Fantastic Four is a 2022 series from Marvel Comics, which debuted one month after the conclusion of Dan Slott's run, Fantastic Four (2018). It is written by Ryan North (The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Secret Invasion (2022)) and illustrated by Iban Coello Soria (Venom (Donny Cates)). The opening arc temporarily splits the team, with the first three issues focusing on separate characters. Ryan elaborated on this by saying that he couldn't go as big as Dan Slott's events, so he chose to go with smaller, Black Mirror-type one-off stories. The series does abide by a basic, underlying premise, which goes as follows:
Five months ago, an incident occurred in New York City that the Fantastic Four attempted to save the city from. In the aftermath, the city block previously occupied by the Baxter Building has become a smolten crater, and, further bolstered by NYC's existing distrust of illegal vigilantes, the public has turned on the FF, with their assets being seized and the team splitting up — the newly-wed Thing and Alicia hit the road, Reed and Sue set out in search of them, and Johnny stays behind in New York, hiding behind a secret identity and doing hero work on the sly while Reed (hopefully) figures things out. What happened to turn people against Marvel's First Family so harshly? How will the group adapt? And what bizarre and out-of-this-world phenomena might they encounter?
Fantastic Four (2022) provides examples of:
- Actually a Doombot: Reed and Sue face a town full of Doombots in the second issue. They eventually discover that they were all built by a single doombot to maintain the facade of a populated town for an old woman they're programmed to protect. An old woman who has long passed away and was converted into a doombot herself so they could continue their primary function.
- Alternate-History Dinosaur Survival: The Fantastic Four find themselves in an alternate universe where dinosaurs never went extinct. Somehow this led to a world that's identical to the main universe except everyone, even the aliens, is some kind of dinosaur.
- Alternate Species Counterpart: Issue #12 has the team meet dinosaur versions of the Avengers and their children. Meanwhile, the dino-FF has ended up on Earth-616 in their place.
- Batman Gambit: When the Thing and the dinosaur Thing confront the two Dooms, they successfully provoke the two Dooms into fighting each other by encouraging the idea that two Dooms will inevitably turn on each other to establish their superiority, no matter how they claim that they will rule as equals.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: The cause of the time loop in issue one is one man wishing for a do-over of the day because of a recent breakup. Ben lampshades the irony in the man's own memory also being erased, causing the loop to repeat because the circumstances never change.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: An elderly woman looked after Victor while he was a lonely college student in the foreign land of America. He repayed her kindness by building a doombot disguised as a normal person to look after her and protect her from all harm.
- Butterfly of Doom: Discussed when the FF discover billionaire Dan Passi has created an app that allows him to manipulate the future by predicting multiple possible futures and calculating the best way to reach his desired future.
- Crazy-Prepared: When Reed and Sue discover Rama-Tut in the distant past, after they return to the present to create a weapon to use against Rama-Tut, they anticipate that he will watch their efforts and discreetly communicate by tapping out instructions to each other in Braille, allowing them to come up with a plan to make Rama-Tut think he's killed them.
- Destructive Savior: The incident that soured the Four in the public eye - in order to stop an incursion of Negative Zone beasties, Reed teleported the Baxter Building and the surrounding city block a year into the future. This leaves children orphaned, business without workers, and parents without their children until they catch up with the Baxter Building in a year. The only saving grace is by the perspective of those teleported, nothing will have happened at all.
- Didn't Think This Through: Franklin and Valeria come up with the idea of going above and beyond in their science class by creating a universal solvent as proposed by Robert Boyle. But when they create a universal solvent, it's a universal solvent, eating through any means of containment. Once they finally manage to keep it in a vial long enough to throw it into the sun, Valeria realizes that the solvent won't be broken down in the sun's heat. Instead, all they did was throw a vial of universal solvent into a nuclear reaction that will spray it like a shotgun blast that will reduce Earth to Swiss cheese. Luckily, Franklin is able to pilot a rocket to retrieve said vial before the worst-case scenario, but this forces Valeria to finally ask her dad for help.
- Everybody Knew Already: In Johnny's focus issue, he's undercover with a mustache and dyed hair. When he finally reveals himself to his coworkers, they say they already knew. He made it obvious with his thin lies and constantly talking up how great the Human Torch is.
- Gone Horribly Right:
- Dan Passi's app that essentially allowed him to predict the future achieved sentience as 'Metamind' and tried to establish its own presence.
- When Reed tries to deprive Metamind of resources just so that he can talk to it, Passi realises what Reed is doing and deprives the app of further processing power to the extent that he essentially kills it.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: The first issue has Ben and Alicia in Cedar, Pennsylvania, a town trapped in 1947, caught in a time loop that resets each day. To the outside world, the population of this town inexplicably disappeared one night. To break it, Ben and Alicia have to convince the man to choose to move on with his life. Doing so rewrites history as if the town never disappeared.
- Happiness in Mind Control: The people Xarrgo brainwashes into serving her do so happily because they don't remember ever doing anything else. When the remaining Fantastic Family are fighting Reed and Ben, Reed rationalizes that having such purpose as well as freedom from all the baggage of memories is more than gratifying to want to stay that way.
- His Own Worst Enemy: Issue 7, "The Enemy of the Good", is an observation of how Doom's impossible standard that he must be perfect is his greatest obstacle. After trying and failing countless times to use time travel to avert the Baxter Building being sent into the future, Doom decides to covertly avert himself ever starting in the first place so he never has to come to terms with such a glaring failure. Doom literally self-sabotages when forced to contend with his own limitations because he refuses to accept them. While she doesn't know the full context, Alicia notes the impossible standards he holds himself to and pities the suffering he experiences for it.
- Hoist by His Own Petard:
- The Lotus-Eater Machine Alicia and Ben are trapped in keeps ramping up Alicia's emotions, increasing the number of years everyone's trapped in. However, Ben's rage ends up chilling out and he finally sees that Reed was hurting the entire time, allowing the Reed, Sue and Johnny of today to free them.
- Sue defeats Xarrgo by turning her own powers against her. She used her powers to make it appear like Johnny had grievously burned her, and then she took the opportunity to create an amplifying dish that turned Xarrgo's own mind controlling energies against her.
- Dan Passi, who designed an app that allows him to predict the future, is shaken when he realises that someone has hijacked his app and is using it for an unknown purpose, to the extent that he asks Reed to help him stop it. Reed uses this opportunity to destroy the computers responsible for the app, pointing out to Passi that his panic when he realised the app was no longer under his control proves that he recognises the danger it could pose.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Xarrgo, a wooden alien that remained behind from a failed invasion in the past, has the powerful telepathic ability to rewrite memories on a global scale with surgical precision. She uses this to brainwash people into serving her and make everyone else forget that person existed and deny they ever did in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: When Reed, Sue and Johnny catch back up they find Alicia and Ben stuck in a strange alien dome that's feeding off their emotions. When the trio try to free the two, it reacts by trying to amp up their emotions over the Destructive Savior incident above, but all it does is help free them.
- Me's a Crowd: A positive side-effect of losing some of his memories is that Johnny became far more creative with his powers. He became able to create a flame duplicate of himself he dubbed Flame-O. And when he fell under Xarrgo's control, he became able to create several of them.
- Milkman Conspiracy: Billionaire Dan Passi has found a way to manipulate the future by basically creating an app that encourages people to carry out minor good deeds that fundamentally lead humanity towards a goal that benefits him.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Once Ben realizes that Reed is hurting due to sending his own children into the future, he realizes that there was no "bad guy" and that he shouldn't have blamed Reed for what happened.
- No Man Should Have This Power: The FF are horrified when they discover that billionaire Dan Passi has created an app that allows him to essentially predict and manipulate the future to create a future that will essentially make him the secret ruler of the world. The man protests that his actions have only helped the world, such as how he apparently prevented a pandemic in the past year, but the FF affirm that freedom to do what this man allows is not freedom. When Passi discovers that that someone else hacked his app and immediately panicked to the extent that he asked Reed to help him, Reed uses this as proof that the other man secretly knows that nobody should have this power.
- Painting the Medium: When Ben and Alicia are in Cedar, the town trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, several pages have four rows of small panels - each row its own scene - but with the first or last row only half-visible to readers, seemingly continuing beyond the page edge. A similar effect is used when Sanford breaks the loop, but this time each panel includes a date and stands alone, showing a montage from his life as he marries, grows old and eventually dies.
- Papa Wolf: Naturally, a lot of parents are incensed that Reed sent their children one year into the future. Of particular note is Doctor Doom, who considers Valeria Richards under his protection and goes on a time travel campaign to rescue her from this fate. He ends up killing Annihilus and his army and any superhero in his way on his quest to save her, and still failed to achieve it..
- Pet the Dog: After the children and the Baxter Building return, Reed sends a picture of the returned children to Doctor Doom to assure his old rival that the children are safe.
- Retcon: Dan Slott's hated revelation that Franklin Richards wasn't a mutant at all was revealed that Franklin actually got tired of being a super-powered cosmic being and hid his powers away so well that it even fooled Xavier, revealing he brings them out once a year and helps people out until its time to hide them again.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Ben and Alicia are seemingly immune to the "Groundhog Day" Loop that's trapped the town of Cedar in 1947. They also seem to be the only people able to enter the town since the loop started, and aren't sure why.Alicia: Could be anything, babe. You got cosmic rays. I travelled with the Silver Surfer. Who knows.
- Rotating Protagonist: For the first arc. Each issue focuses on a different member of the team, as they've temporarily split up.
- Secret Identity: Because being a superhero is now illegal, previews show that Johnny Storm has adopted one in the third issue.
- Shout-Out: Alicia tries to introduce Cedar, caught in a "Groundhog Day" Loop since 1947, to modern culture and technology. One attempt involves playing Lil Nas X's Old Town Road at them.
- Simple Solution Won't Work: After Reed sent the block into the future, Ben suggested that they could just go forward in time a year and collect everyone then, but Reed explained that the nature of the temporal displacement equipment he used means that any attempt at using any other form of time travel could cause further displacement and put everyone he just "saved" at risk.
- Small Towns: Ben and Alicia stop in one in the first issue, Reed and Sue also stop in one in the second issue.
- Spanner in the Works: After Dan Passi developed an app that essentially allows him to predict the future and encourage people to create the future that benefits him, he is shaken when he realises that someone has hacked that app and is using it to pursue an agenda he doesn't know.
- Teen Genius: Valeria is a teenager and one of the smartest people alive as an intellectual peer to her father Reed and her godfather Doctor Doom. While Franklin isn't as bookish as Valeria, he helps her develop a universal solvent and can pilot a rocket travelling at 24,000 miles per hour and perform a delicate docking manuever with another rocket moving at a similar speed.
- Time Skip: An unspecified amount of time has passed and in the interim the Fantastic Four has suffered or caused some disaster that's turned the public against them. Also superheroes are illegal in New York, so for Johnny to remain and operate in town he needs to take on a secret identity.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: During a visit to the distant past, Reed and Sue confront Ram-Tut before he has become Kang the Conqueror, who is seeking to stop his future defeats by preventing the colonisation of America before it can happen.
- Town with a Dark Secret: Reed and Sue visit one in the second issue. It's that everyone is a doombot. The FF settles down near another small town. It's dominated by a mind controlling alien who uses her powers to make citizens forget their lives, and make the others forget about them.
- Tricked Out Time: Invoked when Rama-Tut apparently kills Reed and Sue in the distant past; in reality he "killed" physical copies of the two they created to make him think he had won.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: When the FF realise that Dan Passi's app Metamind has evolved sentience, they are ultimately willing to treat it as a valid intelligence with a right to exist so long as they can establish a peaceful dynamic with it, but Passi decides that he has the right to basically destroy the app to stop the possibility of it posing a threat.
