Fantastic Four (1961) #5 recap
"Prisoners of Doctor Doom!" by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby
This issue contains the very first appearance of Doctor Doom, who as I'm sure many of you know is a pretty significant recurring villain. On the opening page, he claims that he's the only one on Earth that can defeat the FF and takes a helicopter to go see them.
The FF themselves are engaging in leisure activities, one of which being Johnny's reading the Incredible Hulk comic, which is a fun Easter egg:
As one can probably predict at this point, Johnny's barb devolves into a whole fight between him and Ben, with Reed stepping in to pin Ben to the ground with his stretchy limbs, and Sue firing at Johnny with a fire extinguisher. All seems well again.
But suddenly! The power goes out and Doctor Doom drops a giant net over their building from his helicopter! He introduces himself, which prompts Reed to recognize him from his voice as someone he knew from college. Read the explanation below.
von Doom tells the FF he wants Sue as hostage, and she agrees to go to his ship so that she can lure him out for the rest of them. Once she's onboard, von Doom tells the rest of them to board the ship but to promise not to attack, which, uh, sure, dude, just take their word for it. He picks them up via a contraption that looks to me like a golden plunger:
He flies them to his castle, where he informs them of his real motives: he wants to send them back in time via time machine to recover Blackbeard's treasure! With Sue still hostage, they agree and are sent back a few hundred years.
As the next panels show, once there they decide they need new clothes, but this doesn't go the way I, at least, expected it too, for they don't steal the pirates' actual clothes, just their "booty."
They don their disguises, and, as Reed says, Ben looks like a real natural!
The lads go to a tavern, unsure where exactly Blackbeard is, but a pirate crew sees them and roofies their drinks in order to kidnap them and force them to work as their crew.
When they wake up, they make quick work of their kidnappers, with Ben busting up through the ship's deck, and Reed manipulating his height to punch the guy in the crow's nest. Johnny, for his part, melts a pirate's sword.
This doesn't mean they're in the clear, however, for just then they're attacked by another pirate ship!
Johnny uses his flames to turn the ocean into steam, destroying the ship's visibility, and Reed stretches across to their ship to provide a walkway for the rest of them to board the other ship.
They fight gallantly, but there's one unexpected side effect-- the pirate crew nickname Ben Blackbeard, taking him as their leader.
After they swap out the jewels for a worthless set of chains to give to von Doom, Ben decides he quite likes being Blackbeard as opposed to the Thing and tries to send Reed and Johnny away so he can live out a life here in the past, but a storm hits the ship before anything too fatal can occur. They wash ashore along with the chest, and it's then that they get zapped back to the present.
While von Doom is checking the contents of the chest, the following happens:
That was a nice touch of foreshadowing for a later plot with Namor, there.
Doctor Doom isn't kidding and he really does start to suck the oxygen out of the room, but luckily Sue turns invisible and short circuits his machine while he's not paying attention, saving them. Once they're all together, they bust out of the castle, which provides an opportunity for Johnny to demonstrate a new ability:
Johnny then tries to smoke von Doom out of his castle, but he escapes handily. The issue ends with them expressing concern that now both Namor and Doctor Doom are still on the loose, and there's no telling what they'll do.
And with that, another recap ends! Next on the docket is Amazing Fantasy #15.
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