current / archive / issues / faq / RSS feed / twitter /
The Riotous Return Of The Red Ghost!
| < previous | next > |
At the end of the previous issue, 75% of The Fantastic Four discovered that the person who had captured them was Doctor Doom. The only one who has not worked it out yet is Reed Richards, Cleverest Man In The World, despite the fact that he's been working on a top secret project with a man who looks exactly like his old college friend ... Victor Von Doom.
This mysterious, yet oddly familiar, figure has built a spaceship which he promises will give Reed his stretching powers back. Mr Fantastic, Super Genius, is perplexed by it all. "Why is he doing this?" he asks himself. It would need "the resources of a small country" to build the ship. "And why does he seem so familiar?"
Yes, yes he did.
Mr Fantastic flies the spaceship into space for a bit of continuity re-writing - since the first issue of "The Fantastic Four" back in 1961 a lot of other people, in real-life and especially in the Marvel Universe, have travelled into space without becoming superheroes, so Marv Wolfman explains that it wasn't just cosmic rays that caused their transformation, but also sun spot activity, "a flaring of the van allen belt" and "an abnormal increase of neutron activity", all of which solves the problem of Neil Armstrong not turning into The Thing quite neatly. The plan here is the recreate these original conditions and, amazingly, it works, returning Mr Fantastic's powers but also allowing a stowaway to come back to life - The Red Ghost, the only other person to have been changed by the cosmic rays, who's been drifting around in space waiting for a chance to return!
Meanwhile in Latveria, Doctor Doom is treating the rest of the FF to a private concert on his piano.
It looks like we're back to the pretentious, deranged, deluded mad desport version of Doctor Doom seen in Lee & Kirby's final Doom story, The Power And The Pride, where he used a similar piano to destroy Hauptmann's brother
This becomes even more likely when Doom reveals that he has kidnapped Alicia to sculpt a statue of him, a statue which looks very similar to the painting he was having done back in Fantastic Four #85.
He's brought in Alicia to do the job because she is blind, and so can't look at his face. She does, however, have to touch it, and when she does she finds that he's not what she expected at all.
The idea that he's "a man wracked with a life-time of pain" switches back to the other version of Doom, as a good man turned bad by circumstances, and it shames Doom into another old characteristic, of turning his face away in shame.
It looks like Keith Pollard has been doing his research! There's no time for reflection on any of this, however, as Doom reveals his plan, first of all by explaining that he has to abdicate as ruler under "the laws of Latveria" (something which we've never heard of before) and then revealing his nominated successor: his son!
The action switches back to space, where The Red Ghost manages to beat Mr Fantastic, sending their shared spaceship plunging into the atmosphere, where it startes to burn up. Doom is disgusted as this goes against his plans, but he decides to make the best of it and move on with his scheme anyway, not even bothering to check that the ship actually does crash into the ground. It doesn't, of course, and the issue ends with Nick Fury collecting Mr Fantastic from the ocean, where he's finally worked out exactly what's going on.
Will he end the menace of Doctor Doom forever? Find out - next time!
link to information about this issue
posted 4/11/2019 by Mark Hibbett
| < previous | next > |
Comments: