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.

Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: Though his age is not explicitly stated in this issue, there are forty candles visible on Reed’s cake, and Johnny refers to this birthday as “the big one.”

Reed’s brainwaves were stolen and eventually restored in FF #254 through 256.

The flashback sequence to the defeat of Gormuu features young Susan Storm and Ben Grimm. We also learn that the space rocket flight with created the Fantastic Four was completely financed by Reed himself, using two billion dollars left to him by his father. (If Reed paid for the whole thing, who did he “steal” the rocket from in FF #1, as I’ve always understood it to have happened? I figured it was a government sponsored program headed by Reed a civilian advisor.)

Reed and Sue discuss the Thing, still on the Beyonder’s Battleworld following SECRET WARS, and Reed makes cryptic comments about Ben’s ability to transform back to his human form on that planet.

According to Reed, though his father was obscenely wealthy, he kept most of his money in trust funds, untouchable by even Reed himself, and set up a situation wherein he could never be declared legally dead.

The time platform created by Reed’s father is compared to the similar device created by Doctor Doom, and confiscated by the FF, in FANTASTIC FOUR #5.

Is It Clobberin' Time? Bringing this category back, not because the Thing clobbers anyone this issue, but because normal human Reed clobbers normal human Ben in the flashback. Reverse Sneak-Attack Best Friend Clobberin' Time!

My Thoughts: Well, it’s here. I had hoped — prayed — that this time it might be different. That this time, somehow, history would change itself and John Byrne would not give Sue Richards that hideous mullet.

My prayers were in vain.

This issue debuts, without a doubt, the worst hairstyle Sue has sported in the entire fifty-plus year history of the Fantastic Four. As awful as we all know mullets look on men, they look a thousand times worse on women. But it’s the eighties, people. Mullets are the height of fashion. And a fashion plate like Sue isn’t going to sit this trend out. The mullet is here for the long haul.

In other news, while this issue is mostly set-up for the next couple installments featuring the search for Reed’s father, we do get a fun little flashback sequence starring pre-FF versions of Reed, Sue, and Ben. The creative team goes all out on this, too — Byrne pencils and inks it in a 1950s Silver Age pastiche, and even the letters are larger and bolder in the style of those old comics (and, in a nice touch, the narration by Reed is lettered in the modern style at the same time). And of course, Byrne creates an alien monster with a goofy name, Gormuu, in the vein of the other classic Marvel monster comics of the fifties.

Honestly, at first I thought perhaps this was some old Silver Age story Byrne had dusted off and possibly re-inked and repurposed for a flashback, as Roger Stern once did with a “Doctor Droom” story of the same era, until I did some research to verify it was all originally created for this issue. I like fun little homages like this, and that sequence really helps to let this issue stand on its own, as opposed to being simply “part one of three”.