During this arc, the “Marvel Knights” banner disappears and the title becomes just “4” (with a little “MK” in the corner box). I’m going to keep the original title for the sake of simplicity.
This series has never been very good, and this arc has time travel and alternate future characters…All stuff I generally hate because it’s all stuff that’s very, very rarely done well. And these issues are not the exceptions to the rule.
Franklin really wants to be good at little league, so he concentrates super hard and hits a home run. In doing so, though, his mutant powers delete 8 minutes from the time stream. Kinda like the Nixon tapes.
This upsets the Time Variance Authority and triggers a visit from a guy who should be Rama Tut but instead is his son(!). This dude, Ramades, was born after Nathaniel “Kang/Rama Tut” Richards raped a slave and left some time travel tech in Ancient Egypt, which Ramades then uses to trap the FF in the past and come into the present to harass Franklin and create a future where Doctor Doom rules the world.
It really doesn’t matter.
I’m aware of the ongoing debate about who Nathaniel Richards really is. I’m not getting into all that. In this story, he’s described as Reed Richards’ daddy. In other timelines, he ends up being Kang, but I guess this version of Nathaniel is just a time traveler. Similarly, for simplicity’s sake, I’ve tagged Doctor Doom as appearing in this story even though he’s an alternate future Doom who never comes to exist because “Daddy Nathaniel” undoes the damage done by “Not-Daddy Nathaniel who Raped a Slave” so that Ramades never exists in the 616 timeline. Got that?
Anyway, at the end of the adventure, Reed tells him he can stay with them in their timeline and Nathaniel says this…
That’s just NOT TRUE and it’s NOT SCIENTIFIC. There are many ways to get cream out of coffee and, more importantly, there is a very simple way to “unmelt” an ice cube: You just put it in the freezer.
It is not this creative team’s fault that The Fantastic Four, which was the flagship of the Marvel fleet back when the 616 was created, is now an inessential part of a universe dominated by mutants and Spider-Man and Avengers. But I still wish that the team’s books were better quality.