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Micronauts Vol 1 41

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Appearing in "Everyone's Little in Liddleville!"

Featured Characters:

Supporting Characters:

Antagonists:

Other Characters:

Races and Species:

Locations:

Items:

  • Prince Pharoid's Star Sceptre (Mentioned)
  • Prometheus Pit (Mentioned)
  • Doom-robots (miniature)
  • Knockout Gas
  • Lasersonic pistols
  • Acroyear's Energy Sword
  • Bug's Rocket Lance
  • Synthe-Clones (Mentioned)
  • Puppet Master's radioactive clay
    • puppet of Doctor Doom

Vehicles:

Synopsis for "Everyone's Little in Liddleville!"

After losing their powerless microship, the HMS Endeavor, when it sinks in the sewers of New York City, the Micronauts decide that their best chance of returning home to the Microverse is to explore the lead given to them by Ben Grimm about how Doctor Doom had been experimenting with ways of making men small in his castle upstate. Using their Astrostation to travel to the castle, they soon find Liddleville and realize that, since it was created small instead of being reduced in size, they won't find any way of returning to the Microverse there. Despite this, an encounter with the inhabitants of Liddleville who recount how their town was recently taken over by the tyrant Doctor Doom causes the Micronauts to decide to help by finding and freeing the kidnapped Mayor Masters. As they near the miniature Castle Doom, they see the bodies of a number of townspeople crucified outside its walls and realize that the people of Liddleville are robots, but are then attacked by some flying doom-robot missiles. Although they destroy those robots, the Micronauts are quickly downed when Doom himself releases gas from beneath the courtyard that knocks them all out.

When the Micronauts later revive, they find themselves sharing a dungeon with Mayor Masters who is chained to a chair. He introduces himself as the Puppet Master and reveals that he created Liddleville to be a haven for his step-daughter Alicia, a place where she could live a normal life with her friends, the Fantastic Four. As part of his plan, Masters had transferred the minds of Alicia and the FF into tiny, powerless synthe-clones and altered their memories so that none of them would know that they had ever been anything other than the normal human beings they believed themselves to be. However, the will of Doctor Doom, whose help the Puppet Master had obtained by using his mind-controlling radioactive clay, was too strong and he had been able to alter the scenario in a way that enabled the Fantastic Four to regain their memories and escape from Liddleville, leaving Doom's consciousness trapped in the synthetic body of Vincent Vaughn. Masters had then taken control of the robot populace to drive Vaughn out of town. Although Masters had thought that would end Doom's threat, Doom managed to created a new suit of Doctor Doom armor for himself and robots to serve him as he set out to conquer Liddleville. When Doom's robots come for them, the Micronauts fight back, destroying the robots and freeing the Puppet Master before heading off to confront Doom. Their battle starts a fire in the castle and Doom is distracted when the portrait of him with Vincent's unscarred face begins to burn. When Doom suddenly exclaims that he has lost all feeling in his limbs and cannot move, the Puppet Master arrives and reveals that he had used a small amount of his radioactive clay that he had hidden in Liddleville to create a puppet of Doom so he could control and immobilize him. When the Puppet Master tells the Micronauts that the battle is no longer theirs to fight and assures them that proper punishment awaits Doom, the heroes leave to continue their quest to return home. As the heat of the flames melts Vaughn's face, disfiguring his once-handsome features, the Puppet Master mocks Doom who vows to destroy him.

Back aboard their Astrostation, the Micronauts fly away from Liddleville without looking back.

Meanwhile, in the Microverse, on the molecular planet Homeworld's First Zone, the Duchess Belladonna, whose mind is now in the body of the rebel leader Lady Slug, tries to use her new body to manipulate Force Commander Argon into making her his queen. However, her plan fails when he laughingly rejects her and reveals that he, like Baron Karza before him, has used the Body Banks to transform himself from a man into something greater.

Elsewhere, in the royal dungeons mockingly called the Pleasure Pits, the imprisoned Prince Pharoid is taunted by the Dog Soldier guards who remind him that he has lost his Star Scepter weapon, his country has been enslaved by Argon, and he couldn't even protect his woman, the Lady Slug, who is imprisoned in the adjoining cell. However, despite the fact that her mind now inhabits the withered body of the elderly Duchess Belladonna, Slug remains defiant and reminds Prince Pharoid that they must set an example as leaders of the rebellion.

Notes

  • This story about Liddleville takes place some time after Fantastic Four #236 but leads directly into Fantastic Four #246. The Micronauts also appear, technically, in that issue, but only because the Astrostation in which they are leaving the large Castle Doom appears in a single panel. Since none of the Micronauts are visible, they are all listed as (Behind the scenes) for that issue.
    • That one FF panel of the Astrostation exiting Castle Doom via one of its windows probably takes place just before this comic's last panel which shows them flying through the air with hills in the background.
  • Although Doctor Doom's real body last appeared in Fantastic Four #237, it was just a mindless shell, something that the Fantastic Four never realized during the whole time they held it captive in their headquarters. In contrast, the most dangerous thing about Doom, his mind, last appeared in Fantastic Four #236.
  • During the first battle between the Micronauts and Doom, Bug, Devil, Microtron and Nanotron are shown to all be aboard the Astrostation. However, once Doom has gassed his foes, Bug and Devil can be seen lying on the ground with the other three non-roboid Micronauts, but there's no sign of the Astrostation or the two roboids. While it's possible that the two roboids dropped off Bug and Devil to join the battle and then moved off to give them space to fight, the story contains not even a hint as what happened to them. Instead, they aren't seen again until the story's final panel shows all of the Micronauts flying away from Liddleville in the Astrostation.
  • The revelation that Argon is no longer human was another hint that his becoming evil was not just another case of a ruler being corrupted by his own power. The truth would be revealed in Micronauts #49.
  • The story that the Puppet Master told the Micronauts glossed over a few facts. For one thing, although he claimed to have made the tiny synthe-clones, in actuality they had been created by Doctor Doom, as established in Fantastic Four #236 and referenced by Masters in his private conversation with Doom after the Micronauts had left. Additionally, the minds of the Fantastic Four (and Alicia and Franklin) had never actually been transferred into their synthe-clone bodies, but were instead transmitted into them from their real bodies by mechanisms connected to their heads that established and maintained links between their real brains and their artificial bodies, enabling them to control those bodies (like puppets) without ever realizing what was really happening.
  • This issue's story contains three continuity errors, two minor and one major. The first minor error stems from the fact that, in the original Liddleville story, the minds of the Fantastic Four, Alicia Masters and the young Franklin Richards had all been transmitted into miniature synthe-clone duplicates of their real bodies while the minds of both Phillip Masters and Victor von Doom had been transferred into tiny robot duplicates of their real bodies. However, in this issue, it is repeatedly stated (by both Masters and Doom) that Doom's mind was in a synthe-clone body. In contrast, Fantastic Four #246 confirmed that the replica bodies of both Masters and Doom were tiny robots.
    • Also, the fact that Doom's face could be melted without seeming to cause him any pain provided in-story evidence that his mind was not in a biological replica of his body but was actually in a mechanical simulacrum.
  • The second minor error occurred when, while battling Acroyear, Doom referred to himself as "Vincent von Doom" instead of "Victor von Doom." This was presumably due to the fact that, while in his tiny robot body, Doom had used the alias of "Vincent Vaughn" to conceal his true identity from Reed Richards. Since Masters had speculated that the reason why Doom had concentrated on conquering Liddleville instead of getting his real body back was because he preferred the handsome features of "Vincent" to his own scarred face, maybe Doom's misspeaking was some sort of Freudian slip?
  • The major continuity error is that the Micronauts were depicted as being the same size as the people of Liddleville when they should have been several times larger. A central concept of the original Micronauts series was that the Micronauts, as a consequence of how they had traveled to Earth, were supposed to be about the same size as the Mego Micronauts action figures that were 3.75 inches tall (although some Official Handbook profiles written later state that the Micronauts were about 6 inches tall while on Earth). However, as drawn by John Byrne, the synthe-clones (and the people of Liddleville) were much smaller, being only about 1 inch tall. This means that, if the accuracy of this issue's story were to be preserved, then the Micronauts must have been at their normal Earth height when they encountered the Thing and Franklin Richards in Micronauts #40, then somehow shrank in size before this issue began, and then later regained their normal Earth size in time to interact with the Wasp and the Avengers in Micronauts #42–43. Worse yet, these size changes must have taken place without the Micronauts even noticing that they were happening.

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