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The Stupidest Thing Reed Richards Ever Said
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Location: Blogs Atomic FalloutYe Olde Comick Booke Blogge |
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| Posted by: Jake Bell |
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 12:39 AM |
After decades of being told how Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's run on Fantastic Four represents the pinnacle of comicbook-dom, I finally broke down when I found slightly damaged copies of the first three Essential Fantastic Four volumes in a half-off box. What I quickly learned is that as groundbreaking and genre-defining as their 100+ issues may be, the Lee-Kirby era didn't exactly hit the ground running.
It took a good 30-40 issues for Stan and Jack to find their footing and make the stories live up to the colossal ideas behind them. At times, the stories and dialogue are ridiculously stilted or completely inane (some day I'll try to explain why Sue Storm is Abraham Lincoln's mom), but no single line of text struck me quite the way this statement by "the greatest scientific mind on the planet" did in Fantastic Four #20:  Wow, what a discovery! Evidence of life from outer space! It's like a big acorn in need of thorough analysis. Just think of what this will teach us about the possibilities of alien life. It's almost as big a deal as what happened two months ago. Remember that Reed?  Oh, yeah! The Super Skrull landing in Times Square and claiming the planet Earth in the name of the Skrull Empire. As I recall, he was sent here to prepare us for the invasion the Skrulls had planned about two years ago.
Your remember the Skrulls, right, Reed? Right, right, now it's coming back. You and the rest of the team had to fly up to their mothership, posing as the Skrull undercover unit sent to Earth to mimick you and discredit the FF. You convinced them to call off the invasion by showing them pictures from comics books. Don't remember? I suppose you have a lot on your mind and shapeshifting aliens coming to Earth is just two days out of your entire life. No, wait, three days. Almost forgot about Impossible Man. What a pest he was, huh? I mean, he's no Doctor Doom, but he still made life tough for a while.
Speaking of Doom, remember he told you that story about those aliens he met after you guys and Namor turned his plan to hurl you all helplessly into space around on him and left him drifting into the void? Man, was he mad when he returned. He almost killed you and everyone else on the team. Good thing you learned your lesson and recognize you can't just go shooting people who pose a threat off into space without there being some dangerous consequences. If you ever tried something like that again, I bet Namor would totally oppose it.
Of course, this isn't really evidence of alien life since it's just a story from Doom. Kind of like how the Watcher told you the story about his home planet when you ran into him on the moon. Anecdotal evidence isn't enough for a scientist of your caliber, so I can understand dismissing those tales. It's not like the aliens came to you, took you up in their ship, flew you to their homeworld where you saw millions more of them, and made you save their race from an asteroid that was on course to destroy their planet. ... at least not in the last year or so.
Anyway, Reed, I guess what I'm saying is "Best of luck on that acorn thing." (In case you're keeping track, in the first 20 issues of Fantastic Four, seven (or 35%) involved close encounters with alien life.)
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