Fantastic Four #18

 "If there's going to be any shatterin' impacts around here, I'll do the shatterin'!"

It's such a relief to get back to Fantastic Four after a run of fairly inconsequential issues with, at this stage, frankly second string heroes and writers. And this is enormous fun from the start, as the FF watch themselves on the news by means of an enormous, 1960s era, black and white telly... which is immediately juxtaposed with the frankly bonkers futuristic tech hi-jinks of Reed and Sue using an actual ICBM(!) to quickly nip over to Hawaii for a spot of swimming. And yes, that was a highly satisfying sentence to write.

But, in deep space, the Skrulls are still around, and this time we meet their unnamed Emperor, no less. Is he concerned about his underlings stuck as cows on Earth in issue #2 in a frankly nightmarish bit of body horror? No, he is not. Instead, he's determined to (all together now) defeat the FF and conquer Earth, because that's just what alien baddies do. He's "emptied the Treasury" and treated his people "like slaves", so this clearly matters quite a bit to him.

And so we meet the Super-Skrull, who has all the powers our heroes possess, "and more"... not only that, but he also has the shape shifting powers of your average Skrull. And it's such fun to see him arrive in Times Square, calmly claim Earth for the Skrull Empire, and await the Fantastic Four as the Emperor watches from afar. And so the inevitable skirmishes occur... and the Super-Skrull very much wins the first round, the FF heading back to the Baxter Building with their metaphorical tails between their legs. Plot-wise, this is very standard stuff, but it's fun.

But, naturally, Reed comes up with a MacGuffin that saves the day by removing the Suer-Skrull's power supply from the "fifth quadrant where the Skrulls are, and, in a nice touch, it's Sue who, invisibly, gets to use it and defeat the bad guy, causing the watching Skrull Emperor to call his underling a "dolt", a word only ever used by baddies in superhero comics. 

At last, a comic that's genuinely a pleasure to read.