Galactus’ skull lands in times square.
The G-skull belongs to an alternate reality Galactus, and it’s followed by the superheroes from another reality, who warn the FF of a new threat, Abraxas, who is a cosmic entity with a goal to kill every Galactus across all alternate realities.
He’s been drawn to Earth 616 because the Galactus of this reality died in Galactus the Devourer #6.
Abraxas manages to trick the FF into getting the Ultimate Nullifier (with the help of Genis Vell, Quasar and others) out of its hiding place–to use against Abraxas–but then he steals it from them.
His goal is to use it to wipe out reality itself. He’s a bad dude. And he starts mixing realities so that Earth 616 gets mixed up with alternate Earths.
He’s also really powerful, and now he has a Nullifier. The team realizes only one character is strong enough to defeat him: Galactus. So, Franklin and Valeria get help from Roma…
…and combine their powers and resurrect him–pulling him out of Eternity and Infinity (who kind of absorbed him when he died). Galactus returns and Reed Richards uses the Ultimate Nullifier to destroy Abraxas and reset Earth 616.
But when it comes back, it is different.
Franklin Richards is depowered, Valeria Von Doom is gone (and yes, she’s really gone), and…Sue is pregnant!
Yeah, this is a very intricately plotted story…It’s confusing…
You might be thinking that based on how much I complained during both Tom DeFalco and Chris Claremont’s runs, that all this alternate/future reality stuff would just annoy me but here’s the thing: It’s good. It’s a damn good story.
Also during this story: Marvel decides to go back to the old numbering but doesn’t want to give up the new numbering–probably because next issue is #50 which is a decent excuse to charge a dollar more for the issue and include some backup material that nobody will want. So both numbers appear on the covers.