The Terrifics #1-9

The Terrifics #1-9

Originally released in 2018

Written by Jeff Lemire

Art by Ivan Reis (#1-2), Joe Bennett (#3, 6), Evan Shaner (#4-5), Dale Eaglesham (#7-8), Jose Luis (#9)

The Terrifics are a rag-tag group of heroes: Mr. Terrific, Plastic Man, Metamorpho, and Phantom Girl.  Forced together by an accident, the team sets out to explore the unknown regions of the cosmos, including the Dark Multiverse, using scientific know-how.  They're astonishing... incredible... you could even say they're fantastic!  ...though you probably shouldn't for legal reasons.

From 2015 to 2019 (roughly), Marvel did its best to ignore the Fantastic Four over what can only be described as "petty legal squabbles" - 20th Century Fox had the movie rights for the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, and the people in charge of Marvel wanted to downplay those properties as much as possible, to the point where they erased those characters from images that originally contained them when making merchandise.  Secret Wars served as a last hurrah for the team before the Fantastic Four series unceremoniously ended, Reed and Sue (and the kids) were sent off into the multiverse, and Ben and Johnny didn't have much to do. (as for the X-Men, they couldn't write them out entirely, but they stopped making video game appearances, and Inhuman DNA was used as an all-purpose superpower origin instead of the X-gene)

This was eventually resolved by Disney buying Fox outright, but DC seemingly saw an opportunity to make a legally-distinct Fantastic Four comic with Marvel not making one during this time period.  Metamorpho and Phantom Girl are pretty clear counterparts to the Thing and the Invisible Woman, respectively (though the Phantom Girl turns intangible instead of invisible), though the other two aren't quite as exact.  Plastic Man has the powers of Mr. Fantastic but the personality of Johnny Storm, while Mr. Terrific has the personality of Reed but he doesn't have superpowers, just advanced technology and Olympic-level athletics.

It's hard to dismiss the similarities when the first page shows a masked man with a similar sense of style to Doctor Doom as one of the villains, and while out in the multiverse, the team encounters what can only be described as the corpse of a just-barely-lawyer-friendly Galactus.

Upon landing on the behemoth's corpse, Mr. Terrific, Metamorpho, and Plastic Man are attacked by the creatures that are living there, only to be saved by the arrival of Phantom Girl, who was introduced in this series.  She's the ancestor of a member of the Legion of Superheroes who has a similar appearance and powers, though I'm not familiar with the Legion of Superheroes and only found this out when looking up the character on the DC Wiki to confirm that this was her first appearance.

Upon discovering a message from someone named Tom Strong, the quartet is forced to flee back the way they came, though an extended amount of time in the Dark Multiverse resulted in Phantom Girl destroying any electronics (or possibly anything in general) that she touches while she's tangible.  Mister Terrific intends to look into the problem, but first he needs to head back to his lab to analyze a piece of the device that was used to receive Tom Strong's message.

Unfortunately, their time in the Dark Multiverse, or meddling with the device, caused them to be stuck together, resulting in extreme pain when one member of the group tries to leave the others.  They work well as a team when they're attacked by a War Wheel, even if none of the members have any idea why it's happening.

Fantastic Four isn't the only Marvel property that this series references; a team-up move between Plastic Man and Metamorpho is incredibly similar to Colossus and Wolverine's Fastball Special, both in terms of name and how it's done.  Simon Stagg built the War Wheel, though he claims that Mister Terrific must have activated it by accident when working in the lab.  It's a pretty flimsy excuse, though for all I know, Java (the caveman-turned-personal assistant) could have activated it and Stagg is blameless. (Stagg doesn't seem like he'd want a piece of equipment that costs millions to be destroyed, and he seems clever enough to not take a direct hand in things like that)

Resigned to the fact that they're stuck together for now (though Mr. Terrific is working to undo it in his downtime), the team seeks out Phantom Girl's homeworld of Bgztl to find out what's happened in the ten years since she was pulled into the Dark Multiverse.  After being picked up by the space equivalent of a garbage truck, they make it to Bgztl only to discover that Phantom Girl's homecoming isn't quite like she hoped.

Still, the scene of her reuniting with her mother is a touching one.  She can't stay on her homeworld until the energy that's binding the team together is removed, but at least they know that she's alive.

While the team didn't seem to know each other all that well before the incident that brought them together, the book borrows some of the dynamics from the Fantastic Four. This isn't really the case where Phantom Girl is concerned (since she's an alien teenager who's not related to the others), but Plastic Man and Metamorpho bicker a lot like Johnny and Ben, while Mister Terrific offers to fix Metamorpho's condition and make him human again. He doesn't have Reed's guilt motivating him, but he figures he can at least try.

Issue 5 does an interesting thing where each page consists of at least four panels, with one panel showing what each member of the team is doing. (if two or more people on the team are together, the panel is much larger, and if all four of them are together, the panel takes up the whole page)

An entire town in Michigan is slowly being turned into Metamorphos, and it's up to the Terrifics to investigate what's going on. The one who's responsible for this calls himself Algon the Ancient Elemental Man, and he's looking for a successor to keep the power of the Kingdom of Elements contained.

The team manages to stop him from making Metamorpho his successor and reverse the transformations that happened to the city (though that includes a dog that helped them out who was called Element Dog, which was a little disappointing - I was hoping the dog would stay empowered and be the team's pet), with the unexpected side effect of turning Metamorpho back into a normal human.  

As it turns out, the events that happened to the team from the attack of the War Wheel onward were orchestrated by one man. A man with an alliterative name, a metal mask, and a cloak over his head, who's smart enough to hack into Mr. Terrific's T Spheres. Of course, I'm talking about Doctor Doom Dread.

Doctor Dread informs the team that Tom Strong is the greatest hero of another reality, and Doctor Dread intends to kill him. Looking into it, Tom Strong is a character that Alan Moore made for a different comics company in 1999, a throwback to the pulp action stories of the 1940s and 50s. I'm assuming that DC bought the rights to the character, or even the company in question, in the time since then.

The Terrifics make it to Tom Strong's dimension, though they discover that Doctor Dread is one step ahead of them, having attacked Tom with an extra-dimensional tree. When they get too close, the four of them and their tagalong dog, who I guess they decided to keep (so hopefully, when Metamorpho inevitably gets his powers back, then so will the dog), are sent to the Forest of Eternity, where Tom had also been sent.

Once freed, they discover that all of this dimension hopping has made it so they're no longer linked together, along with allowing Phantom Girl to control her powers and touch things while tangible without those things exploding. Tom's wife, daughter, and assistant were kidnapped by Doctor Dread and sent to different parts of the multiverse; Tom Strong memorized which portals they were sent through, so he, his robot butler, and the Terrifics split up to go after them.

Tom Strong and Mr. Terrific wind up in the main DC universe, where another character who's heavily associated with Alan Moore makes an appearance: Swamp Thing. He's angered by their presence, as Slaughter Swamp (the swamp outside of Gotham where they appeared) is apparently a big deal to him.

The misunderstanding is quickly cleared up, though it turns out that Tom Strong's wife isn't even in the DC universe any more; she escaped, got back to her own world, and is trying to find everyone else.

Following a lead from Swamp Thing, Tom and Mr. Terrific head to a branch of Mr. Terrific's company that's located in Gotham. The company closed while he was busy with multiverse exploration, but Doctor Dread is there, where he continues the unsubtle Doctor Doom parallels with Dread Drones, which are basically Doombots.

Everyone else arrives, with Doctor Dread being especially shocked that Rex Mason, the man formerly known as Metamorpho, survived the trip across the multiverse. This seems to confirm Doctor Dread's identity, as he had access to Simon Stagg's resources and a personal reason to dislike Metamorpho in particular. (As they both have crushes on Stagg's daughter, though Sapphire considers Metamorpho to be her true love)

The Terrifics might not be as natural of a team as their inspirations, as they're mostly pre-existing characters rather than being made up for a series like the Fantastic Four, but they're an entertaining group regardless. Phantom Girl feels a little underdeveloped compared to the rest, but the scene where she returned to her home planet for a short time was great. Mr. Terrific's trauma over his late wife leads to him being a little distant, but it's clear that the team is bonding and slowly growing into something like a family.