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Fantastic Four Vol 1 271

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I still need you to pilot my experimental star-drive rocket.

—Reed Richards

Appearing in "Happy Birthday, Darling!"

Featured Characters:

Supporting Characters:

Antagonists:

  • Gormuu (First appearance) (Only in flashback)

Other Characters:

Races and Species:

  • Humans (Main story and flashback)
  • Deviant Skrulls
  • Taranith Gestal's alien race (Unnamed) (Only in recap)
  • Mantracorans (Mentioned)
  • Gormuu's alien race (Unnamed) (Only in flashback)

Locations:

Items:

Vehicles:

Synopsis for "Happy Birthday, Darling!"

The Fantastic Four, Alicia, Franklin and Wyatt Wingfoot have surprised their leader Reed Richards with a birthday cake. Reed is genuinely surprised as his birthday managed to slip his mind. With many candles on the cake, Reed decides to delight Franklin by using his powers to expand his lungs to comic proportions allowing him to generate the gust of breath needed to blow out all the candles. Once the festivities being, Sue begins to notice that something is troubling Reed. Confirming her feelings, Reed takes his wife outside and makes an admission to her: he cannot remember his mother's eyes. Reed reminds Susan of how, while they were exploring the Negative Zone, he had been made a prisoner of Taranith Gestal, who absorbed Reed's mind into a machine. Reed has realized that, since being restored to normal, there are gaps in his memories. As Reed struggles with trying to remember these missing memories, he tells his wife that the earliest thing he can recall is so few years ago, just before they became the Fantastic Four, when they battled the being known as Gormuu....

Years ago, a much younger Reed Richards is driving through Central City, glad that his fiancée Susan Storm had decided to come out and visit him. As they are driving, they witness as a strange alien ship passes by their car. After driving to the landing site, they are shocked to discover a horrible-looking alien creature emerging from the ship. It introduces itself as Gormuu, a warrior of the planet Kraalo. When Reed questions the alien's purpose on Earth, Gormuu explains that he has come to Earth to conquer it. As Reed pleads to the alien visitor not to do so, it merely brushes off his pleas and walks away, growing with every step. Soon the United States Air Force is deployed, but their weapons have no effect on Gormuu, who continues to grow and become stronger.

Meanwhile, Reed is meeting with military officials to brainstorm on ways to stop Gormuu and his invasion of Earth. When it is reported that the creature is approaching Central City, an evacuation is ordered. When the general contacts the White House for assistance, the President tries to contact the Russians to get permission to launch nuclear weapons at the monster without any retaliation. The Russian premier warns the President against such an action as it might be seen as an act of war. With the governments of the world locked in their nuclear rhetoric, Reed decides to try something else. Racing out to Gormuu's ship, Reed goes inside to investigate. There he discovers the device that is constantly pumping Gormuu with energy causing him to grow. Going out to investigate the footprints and measuring the deepness of the footprints, Reed finally has the solution he is looking for.

Rushing back to the Richards Rocket Group facility, Reed begins building a device that will bombard Gormuu with more power. As he is completing the work, he is joined by both Sue and Ben Grimm. When Reed tells them abut his power beamer, Ben believes that Reed is betraying them to Gormuu and tries to stop him. Reed is forced to punch out his best friend, and then he activates the device. When the beam from the device strikes Gormuu, he suddenly shoots up in size. The alien invader initially gloats, but when he cannot stop growing he begins to panic as Gormuu's body very quickly grows larger than the planet itself, loses all cohesion and fades away. In the aftermath of the invasion, Reed explains that he discovered that while Gormuu's body increased in size, it did not increase in mass, and he had realized that increasing Gormuu's size to an exponential level would cause him to dissipate. With the threat neutralized, Reed takes Sue and Ben outside where his new experimental spacecraft is in its final stages, telling his two closest friends that today's attack make their future space flight all the more important...

... Finishing his recollection, Reed comments how they went on their unauthorized space flight not long thereafter which resulted in their exposure to cosmic rays and becoming the Fantastic Four. Reed once more chastises himself for being responsible for Ben Grimm's transformation into the Thing. When Sue reminds her husband that Ben has gotten over that and has become comfortable with who he is, Reed responds by saying he is not so sure, pointing out their recent involvement in the Secret Wars on Battleworld where Ben discovered he could change back and forth between his human and Thing form. Reed had deceived Ben into thinking it was the planet itself that triggered the transformation, when he knew full well that it was Ben's own force of will. Reed wonders how Ben will feel if he ever returns to Earth and discovers the truth. Sue tries to reassure her husband that what he told Ben wasn't really a lie per se, as he told Ben what he needed to hear.

Putting aside the conundrum for a time, Reed decides to make an announcement to the rest of the team: They are returning to Central City, and the Richards family home so that Reed can finally close any gaps he still has in his memory. They soon arrive at the Richards estate where Reed is reunited with Giles Peacock and his wife, the on-site staff that has worked for the Richards family for years. After a round of introductions are made, the Fantastic Four and their friends all sit down to dinner. There, Reed explains that his father disappeared three years prior to the space mission in which the Fantastic Four gained their powers. Reed's father had left him two billion dollars, most of which he spent on his rocket project. When Wyatt asks about how Reed still has this estate considering the Fantastic Four's early financial woes, Reed reveals that his father, while making sure that he could not be legally declared dead no matter how long he was missing, had also created a self-perpetuating fund for the upkeep of the estate and the support of the Peacocks.

Giles tells Reed that everything has been absolutely fine, with the exception of the occasional ghosts that appear in the night. He tells the Fantastic Four that there have been a total of thirteen appearances, beginning just after Reed's father vanished, and that the first ghosts had come straight through the wall of Reed's father's locked laboratory in one of the mansion's sub-basements. Curious as to what these ghosts might be, Reed and the rest of his team go down to the lab. He stops She-Hulk before she can smash the door open, warning about traps. Instead, Reed has Sue use her powers to make the wall transparent so Reed can spot the triggers and has Johnny use his flame powers to melt through them, deactivating the traps. Getting into the lab, they are all shocked to see a massive time platform just like the one the Fantastic Four confiscated from Doctor Doom early on in their career. Examining the controls, Reed sees that it was set for yesterday's date and realizes that his father, in the past, had tried to travel forward into his own future, which is their present. Reed theorizes that a "safety-valve" in the space-time continuum must have shunted his father sideways into a parallel universe where he may still be alive and trapped on an alien "Other-Earth." Reed tells his friends and family that there is but only one course of action: use the time platform and try to find his father.

Solicit Synopsis

Aliens attack! They'll stop at nothing to defeat the Fantastic Four - and they can change their very shape! Could it be the Skrulls? Or somebody worse? Who could be worse than the Skrulls?

Notes

Continuity Notes[]

Present Day[]

  • The number of candles of Reed's cake count to 40. Reed's actual age should be considered a matter of interpretation. A previous reference to his age was in the letter pages of Fantastic Four #11 that states that Reed was in his late 30s that time. Per the Sliding Timescale of Earth-616, for every four years of real time, roughly one year elapses in the Marvel universe. As such, roughly six years of time had passed between Fantastic Four #11 and this issue. So by the time of this story, Reed should be anywhere between 42 and 45 years of age. One could argue that the candles represent Reed's physical age after he was de-aged in Fantastic Four #214. Further adding to the confusion, Johnny refers to Reed's milestone birthday as "the big one," which is common to say for someone's 50th birthday, not their 40th.
  • This is the first time Reed's parents are mentioned. Reed's father is identified as Nathaniel in Fantastic Four #273, his mother Evelyn is named in Fantastic Four: Unplugged #2. In this issue, Reed reveals that his mother died when he was only seven years of age, but states that he had always had a very clear memory-image of her in his mind.
  • Reed mentions how Ben stayed behind on Battleworld during the Secret Wars. As seen in Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #12, Ben decided to stay on Battleworld when he discovered he could change back and forth between his human and Thing forms. Ben remains on Battleworld between Thing #11–22, when he discovers the truth about his ability to change back-and-forth, only to lose that ability in the process. This, along with the discovery that Johnny and "Alicia" are dating in Fantastic Four #277 leads to Ben being estranged from the Fantastic Four until he rejoins the team in Fantastic Four #296.
  • Wyatt makes mention of the Fantastic Four's previous financial problems early on in their career. This is a reference to Fantastic Four #9 when the Fantastic Four filed for bankruptcy and Reed had to sell off their assets.
  • Reed states that his father disappeared three years prior to the space flight that created the Fantastic Four. From the perspective of this story, the events of Fantastic Four #1 happened roughly six years prior per the Sliding Timescale. This would place Nathaniel Richards' disappearance nine years prior to this story.
  • Reed makes the observation that his father's time platform resembles the one they confiscated from Doctor Doom following their first battle in Fantastic Four #5. This is somewhat accurate since, as revealed in Fantastic Four Annual #11, Reed had confiscated it and kept it until he was forced to return it for diplomatic reasons, but not before he was able to duplicate the device for his own use. Reed had restored Doom's time platform to Doom's castle in Upstate New York at some point before Marvel Super-Heroes #20.

The Past[]

  • All Cold War references in this story should be considered topical references per the Sliding Timescale of Earth-616. As the modern age slides forward so as not to prematurely age the character, such is the same with everyone's past prior to the birth of the Fantastic Four.
  • As revealed in Conspiracy #1, General Edward Harrison provided Reed with the equipment he needed to defeat Gormuu, and was later responsible for covering up the whole incident from the general public.
  • Naturally, the spaceship seen here is the one that Reed and his friends pilot in the accident that turn them into the Fantastic Four way back in Fantastic Four #1.
  • The research facility where Reed Richards worked on his FTL rocket was never actually called the "Richards Rocket Group Development Complex" in this issue. That name is a composite of this story's references to the facility as "the rocket base" and "the development complex" and "the rocket group compound." This research center was probably the "Reed Richards's headquarters" mentioned in Fantastic Four #245, and may well be where the scene of Reed and Ben arguing about the potential danger posed by cosmic rays took place. If so, then that would mean that this location should be listed in every comic in which that scene from the Fantastic Four's origin appears, including Fantastic Four #1.
  • The fact that the name "Richards" is displayed on the research center suggests that Reed established the center as part of his rocket project, presumably using some of his father's two billion dollar gift to do so. However, given that Nathaniel Richards was also a brilliant scientist, it's not impossible that he may have founded the center years earlier.

Chronology Notes[]

A flashback in this story affects the chronology of the following characters:

Publication Notes[]

  • The flashback sequence, as well as the cover, is presented in Jack Kirby's stylized, "monster-era" (prior to 1961) manner with John Byrne's artwork also reflecting this motif.
  • This issue also contains a letters page, Fantastic Forum. Letters are published from Stephen Scott, Beau Smith, Charles Ardinger V, Gregory Hrynchyshn, Vicki Newton, Sean Twist, and Mary Francis O'Malley.

Trivia

  • In this issue, Reed refers to the humanoid natives of the Negative Zone planet Mantracora as "Mantracorans." This is the only in-story reference to the name of that race.

See Also

Links and References

References

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