issue as her “apparent death.” Salamandra only had one other appearance after this, in the now-infamous scene in Fantastic Four: Foes, that had a bunch of FF villains in one scene. That’s too bad, as she could have been a major adversary for our heroes.

The next time we see the Trapster, it’s in the 2005 Secret War event, where he’s one of several tech-based villains getting funding from the new Latverian government. There’s no mention of how he escaped the Wizard’s time-prison, so let’s assume he was freed when Cole destroyed the hideout. The Wizard is also present at the Secret War fight, so maybe they patched things up? During the Civil War event, he and the Wizard will be back at it with yet another new Frightful Four.

Fantastic or frightful? It’s been a long time since there’s been an entire issue devoted only to the big slugfest between the heroes and villains. It’s a big, broad superhero brawl with action in the classic Marvel manner! What’s not to love?

Next: Halloween town.

• * * * *

Want more? Check out my new ongoing serial, THE SUBTERKNIGHTS, on Kindle Vella. A man searches for his missing sister in a city full of far-out technology and hidden dark magic. The first three chapters are FREE, so give it a shot! Click here for a list of all my books and serials.

Reading the Fantastic Four comics from the start. Last issue introduced a new Frightful Four, with them being a family of sorts this time. Now, in issue #515, we see just how dysfunctional they are.

Super-genius villain the Wizard has formed a new Frightful Four, with him, Hydro-Man, Paste-Pot Pete a.k.a. the Trapster, and Wizard’s fiery ex-wife Salamandra. To attack the FF, they’re using Salamandra’s daughter Cole as bait, setting her up on an online date with the Human Torch. When Johnny gave Cole a tour of the Baxter Building, she opened a portal letting in the Frightful Four, and the Wizard chose that moment to announce that he’s Cole’s long-lost father.

This issue begins with Cole rejecting the Wizard, causing the floor under her to break apart. There’s a discussion of whether Cole has been born with gravity powers similar to the Wizard’s. Cole runs off and sends the Trapster after her. He then reveals that he knows the FF are in the room, with Sue having turned them all invisible. Everybody fights, with the Wizard’s “vid-cams” recording everything. Sue traps Hydro-Man in a force field, the Trapster wraps up Reed in some kind of elastic trap to slow him down, and the Wizard de-gravitizes Ben so he can’t punch anything. Johnny has a tough time with Salamandra, who has fire powers of her own as well as super-strength.

Hydro-Man makes it rain, revealing Sue’s invisibility. Reed escapes the trap, only for Salamandra to hit a nerve in his neck, Vulcan-style, to temporarily paralyze his right arm. The Wizard attacks, so Sue puts a force field around her and Reed. Then the Wizard applies a “kinetic stabilizer” which solidifies the force field, trapping Sue and Reed inside it. Salamandra and the Wizard take a moment to have a lovers’ quarrel with him saying, “You’ve been dead to me since the day you became pregnant.” (What an a-hole.)

Hyrdo-Man is able to fight Ben by transforming himself into a bunch of clones of himself, while the Trapster seals Johnny up in fireproof glue. Johnny nearly suffocates from the glue, but Cole frees his face so he can breathe. They joke about how they probably won’t have a second date. The Trapster draws a gun on Cole, only for the Wizard to shut off the cameras and brutally attack the Trapster for this offense. The Wizard calls the Trapster an embarrasment and a laughing stock, while a hurt Trapster says he thought they partners, and even friends. Wizard says his team is a team of four, and that the Trapster is a fifth wheel.

The Wizard turns the cameras back on and broadcasts live to the world that he has successfully defeated the Fantastic Four. He tells the world that the FF are poor excuses for heroes, and the public cannot rely on them if the world is in danger. “No real heroes were hurt during this demonstration,” he says. Then the Frightful Four teleport away.

Later, in the Wizard’s HQ, he has Cole tied up (!) while he does experiments on her to test her powers. He tells her and Hydro-Man that he did not murder the Trapster. Instead, he trapped (heh) the Trapster in a time loop where the Traspter experiences the last few seconds of his life over and over without actually dying. The Wizard and Salamandra argue about what to do with Cole, with Salamandra revealing that Cole’s birth was a result of the Wizard genetically manipulating Salamandra. She says the Wizard abandoned Cole thinking her useless until she showed some signs of having powers. He tells Cole he can train her to control her power, saying “You are my most wonderful, most perfect… experiment.”

Cole escapes and runs off, saying she refuses to be a lab rat. The Wizard lets her go, saying he’ll always know where she will be, and that he’s never letting go of her again. Meanwhile, at the new Baxter Building, the FF do repairs. Reed says the Wizard has only ever cared about fame, wanting to prove his superiority to the FF by imitating the FF. They debate whether Cole was tricked or if she was in on the Wizard’s plan. Johnny chooses to believe Cole, and he leaves to go look for her.

Johnny and Cole meet up at a nearby rooftop they both remember from their date. She admits she had an ulterior motive, but it wasn’t Wizard’s. She known about her gravity powers for some time, and she hoped Johnny could get her to Reed so Reed can take her powers away. Then she admits she ended up liking Johnny along the way. Just as they’re about to kiss, the rest of the FF catch up to them. Sue says the others have decided to trust Cole… for now. Reed says that a cure for Cole would depend on access to the Wizard’s data. “The Wizard already visited us once,” Reed says, “it’s only right we return the favor.”

To be continued!

Unstable molecule: Johnny asks Reed for a mobile graviton detector to find Cole Reed tells him there’s no such thing, only to then invent one on the spot.

Fade out: This is the first time someone else had seized control of Sue’s force fields. (Unless maybe the Beyonder did it?) We’ll have to see if this becomes more of a worry in the future.

Clobberin’ time: The Wizard attaches a gravity disc to Ben’s back, where Ben can’t reach it. This takes out Ben for most of the fight.

Flame on: Johnny takes Cole to a specific spot her showed her on their date. It’s a particular gargoyle high up on a skyscraper. He says it’s where he goes when he needs to think. This is where and how she found him after she left the Wizard.

Trivia time: The comic mentions all the times Johnny fought the Wizard back in his solo adventures from Strange Tales, beginning with issue #102. Those solo stories are rarely mentioned, as they are so different from the rest of Marvel continuity, except for that a lot of classic characters had their first appearances there.

Fantastic or frightful? How do you write the Wizard so he’s not just another Dr. Doom. Doom has a moral code he lives by, while this issue shows just how lacking in morals the Wizard is. He views other people, including his daughter and ex-wife, as nothing but test subjects for him to experiment on, and only so he gain more acclaim for himself. That makes this a dark and uncomfortable story, but one that’s told well.

Next: Breaking in.

• * * * *

Want more? Check out my new ongoing serial, THE SUBTERKNIGHTS, on Kindle Vella. A man searches for his missing sister in a city full of far-out technology and hidden dark magic. The first three chapters are FREE, so give it a shot! Click here for a list of all my books and serials.