Fantastic Four #587

With the debatable exception of #86.1, I believe this is the first time I've done a genuine callback - which is to say, you won't really get today's strip unless you read and remember #70.

I was thrilled to learn about Johnny's death, though that's not to say I have any ill will toward the character. But Ben and Sue are historically very mistreated in this series, so killing them would've been bullshit, and Reed is the best thing about the series these days, so that wouldn't have done either. Johnny's great as a foil for Ben and an entry point for young readers, but no one is more in need of a time out than ol' Hotfoot. And that's really all we're talking about here - I mean, there's dead, and there's comic book dead, and then, waaaay past comic book dead, there's Fantastic Four dead. I hear tell that Reed once built a machine to abduct Ben from Heaven after an earlier death of his. When you've defeated Heaven itself, I guess the Negative Zone should be pretty simple, huh?