Warning: Spoilers for Fantastic Four: Road Trip #1
For Marvel’s First Family, The Fantastic Four, there isn’t much that can stop their collective smarts, brawn, and familial bonds from being the strongest in all of comics. Whether it be preventing the newest super villain threat on tir own or working with the Avengers to thwart the next world-ending disaster, this quartet of heroes will always do what they can to bring peace and prosperity to every corner of the Marvel universe.
But as recently revealed in Fantastic Four: Road Trip #1 by Christopher Cantwell and Filipe Andrade, their greatest weakness is one that might be impossible to get rid of, lest the Fantastic Four be downgraded to the Fantastic Three. So much for a nice family vacation!
A one-shot spinning out of the ongoing Fantastic Four title, Fantastic Four: Road Trip #1 is a surreal and grotesque dive into what originally seems to be a regular, non-superhero day for our titular characters. Driving across the vast nothingness of the Arizona landscape (sorry, no flying Fantasticar here), the family - consisting of Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, Ben Grimm (aka The Thing), Valeria Richards, Franklin Richards, and The Thing’s main squeeze, Alicia Masters-Grimm - are ready to finally have a few days off in a remote cabin next to the Grand Canyon to try and enjoy themselves far away from the constant craziness of the superhero world.
But as Reed is always wont to do with his incalculable love for everything scientific, he strategically makes a stop at a crater in the middle of nowhere to snag some soil samples containing odd magnetic signatures that – expectedly – Reed wants to get his stretchy fingers on for experimenting reasons. Grabbing what he needs with a little help from his son Franklin then bringing it all back to his “vacation lab” in the basement of their cabin for analysis, the odd material immediately begins to attack the family’s cellular structures due to the unique properties of the soil that Reed deduces came from a planet called Spyre.
Realizing that they have been set up in a sort of trap that’s quite literally melting Reed, disappearing parts of Sue, duplicating Franklin, reverting Valeria’s intelligence, keeping Johnny ablaze and making The Thing’s rocky skin fall off, the group finds a way to save themselves and confront the mastermind behind the attack: The Mad Thinker. Revealing the Fantastic Four’s greatest weakness to be Reed Richards himself due to his “selfish and obsessive tendencies” as well as musing over the fact that “The easiest way to the Fantastic Four’s destruction has always been through Reed Richards’ CURSED curiosity!” the Mad Thinker gives the quartet something to consider as they pummel him into submission.
So even with the smarts and good intentions at the center of everything Reed Richards does, it’s his obsession with his mission and undying love for everything science that is The Fantastic Four’s greatest weakness. And while the family manages to sneak out of this predicament intact, there might come a day where Reed’s fatal flaw will spell the end for his loved ones, and there’ll be nothing he can do about it.