Civil War: Fantastic Four

The Puppet Master and the Mad Thinker devise a plan to have Captain America’s freedom fighters attack Tony Stark’s convoy that is transferring captured heroes from one undisclosed place to another. While all the heroes are fighting they’ll use Puppet Master’s mind control to take control of the support helicopters to launch missiles at both sides and a member of the Yancy Street gang to plant a bomb.

The Thing stumbles upon the action and is able to avert disaster by covering the bomb with an armored truck.  When both sides ask Ben Grimm to join their side his answer is that he doesn’t support the law or believe in it but neither will fight his own government or be considered a criminal so he opts to move to France.  There he has some adventures with some French super heroes but the story line no longer has anything to do with the Civil War.

Later Reed Richards manages to capture the Mad Thinker, but not to punish him.  Reed wants the Mad Thinker to look at one of his equations, believing him to be one of the few men on earth with the intellect to understand it in all of its’ complexities.  Basically the formula Reed Richards has created is supposed to predict societal trends and unfortunately the conclusion is a bad one.  Richards sees the Registration Act as the only option because the results of the other thirty scenarios run through his equation meant the end of mankind and the Mad Thinker believes his equations may just be valid.

Throughout the whole story though Reed had been arguing with Sue, giving her made up reasons for why he supported the Registration Act and all the consequences that came with it.  In showing the Mad Thinker his formula, he inadvertently opens the door to give Sue access to his equation while she is invisible.  Sue exposes herself and asks Reed why he had lied to her, but telling her that she was not intelligent enough to understand the accuracy and consequences of his equation probably wouldn’t have gone over too well I’m sure.  While this creates a giant rift in their marriage, it also is the main point of discontinuity in the book.

While that is how events went down in Civil War: Fantastic Four, in the main Civil War book, right at the beginning Reed waves Sue off while he is working and tells her to look at his formula to see why he supports the Registration Act.

The discontinuity doesn’t end there unfortunately.  In Civil War, the Thing can be seen at first major battle between Iron Man’s team and Captain America’s team and as a supporter of Iron Man & Reed Richard’s side, yet in this book he declines taking a side and is in France when this battle should have taken place.

I know in a major crossover continuity can sometimes be difficult to maintain, but there should have been a better discourse between the writers to avoid something like this and it should have been caught in editing and re-worked.