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In Fantastic Four, a major Marvel character debuted as the mysterious Scion, a villain who was so brutal that even Kang and his variants didn’t approve.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Fantastic Four #35, available now from Marvel.
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Marvel’s First Family, Fantastic Four #35 dives deep into the team’s history while introducing a mysterious new time-traveling character named Scion. While he presents himself as one of Kang’s many variants, “Death in Four Dimensions” by Dan Slott, John Romita Jr, JP Mayer, Scott Hanna & VC’s Marte Gracia, reveals that he’s actually one of the Marvel Universe’s greatest heroes, Mr. Fantastic.
During “Death in Four Dimensions,” Reed Richards and the team return home they stumble upon an artifact from another time. As they try to identify what it is, Immortus has gathered Kang the Conqueror and the rest of their variants, Rama-Tut, and the Scarlet Centurion to their stronghold in Neverspace located at the end of broken timelines. Their goal is to locate all of the pieces to the artifact left behind by Nathaniel Richards, Reed’s father. To do so, they need to travel through time to different points in the Fantastic Four’s history to acquire. They are joined by the mysterious Scion, who claims he is also a variant.
To make the scavenger hunt more enticing they are all tasked with killing the Fantastic Four in each timeline. Rama-Tut attacks them shortly after they return to Earth when they were still learning their powers. He easily suffocates them all under enough sand to fill the Baxter Building. Meanwhile, the Scarlet Centurion travels to the time period right before the “Onslaught” event unfolds and uses the Thunderbolts to kill the Fantastic Four of the ’90s. Meanwhile, Kang the Conqueror attacks the team right after Johnny returned from the Negative Zone in the Future Foundation era. Catching them off guard, he disintegrates Johnny, and uses the Excalibur sword to first kill Ben before turning to the rest of the family.
As the group turns to hear Scion’s story, the new variant explains how he visits the family moments after they return to the Baxter Building during the story’s opening. He tells the rest of how he used his technology to age or de-age leading the group to interrupt him asking if he really killed them as babies, to their collective horror.
Scion confesses that those events didn’t happen and he actually went and followed each of the variants to their different time periods. From there, he rescued a member of the Fantastic Four in each. Outraged and confused, Kang and variants ask him to explain himself, which is when Scion reveals his true identity.
With the knowledge of their intended attacks, Reed traveled through time to assemble a team as the variants looked for their piece of the artifact. The time-displaced members all worked together to subdue Kang and the rest of the variants, just in time for the TVA to show up and clean up the mess. The TVA then reset all of the timelines and returned the members, with Reed taking the assembled artifact home with him.
While Reed Richards is frequently stuck in a lab, this mission gives Reed the rare chance to show off how effective a hero he can be on his own. Reed is one of the smartest heroes in any incarnation of the Marvel Universe, and he clearly outmaneuvers the Kang variants here. First, he finds a way to sneak into their base, which only allows descendants of Nathaniel Richards, and then he figures out how to assemble an ad-hoc Fantastic Four team through their oversights. In the same way that the Invisible Woman joined S.H.I.E.L.D. as a covert operative, this mission hints that Reed could be cut out for a similar line of work when the need arises, as he effectively maintains Sion’s facade throughout this mission well enough to create a believable variant of Kang.
Thanks to the Council of Reeds, Mr. Fantasic has had plenty of experience dealing with variants in the past, but this story underscores how many of the lessons he learned in those stories stuck for Marvel’s original super-genius.
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