A bit of housecleaning on the Doom retrospective before moving to the post-Secret Wars era: I should have reviewed this one during the Hickman run.
Fantastic Four #581 (2010)
By Jonathan Hickman & Neil Edwards
cover by Alan Davis
I love how College Years Reed Richards and Ben Grimm look worried, while Doom just seems annoyed that someone broke into his room.
Also is it just me or does Doom look twice the age of Reed here?
This is a time travel story, courtesy of Reed’s father Nathaniel.
You might remember him as the INCREDIBLY annoying guy from the DeFalco run, but Hickman’s version is completely different.
We don’t get a lot of flashbacks to Reed’s time in college; when we do, it’s usually out of class.
Even if we do get to see him in class, it’s always about a scientific field.
This is likely the only time we will ever see Reed in philosophy class.
Good choice showing that Reed didn’t JUST take science classes; the guy has depth!
Also not surprising: Doom being the most obnoxious philosophy student ever.
I wonder how this guy reacted when he realized one of his philosophy students grew up to be a ruthless dictator. That can’t be good for your resumé… or at least I hope that’s not a plus.
Guys, don’t take this personally. He doesn’t think he’s better than you SPECIFICALLY.
Ben Grimm wasn’t in the class. Can you imagine the Thing taking philosophy?
I wonder if the reason why Reed is never fazed by any of the weird stuff the FF run into is that he grew up expecting his father could at any day teleport into his college dorm.
Ben is also absurdly chill about this.
To be clear, Reed doesn’t know his father is a time traveler (until Nathaniel messes up with history in the rest of the story).
This actually respects Nathaniel’s introduction in the John Byrne run, which is when Reed found out.
This story ties into Hickman’s S.H.I.E.L.D. miniseries, which is WAY too complex to discuss now.
All you have to know is that Immortus has orchestrated a hunt to leave only one Nathaniel Richards alive among his variants.
Now that only two Nathaniels are left alive, he’s looking for help to save himself.
Which in turn leads to Reed asking Doom for help.
Notice that Doom is ALREADY building his own robot army!!!
Or, if we go by Books of Doom, he’s building them for the US government: this still kind of fits that retcon as well.
This leads to Doom building an exoskeleton for Ben Grimm. A bit on the nose, especially since it has four fingers like the Thing.
This has been very easy to fit in continuity so far, but Hickman does an uncharacteristic mistake here by namedropping Oppenheimer here.
He died in 1967, which does fit with the timeline of the first Fantastic Four adventures… except that, thanks to the floating timeline that Marvel uses, this scene can’t possibly be happening THAT far back!!
Assuming this is happening in 1967 (and that’s already stretching it, Oppenheimer died in February) and that the students are at least 18 years old, as of 2025 it would mean Reed and Victor are 76 years old!
And no, you can’t use the time travel excuse, because Doom hasn’t invented his time machine yet.
This can only work if you either assume Nathaniel is visiting a parallel timeline where Oppenheimer lived much longer, or you ignore that little reference.
We’ve seen over the course of the retrospective that Doom has used tons of mind control devices.
Oddly enough he tends to use them only once and then forget about them; looks like this goes all the way back to college.
Nathaniel then brings them into the future, where his variant has kept himself busy.
And we close with Other Nathaniel spotting them.
Fantastic Four #582 (2010)
By Jonathan Hickman & Neil Edwards
cover by Alan Davis
Just in case you need to keep track of who these people will grow up to be.
From the looks of this, I believe Other Nathaniel murdered the DeFalco version.
GOOD RIDDANCE.
Unfortunately, not only Other Nathaniel is way too strong for this ragtag team…
…he has his own team: the Anachronauts.
Kang and Immortus also employed teams with the same name.
And they always suck.
Other Nathaniel is definitely tougher, but he didn’t account for Doom’s Random Telepath Helmet(patent pending).
Well not SPECIFICALLY, but he does have a way to protect his mind.
Which means he would be able to kill not just Nathaniel, but also Reed Richards and Ben Grimm and making sure the Fantastic Four never form…
…if it wasn’t for Doom showing up at the last second.
That’s right: DOCTOR DOOM just ensured the Fantastic Four will exist.
Doom is even charitable enough to offer Nathaniel the last blow!
It’s not his fault he doesn’t accept.
I don’t know, Victor, you might be the one who wants to forget this.
And with that taken care of, Nathaniel can return to other plots.
One of those is waaaaay too complicated to bring this up, but the crucial point is summarized by Adult Franklin Richards here: this entire thing resulted in making Reed an orphan in every reality, which is a big reason for the creation of the Council of Reeds.
For the rest of the Hickman plot relevant to Doom, this continues in FF #583.
Doom significance: 0/10
I was expecting Nathaniel, or maybe Future Franklin, to erase the memories of the young Reed, Ben and Victor. Considering it’s absolutely impossible they remember ANY of this, the best explanation given the Marvel time travel rules is that this just created a new parallel timeline.
Silver Age-ness: 4/10
Reed and especially Ben accepting all of this insanity without missing a beat.
Does it stand the test of time? 8/10
Needless to say, Hickman’s Nathaniel runs circles around DeFalco Nathaniel in every conceivable way. That really helps the story, especially the first one, and it’s a nice deviation from the overarching plots that are ongoing at this time.
On the other hand, Reed and Ben are WAY too casual about the whole situation, and not properly explaining why their future selves don’t recall this is unforgivable given how much Hickman typically pays attention to these things.
And of course there’s the main catch of the Hickman run as a whole: while I liked it A LOT, there’s no denying that it’s mandatory to either read it as a whole or to keep up with it every single time, because if you pick up one isolated issue you are bound to be completely lost.
Crazy tech
In addition to having built a machine to communicate with the dead, sentient robots and a time machine, Victor Von Doom ALSO built exoskeletons and telepathic helmets while in college.