Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: fantastic four, marvel, x-men, X-Men/Fantastic Four, X-ual Healing - The Weekly X-Men Recap Column

X-Men/Fantastic Four #4 – Yes, This Book Still Exists [XH]

Published Mon, 27 Jul 2020 15:30:16 -0500

by Jude Terror

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Hi, and welcome to X-ual Healing, the number one sex-themed weekly X-Men recap column on the web. Marvel somehow found the time to squeeze out five X-books last week, and we're now down to the final book we have to recap: X-Men/Fantastic Four #4! Oh, and by the way, in a new feature, down at the bottom of this week's articles, you'll find a table of contents linking to all the X-ual Healing recaps of the week. Go ahead. Scroll down and see.

Sworn to sell comics for Marvel executives who feared and hated the fact that Fox owned their movie rights, The Uncanny X-Men suffered great indignities. Still, thanks to a corporate merger, a line-wide relaunch, and Jonathan Hickman's giant ego, the X-Men can finally get back to doing what they do best: being objectively the best franchise in all of comics.

X-MEN FANTASTIC FOUR #4 (OF 4)
FEB200877
(W) Chip Zdarsky (A/CA) Terry Dodson
The exciting finale! On an island of doom, the X-Men and Fantastic Four fight to save the future! Lines will be drawn in the sand and enemies will be made, upending the Marvel Universe!
Rated T+
In Shops: Jul 22, 2020
SRP: $3.99

X-Men/Fantastic Four #4 Recap

Ah, there's nothing quite like having a gratuitous four-issue spinoff crossover series, already unlikely to have anything of true value to add to the ongoing story being told in the X-books, be interrupted by a months-long industry shut down due to a pandemic. If anything could kill a comic's momentum dead in the water, that would be it. But with just one more issue left, Marvel might as well just publish it and be done, so here we are.

Doctor Doom has just unleashed his Sentinel Doombots. Oh no! Doctor Doom has declared war on mutants! While a battle rages, Doom continues his process to restore Franklin Richards's connection with his power source. Reed, Sue, and Kate Pryde are locked out by a force field. Kate threatens to phase through his armor, so Doom controls her powers, making her denser than stone and causing her to crash through the floor. Sue is all like, "You can't do this!" But there's nothing she can do.

So Sue teams up with Nightcrawler to carefully dismantle the Doombot armor that contains the Latverian mutants. They extract the mutants so the X-Men can take out the armors. Meanwhile, Kate Storm, who I'll point out here, is, in typical Greg Land style, drawn like a porn star, is having a character moment. This, combined with her wearing an old-school X-Men uniform instead of her pirate costume, combined with the fact that in Marauders she's been f**king dead for months, makes this whole series feel even more out of sync with the rest of the X-Books. Anyway, Kate's all like "Doom wants to control my powers? Well, I won't let him!" Good for her.

Back in Doom's control center, Professor X and Reed Richards plead with Franklin to abandon the process because Doom is killing humans and mutants to make it happen. Franklin agrees, but Doom refuses. Kate pops back up, having regained control of her powers and phases through Doom's armor, incapacitating him. She frees Franklin from the machine. He decimates the Doombots and passes out.

Doom threatens everyone for messing with his affairs, but Professor X lectures him and says the Latverian mutants are now Krakoan, and they're coming with them. Doom agrees. Afterward, the X-Men and Fantastic Four makeup and Franklin are allowed to go and live on Krakoa.

A few weeks later, Franklin is in the middle of a test by Beast, who explains that Franklin's powers are still broken, but they deplete less quickly while he's using them on Krakoa. Meanwhile, in New York, Valeria Richards chats with her Uncle Doom. She noticed that while all the hubbub was going on back on the Latverian island, Doom was studying Franklin's power source and taking some power for himself. Doom says he plans to use it to help humans evolve to match mutants. Valeria thinks he's in denial.

Magneto and Professor X pay a visit to the Fantastic Four. They bring Franklin along so he can have dinner with his family. While there, they visit Reed Richards in his laboratory. Professor X wipes the design for the mutant cloaking, X-Gene blocking device he had invented for Franklin in the first issue. Xavier tells Reed that he's not going to wipe his memory of doing this to him because he wants him to remember how serious mutants are about their survival. He gives Reed a pretty good telling off, and in the Marvel Universe, there's really no one who deserves a good telling off more. Maybe Iron Man.

Okay, so this story did serve to set up a few things, even if it was poorly scheduled to fit with the rest of the Dawn of X. I guess all of this takes place back at the very beginning, in line with the comics that were in stores last October and November? We've got Franklin Richards hanging with the X-Men. We've got Xavier mindwiping Reed Richards, which is sure to cause some bad blood. We've got Doom preparing for war with mutants. And we've got a new aspect to Kate Pryde's powers to explore whenever she's not dead again.