The Fantastic Four are in a real bind. Not only has their greatest enemy become Sorcerer Supreme and attempted to take over the world, but they were just wiped from existence entirely after a failed time travel experiment meant to restore their powers. Young Valeria ended up on a world that was watched over and ruled by her own brother, Franklin, who had taken the form of Galactus. It’s an absolutely insane and heartbreaking story that ends in a murder that would make Valeria’s godfather Doctor Doom proud. Franklin Richards is one of the most powerful heroes of all time, and Valeria just killed him.
How Franklin Became Galactus
To set the stage, Doctor Doom recently used his unmatched magical might to strip the Thing of his powers, leaving him just a normal man. While he struggled to come to terms with that shock, the rest of the Fantastic Four were in for an even bigger one, as their own powers began to fade as well. To solve this, the group decided to try and travel back in time to reexpose Ben to the cosmic rays and stabilize their powers. Unfortunately, everything went wrong when he accidentally absorbed all of the cosmic rays meant for their past selves, resulting in a massive ripple effect in time that erased them all from existence. In her final act, Invisible Woman threw force fields around the children, which leads us to now.
Fantastic Four issue #32 begins with Valeria watching her friends and family be swallowed by the time wave, herself being taken last. She wakes up in a new world where the Fantastic Four never existed, in the body of Mary Richards, what Reed and Sue would have named Valeria without Doctor Doom’s interference. She questions how the world could have survived without the Fantastic Four there to save it when they did, and gets her answer when she finds her brother. Franklin Richards has become this world’s new Galactus, and he uses his reality warping abilities to destroy or rewrite the personalities of anyone who causes him trouble or grief, including his own parents.
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Valeria manages to piece together that, just like her, Franklin’s mind was transferred to this new world. However, because he disintegrated in the time stream first he arrived much earlier, when he was still a fetus. His non-fully formed body couldn’t retain his memories, but it did take to his powers. Valeria and everyone else thinks Franklin lost his awesome powers, but he actually uses them to convince everyone, including himself, that they are gone so he can enjoy being a kid before he takes on all of that responsibility. However, this version of Franklin had full access to his powers from birth, and none of the training and guidance from his superpowered parents. He stopped every major threat the world faced, including Galactus, but grew up disconnected from everyone else because of it. With the weight of the world on only his young shoulders, Franklin turned himself into the biggest thing he’s ever seen, Galactus, and proceeded to police the world.
Galactus-Franklin Rules with a Cosmic Fist
Franklin used his powers to alter the personalities of anyone who committed crime or stood against him, including his own parents. He effectively lobotomized their souls, leaving them smiling, personality-less husks of themselves. Valeria teamed up with the final resistance against this alternate version of her brother, Jean Grey and Namor, who for some disgusting reason are married in this universe. Like, seriously, why? Is it just legally required that Namor has to be in a horrible relationship in Fantastic Four comics? Either way, the three use Jean’s telepathy and Namor’s ability to convince Franklin he has a fish’s mind to hide from Franklin, and Valeria constructs a machine that will allow her to send her mind back to before the Thing absorbed the wrong cosmic rays.
Franklin becomes aware of the machine the second they turn it on, and immediately rewrites Namor and Jean’s minds. He does the same to Valeria, which reveals that she has been narrating the issue to her brother in the nanoseconds it takes for him to rewrite her mind. However, she reveals that this was always her plan. Franklin read their minds and found the plan to send back Valeria’s consciousness, but was so focused on that he missed the hidden plan of instead just sending back a single message of four words. In doing so, their timeline comes apart as the original one reforms.
Still, the original timeline returning means the utter destruction of the altered one. Franklin cracks and shatters as his sister explains that they’re both going to die so their other selves can live. He cries that this is murder, that she’s killing him, and she says that she’s willing to live with that in the few moments they have left. Cold, just like her godfather. They cease to be, and back in the real timeline, Valeria gets her message and says she knows how to fix everything. What are those four words? We’ll just have to wait until next issue to find out!
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The post Valeria Richards Just Took Out Her Own Brother (And Doctor Doom Would Be So Proud) appeared first on ComicBook.com.
