Welcome To The Archive for "Fantastic Four"!


BASE OF OPERATIONS: Baxter Building, Manhattan

HISTORY: Over a decade ago, the U.S. government, under the auspices of the Directory of Mainland Technology Development, began gathering international child prodigies at a Manhattan laboratory facility in the Baxter Building, giving them the Best resources and teachers the project could afford. Headed by scientist William Storm and the U.S. military’s General Ross, the project discovered the N-Zone, an otherdimensional space which paralleled our own. When 11-year-old Reed Richards independently accessed this zone and began sending small toys into it, the project recruited him to join their work. Over the following ten years, Reed Richards, Victor Van Damme, and other students and instructors worked on the project before the government ultimately constructed its N-Zone teleportational gate in the Nevada desert, intending to teleport an apple to a receptor in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Unbeknownst to the others, Victor Van Damme altered the device’s settings and, upon the five people on its steps vanished into interdimensional space, returning altered. Reed Richards returned to the same spot, transformed into a mass of pliable cells. Ben Grimm, Reed’s childhood friend, was transported to Mexico and transformed into the rockish Thing; Johnny Storm was transported to Paris, his skin converted to flame-emitting cells;Victor Van Damme was transported to an unrevealed location and acquired a mechanized skin; while Sue Storm was transported into the Nevada desert, acquiring invisibility powers.

Arthur Molekevic, a fired Baxter Building instructor who had covertly observed the experiment and its transformed subjects, sent his artificial ani-men after the five. Initially retrieving Susan while the government gathered Reed, Ben, and Johnny at the Baxter Building, Molekevic then sent what seemed to be an enormous monster after them. Defeating it they followed it to Molekevic’s underground laboratories and retrieved Susan, inadvertently destroying the underground chambers in the process and apparently burying Molekevic. The government relocated the remaining Baxter Building students to a secondary facility in Oregon, and dedicated the Manhattan facility to the quiet study of the altered four. When Van Damme attacked the Baxter Building six months later, Reed tracked him to Copenhagen. Refused permission to go to Denmark by the government, the quartet went anyway in Reed’s childhood “Fantastic-Car,” knowing they needed Victor’s knowledge to restore themselves. Battling Van Damme, they were unable to defeat him before the government arrived and were forced by international law to set him free.

The four used a reconstructed N-Zone transporter to pilot a decommissioned U.S. Space Shuttle, heavily modified by Reed Richards and awkwardly christened the “Awesome” by Johnny Storm, to explore the N-Zone itself. The quartet made contact there with a being known as Nihil, who tried to kill them and follow them back to Earth, where both ships crashed in Las Vegas. The Fantastic Four were officially “outed” as super-humans on the Sunset Strip while defeating Nihil and his alien crew. Returning to the Baxter Building, they were briefly attacked by a rejected Baxter thinker named Rhona Burchill who was jealous of Reed’s status, and subsequently aided the Ultimates, with Ben and Johnny fighting beside Nick Fury, Carol Danvers, and the Ultimates’ Thor and Black Widow against the Free while Reed and Sue went into space with Iron Man to investigate Gah Lak Tus. The quartet also investigated the mystery of a secret race known as the Inhumans, then a group of Chrono-Bandits across time after they duplicated a time machine which Reed and Sue had co-created. Recently, Reed made interdimensional contact with another universe’s version of the Fantastic Four, bringing the team into conflict with an alien world affected with a zombie-creating virus.

SIGNIFICANT ISSUES:
Origin (Ultimate Fantastic Four #1-#6, 2004)
Battlered Victor Van Damme (Ultimate Fantastic Four #7-#12, 2004-2005)
Explored the N-Zone (Ultimate Fantastic Four #13-#18, 2005)
Battle Rhona (Ultimate Fantastic Four #19-#20, 2005)
Met zombie counterparts (Ultimate Fantastic Four #21-#23, 2005)



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