FANTASTIC FOUR #271

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARLING"
Writer/Artist: John Byrne
Letterers: Janice Chiang & Michael Higgins | Colorist: Glynis Wein
Brand-New Editor: Michael Carlin | Editor-in-Chief: Jim Shooter

The Plot: Sue, Johnny, She-Hulk, Wyatt, Alicia, and Franklin arrive in Reed’s lab to wish him a happy birthday. Later, Reed confides in Sue that he is slowly losing portions of his long-term memory, and he believes this condition to be an effect of the theft of his brainwaves in the Negative Zone months earlier. He tells Sue the first vivid memory he has is of the time he defeated an alien invader named Gormuu before the creation of the Fantastic Four.

Reed decides that his best shot of regaining his lost memories is with a trip to his family estate, unused since his father’s mysterious disappearance years earlier. The next day, the entire group, including Wyatt, Alicia, and Franklin, heads for Central City in California. There they meet the Richards' butler, Peacock, and his wife, who inform Reed that they’ve been seeing ghosts around the estate periodically for years.

Reed leads the FF into his father’s lab, where they locate a time machine, the cause of the spectral, time-displaced imagery. Reed deduces that his father attempted to jump to the future (the FF’s present), but instead moved along a parallel timeline to another universe. He determines to find that universe and rescue his father.