Fantastic Four #2

[Cable]

Last time we saw what Ben and Alicia are doing, this time it is Reed and Sue

Full Spoilers:

Spoiler: show

The narration of the issue is in the form of a letter from Sue Storm to Jen Walters. She tells about how she and her husband Reed Richards were eating in a small town diner when suddenly the waitress and all the other patrons turned into Doombots. They start to fight back but as a state trooper arrives the robots return to their disguises so that it looks like Sue and Reed were violent for no reason. The trooper takes mercy on the heroes and just drops them off outside town with instructions not to return. Instructions that they ignore. They do return invisibly though and observe that everyone in town seems to be Doombots, only keeping up their disguises around an old lady that they theorize to be the 'head Doombot'. Reed uses his powers to change his face and then goes to question the old lady while Sue watches on invisibly. He is invited to the old woman's house, learning her name is Mary, after she recognizes the name Victor Von Doom. She tells about how she met the young immigrant student when he had first arrived and was struggling. She offered to make him meals every day. He swore to pay her back for this favor, but disappeared one day and never returned. Reed tells her his real name and she has no reaction, leading Richards to conclude that she is actually a human and not one of the Doombots. He exits to speak to his wife and they come to the conclusion that a young Doom built these robots to protect Mary and that they seem to have self-reproduced to populate the whole town. Reed introduces his wife to the old woman but Sue can tell through her powers that there is in fact a Doombot illusion field present: she reveals Mary is a robot after all. Furthermore, she pulls off the robot's face to reveal a skull inside! Reed oozes inside and finds there is only bones present, some of them broken. Sue now suggests that Mary may have become injured and the Doombot thought the only way to not fail its mission to protect her was to pull her inside its own body. The old woman eventually passes away but the Doombot allows her to live on by overwriting its own personality with hers. Reed and Sue get interrupted by other Doombots in town who realize the old woman is dead and so shift to their secondary objective of destroying Reed Richards. Mr Fantastic holds off the robots while Invisible Woman races to their car and activates a mass EMP blast. The robots are deactivated for awhile so Reed goes to test a hypothesis: he digs up the graves in the cemetery and they find more Doombots. In order that their illusion not be revealed to Mary, the town's Doombots would emulate death by purposefully overloading their own circuits. This provides a way to destroy them all, but Reed instead wants to take a different course of action. Reed and Sue work through the night to alter the programming of every unit so that the instructions to destroy are removed. They leave, allowing the Doombots to continue to live and die as members of their own small town.

I am loving this volume so far! The one-and-done issues are like episodes of the X-Files or Twilight Zone or something lol. I feel like this can't be continued long-term because readers of Fantastic Four expect themes of family/partnership etc and so the separation of the members can't last, but as long as the quality remains this high personally I could read these solo adventures for the foreseeable future. Of course the central mystery that isn't being touched yet would need resolved along the way before the cryptic hints become annoying.