Not sure how many of you there actually are but welcome! This past Wednesday saw the release of the final issue of Fantastic Four, the book that began the Marvel Age and brought Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and the First Family of Comics, to the forefront of popular culture’s collective mind. We each mourn in our own way but the Terrific Trio here at the site gave a go at showing you all what could have been as far as our fateful imaginauts of the unknown.
Enjoy, comment, and remember to vote!
Round 1:
Allie-616: Reed Richards
Earth-2 Mike: Franklin Richards
13th Dr. Sean: Dr. Doom
Round 2:
13th Dr. Sean: Ben Grimm
Earth-2 Mike: Valeria Richards
Allie-616: Peter Parker
Round 3:
Allie-616: Sue Storm
Earth-2 Mike: Scott Lang
13th Dr. Sean: Namor, the Sub-Mariner
Round 4:
13th Dr. Sean: Johnny Storm
Earth-2 Mike: HERBIE
Allie-616: She-Hulk
Characters: Reed Richards, Susan Richards, Peter Parker, and Jen Walters.
Title: The All-New, Amazing, World’s Greatest Fantastic Four (Shipping this August 2015)
Summary: Johnny & Ben are taking a much needed break from the Fantastic Four. Ben is traveling the world with Alicia who is on a major world tour with her art. Johnny is a Formula One pit crew member in the Fantastic Four sponsored car driven by his new girlfriend. Reed and Sue have decided to replace them with their former replacements Spider-Man & She-Hulk. Unfortunately the new FF series is plagued by some of the problems that besieged many of the New Universe books in 1986, that is each issue had a different creative team.
The All-New, Amazing, World’s Greatest Fantastic Four #1 written by Chris Claremont, illustrated by Jim Lee comes with 400 variant covers including the Midtown Comics nude Aunt Petunia cover. The first issue is moving day at the newly constructed site of the Baxter Building located on 1700 Broadway. Peter and Jen are moving in as Ben and Johnny’s belongings are placed in a POD that is sent to the Negative Zone. The move is broken up when the Gladiator and Impossible Man are doing their best Superman/Mxyzptlk impersonation and leveling much of Manhattan the way the Avengers did in their first movie. Wiser heads prevail, the New FF,Gladiator, and Impy enjoy some of Aunt May’s pancakes with the newly formed FF.
The All-New, Amazing, World’s Greatest Fantastic Four #2 written by Jim Shooter and illustrated by Mike Zeck: The original Beyonder is back! The ‘baby unit’ survived Jonathan Hickman’s Secret Wars and he’s on a quest to bring back mullets. He gives Sue a mohawk, Reed a bald head and long beard, Peter a hipster mustache, and dyes Jen’s hair orange. Karma and her radioactive make-up, from volume 1 #266, show up at the cliffhanger ending.
The All-New, Amazing, World’s Greatest Fantastic Four #3 does not pick up where #2 left off and is Written, Drawn, Lettered, & Colored by John Byrne. The Psycho Man has convinced Rom and the Space Knights that every human is a Dire Wraith. Fear, Doubt, and Hate consume the globe until the Micronauts show up and assist the FF and convince Rom to rejoin them in comic book purgatory. Byrne leaves the book because he was not able to put She-Hulk in a bikini.
The All-New, Amazing, World’s Greatest Fantastic Four #4 is the Wedding of Namor and Sue written by Rick Remender and drawn by Fred Hembeck. Susan Richards is de-aged for no apparent reason. She returns to using the name Invisible Girl. Her marriage to Reed is annulled. Namor tries to move in on Sue, but runs into some trouble due to their age difference. In the meantime, Peter introduces Reed to his old friend MJ. Kang shows up and takes She-Hulk back in time to the 70s where they go to several disco parties with Power Man and Dazzler. The book is on the verge of cancellation again.
The All-New, Amazing World’s Greatest Fantastic Four #5+. Dan Slott takes over the reigns. In his first story arc “6>4”, Reed, Peter, Sue, and Jen face the Sinister Six of the the Wizard, Mad Thinker, Sandman, Dr. Octopus, Green Goblin, and the Tinkerer. Mark Waid writes a regular 12 page Dr. Doom back up feature in each issue. Marvel/ Disney has found 1,000 lost pages of Lee/Kirby FF material. Each issue will contain five pages of this never before seen work by the FF creators. Marvel prices this whopping 40 page monthly at 99 cents and it sells two million copies a month.
Characters: Franklin Richards, Valeria Richards, Scott Lang, and HERBIE.
Title: “About Ten Years Ago”
Summary: Valeria Richards is sick and tired. Of her brother. He accidentally created a new world, saved the world’s greatest heroes from certain death, has more than once been his Future Self, and might be one of “The Twelve.” At three years old Val is the smartest human being in existence and the only thing holding her back is time. With the cancellation of the Fantastic Four comicbook the Rolling Timeline is gone and the Rules Have Been Broken. Franklin Richards has taken to calling himself Frank now that the world is moving at a true pace but only Val seems to notice. Time, ever the enemy, is finally on her side.
She decides that if the world will move on she will no longer be its thrall. She takes the one thing in the world that she knows her technically slow brother cannot live without, his living stuffed animal HERBIE. Val’s known, since she was old enough to potty train herself, that thing is actually a killswitch to be used to avoid doomsday. Her biological Father has time-traveled enough to realize that his First Born is capable of some crazy weird shit. Val sees the world for what it is, the kids are free, the world is doomed.
Val gives HERBIE a more human voice, one that sounds like the compassionate Father who never left the lab long enough to teach his son not to create worlds out of aether. HERBIE slowly takes over the mind of this ultimately unknowable creature wrapped in human shape, the Overmonitor known as Tattletale, leaving the Gentry known Val with control of God. She slowly, until she removes the concept of time entirely from the list of rules that can bind her, supplants that Jack Kirby pastiche who was drawn as God that one time, and absorbs all knowledge within the bounds of what we once called the 616. The entirety of what it is, what it was, and what it could have been are hers to dictate.
Val begins to apply order and logic on everything, no matter where or what it may already be. There is nothing left untouched by whatever Val has decided that she is. There is only the voice in her ear. Her body being the one place that she would not change (could not, it would seem, because at the end of the day her Godfather will outlive us all no matter what her aspirations are). The voice that keeps saying “Cassie.”
Scott Lang’s professional career is as a thief, a burglar. He goes in and takes things that you don’t want him to have. He is, without hyperbole, the greatest size-changing hero in the Marvel Universe. When Val began enacting her master plan Scott hid inside HERBIE. He was the only person in the Baxter Building who knew what a little girl was supposed to sound like and he knew it wasn’t how Val did. He never trusted her. Once Scott realized what was going on he was, honestly, not that upset. Scott Lang’s done a great deal during his super-career. Hero? Yeah. Villain? Sure. Dead? Absolutely! Avenger? No matter what! Heck, he even got an honest to God Geoff Johns’ semi-reboot. He’s seen it all and during that time he never overcompensated by calling himself Giant Man or Goliath (even though he was the villain in that Bible story).
He lived as he saw the world and only ever really cared about his daughter, Cassandra Lang. She was taken because, for some reason, she thought that he would ever want to live in a world without her. If the Sixth Stepford Cuckoo has decided to play Creator then Scott is going to make the best of it. Eventually taking up residence in Val’s ear (long after traditional conditions of spacetime have stopped applying) he has had no luck subconsciously convincing the crazy little girl to resurrect his daughter so he does the next best thing. He begins telling her stories.
Stories of unlimited imagination, Negative Zones, and walking Natural Disasters with gigantic letters on their belts. He tells her that she did not develop in a vacuum but is the perfect product of a life lived full of infinite possibilities. Did the old world not keep up with her? Was her brother a walking deus ex machina? Fine, build something better and do not keep rehashing all the nonsense you think you want. Make something new. Start from scratch. Keep moving forward no matter what. Only a man like Scott Lang, who was never worried about what others thought, could understand and appreciate the value of a world where anything was possible.
Val smiles, for the first time since she last saw her Mother, and hugs her Brother. She asks him to calm down and help her build something. He smiles too, not because of anything in particular other than finally having the approval of his Sister. He’s not ashamed of that and if it took her using him to recreate reality to do so then so be it. They’re the Fantastic Four, they have been, and will be, through worse.
The panel falls away, HERBIE glows, Scott steps out and looks forward. In the words of the late, great Dwayne McDuffie (by way of post-Civil War Reed): “How many people does it take to save the world?” And Scott holds up four fingers. The panel pans out, a world comes into view. Earth, roughly. Coming out from it is a single ship with four silhouettes aboard. The panel pans out again and there it is: The cosmic storm! Nothing will ever be the same again and everything will begin anew. The match starts the fire which will forge a new Marvel Age.
Characters: Ben Grimm, Johnny Storm, Namor, and Dr. Doom.
Title: “Baxter Place” (in the style of the classic drama, Melrose Place) or “Fantastic Four Shades of Blue”
Summary: It is a typical day at the Baxter Building, in an effort to settle the debate between Franklin and Val, arguing over what came first, the chicken or the egg, Reed and Sue have taken their kids on an adventure through time to help quell their squabbling (squab… get it). Ben is getting ready for a date with Alicia, sulking in his room over the fact that he is a grotesque rock monster and the only person who wants to date him is a blind girl whose step-dad plays with puppets, when all of a sudden Johnny comes bursting in saying, “it takes some big stones to go out looking like that.” This of course leads to Ben and Johnny roughhousing, crushing and burning furniture throughout the apartment. As the two are getting into it, the doorbell rings, causing the two to shout in tandem, “who is it?”
Namor enters carrying a bouquet of kelp, hoping to woo Sue with a pearl necklace and the fragrant aroma of salt water and fish. He explains to the two, that he is here for Sue, who his good friend Doctor Doom said, had finally come to her senses and was planning on leaving Reed. Ben tells Namor to stop trying to steal his best buddy’s wife, and Johnny follows by saying, “Haven’t you realized by now that that is the only type of pearl necklace you’ll ever give my sister, and she’s just not that into your sea cucumber?”
Namor, furious after being hooked by Doctor Doom’s clever ploy (get it… hooked), and embarrassed by Johnny and Ben, casts (get it… casts) his gifts to the side and storms off toward the Latverian embassy saying, “Doom will not make a clown-fish out of me!” Excited to see the confrontation, Ben and Johnny quickly follow in-tow. The three go barreling into the Latverian embassy only to find Doom embracing a sobbing Dorma. The three notice that she has been watching all of the recent events on a video feed. She screams at Namor, “You wanted to leave me for some pale faced blonde!?”, slapping him in his face, and runs out.
Namor, stunned, embarrassed, and humiliated, attempts to go after her, while Doom laughs in triumph. Doom then explains why he has felt the need to punish Namor, after he turned down his invitation to join forces and conquer the world. Looking for any excuse to fight with Doom, Johnny and Ben join an enraged Namor. Together, the three quickly dispatch Doom, only to find he’s been a doombot the whole time. After, as they begin their farewells, Johnny says to Namor, “You know, you’re an okay guy Subby, but you’re still never going to have imperius sex with my sister.”
SniktyBamf! 