Friday, September 29, 2006

Children Of The Corn Had Nothing On Him

Question of the day: Does Franklin Richards still have his awesome, nearly mindbogglingly immense mental/reality warping powers?

For some reason or the other, I was thinking about how that was an ongoing subplot through a lot of the '80s and '90s. I remember shortly after Spidey first got rid of the symbiote, and Reed had it in his lab, it tried some mindmeld thing with Franklin, accidentally breaking down the mental barriers Reed put in place (how?), and in the process scaring the crap out of itself, when it realized how powerful he was.

The first Dr. Strange comic I ever read (I want to say #75, from his series in the mid-80s) started off with Strange coming to the aid of Reed, Sue and Franklin, only to end up standing by and watching as Franklin laid waste to Mephisto. To be fair, Strange was the one who freed the kid, so it isn't like he did nothing, and he was holding his own prior to that, but still, the kid laid the pain on the loincloth wearing Devil wannabe.

Franklin's responsible for Heroes Reborn and Counter Earth, right? Which would mean it's mostly his fault we've got Onslaught Reborn coming our way. I'll get you for that kid.

He's a mutant, but I can't remember if he was listed as one of the 198, post-Decimation. And from the little I've skimmed through Fantastic Four books recently (Waid and JMS), I didn't see any signs of it. Which is odd, I'd figure to JMS, reality-warping would be almost as good as magic to make the FF heroes of destiny, or something equally inane.

And if Franklin does still have his powers, doesn't he have to register with the government? And whether the intent to use his powers was there or not, wouldn't the government keep a really close eye on him, and possibly insist on training so that he doesn't pose a risk? I'd love to see Stark show up to take Franklin away insisting he has to be kept under close observation. If Sue didn't show up to make Stark's brain explode, it might just force Reed out of this funk he's in these days.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wouldn't it suck if it at the end Civil War turned out to have happened because Franklin was playing with his action figures and making them fight?

CalvinPitt said...

anonymous: I think I would actually burst out laughing if that was the reason for all this.

The real question is, could he fix all the things he'd caused (peter unmasking, Stark and reed becoming almost evil, etc.)?

SallyP said...

Heck the way that Reed is acting right now, he'd strap poor Franklin down and start drilling through his head.

thekelvingreen said...

Ha, I've just written at length about Franklin's experience with the symbiote in another post, which is utterly redundant, as it's all here. Oh well.

Franklin rewrote reality at the end of Carlos Pacheco's F4 run; that guy who killed Galactus (Abraxas?) came to Earth, and the only way to stop him was to rewrite everything. One of the after-effects of that was the apparent loss of those reality-altering powers. I don't think they've cropped up again snce then, but it's only a matter of time.

And don't you mean the psychic kid from the cornfield in The Twilight Zone, rather than the Lovecraftian child-cult of Children of the Corn? ;)

CalvinPitt said...

sallyp: Yikes. Let's hope Reed isn't that far gone.

kelvin: Huh, so they're gone for now. But as you say, it's only a matter of time.

Yeah, I suppose the Twilight Zone Kid would have been more appropos, but I wouldn't have known what to call him.

Maybe I should have gone with the Village of the Damned?