Today, discover how Reed Richards and Doctor Doom survived their seeming deaths in the 1990s.
In Death is not the End, we spotlight the outlandish explanations for comic book characters (mostly super-villains) surviving seeming certain death.
The presumed death of Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom has to be placed into the context of the surrounding turmoil of the Fantastic Four at the time, because as it turns out, that turmoil might specifically be why their “deaths” occurred!
When Tom DeFalco and Paul Ryan took over Fantastic Four (with inker Danny Bulanadi) in 1991, DeFalco was intent on the book being as popular as Marvel’s other titles of the era. This was the time of “grim and gritty” superheroes being all the rage and the Fantastic Four well, were not grim nor gritty, so DeFalco did his best to gritty the book up as much as he could while not betraying the characters themselves.
The first thing, very early in their run, was to reveal that Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, was not actually married to Alicia Masters, the former girlfriend of the Thing, but to a Skrull spy named Lyja. Of course, as these things are wont to happen, Lyja had truly fallen in love with Johnny, and after some drama, she returned to Earth and became a regular ally of the Fantastic Four.
Next up, during Infinity War, the Invisible Woman met up with her villainous self, known as Malice. You see, the villainous Magus had teamed up with a race of aliens who shape-shifted into doppelgangers of the various heroes of the Marvel Universe. These doppelgangers had little to no consistency in how they were applied. One of the strangest ones debuted in Fantastic Four #369 and attacked the Invisible Woman in her mind somehow AS Malice. Sue ended up absorbing Malice into herself. This didn’t really fit with the other uses of the doppelgangers, but it is what it is. This made Sue act more and more like Malice over the ensuing months, including some questionable costume choices, like a skimpy costume with the four on her chest emblem now being clear to show as much cleavage as possible without literally baring her breasts.
Finally, during a storyline where Johnny had gone “supernova” while fighting some bad guys and thus setting his college on fire, Johnny became a wanted fugitive and a group of superheroes including Wolverine went to capture Johnny. The Thing tried to stop them and Wolverine instinctively slashed Thing in the face with his claws, scarring Thing so badly that Ben started wearing a helmet to disguise his scars.
Beyond the active members of the team, in Fantastic Four #377, Franklin Richards was artificially aged to become a teenager, now calling himself Psi-Lord and having a whole badass futuristic suit of armor. Former Fantastic Four member, Sharon Venture, had been mutated by Doctor Doom into becoming a sort of monster.
The only stabilizing force on the Fantastic Four at the time was Reed Richards, their leader. So what if he came off the board?
While trying to get Sharon under control (as she was freaking out over being a monster), Sharon was seemingly killed and the Thing flew to Latveria to get revenge on Doom for essentially killing Sharon. The rest of the team (plus Lyja and Franklin) followed to Latveria in Fantastic Four #381. Doom, meanwhile, was so obsessed with gaining more power that he had lured a powerful alien force to Earth and it promptly started blowing stuff up in Latveria. When the FF arrived, Reed offered their help and Doom, of course, initially rebuffed his open hand of friendship…
The Fantastic Four still insisted on helping Doom take down the creature with a plan to teleport it away (but Doom did not let them know that the plan also involved him siphoning off the alien’s powers as it was transported away). The alien was too powerful, though, so it fatally wounded Doom. Luckily, Doom was able to then teleport it away before he died. Reed rushed to his side and Doom this time asked for Reed’s hand…
As it turned out, Doom just wanted Reed’s hand because if he was going to die, he wanted to kill Reed in the process, and so Doom seemingly blew them both up…
DeFalco defied expectations by keeping Reed and Doom dead for over years, including having Reed and Doom miss the landmark four hundredth issue of the Fantastic Four! There were a number of close calls along the way, including a Reed from an alternate reality who ended up possessed by Malice (finally clearing Sue of that evil influence) before he died. Along the way, Ant-Man (Scott Lang), Kristoff (a young boy who Doom had imprinted his consciousness on as a “back-up plan” had Doom ever died, but who had since broken free to be his own person) and Namor (who kept trying to take advantage of Sue being a widow to get her to move on with him) had kind of sort of joined the team, as well, but they were all like Lyja and Johnny, which is to say that they were ancillary members. The team never officially adopted a fourth member to replace Reed (Ant-Man came the closest, as he was also the team’s science guy with Reed dead). In fact, they actually lost ANOTHER member, as Franklin formed a new spinoff team called the Fantastic Force with other teen heroes and Johnny left the Fantastic Four to become the mentor/leader of the Fantastic Force.
So by Fantastic Four #405, the Fantastic Four was made up of Invisible Woman and Thing as the main members, with Ant-Man, Namor, Lyja and Kristoff as their other sort of kind of members.
In any event, in Fantastic Four #405 (by DeFalco, Ryan and Bulanadi), the team fought against the time-traveling villain, Zarrko the Tomorrow Man and after they captured him, he tried to bargain with them by revealing that he knew what happened to Reed and Doom! Before he could say anything more, he was vaporized!
In the next issue, this turned out to be a ruse, as Zarrko was working with someone who wanted to toy with the Fantastic Four. The team tracked the “disintegration beam” to a futuristic setting in Fantastic Four #406 where they found an imprisoned Doom!
They then met the guy who was behind it all, a mysterious and powerful man named Hyperstorm…
At the end of the issue, Hyperstorm sent the FF through time to an ancient world. In the next issue, they discover that Reed had been exiled on to this ancient world ever since he was seemingly “killed.” Hyperstorm had plucked them from time right before they were vaporized.
Hyperstorm then showed off his powers by fixing Thing’s scar in one issue and then turning Franklin back to his younger self in another issue.
We then learned in Fantastic Four #414 (inks now by John Lowe), that Hyperstorm is the son of Franklin and Rachel Summers in the future and that he had known that the Fantastic Four were ultimately going to challenge him, so he used his powers to keep them from doing so, by destabilizing the team by removing Doom and Reed from the equation…
But really, he just gets off on controlling people.
In the end, Reed figures out a way to stop Hyperstorm by basically feeding him to Galactus.
So that was how Doom and Reed survived. Was it all that coherent? Not particularly, but it was something!
If anyone else has a suggestion for a future Death is not the End, drop me a line at [email protected]!
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