The Fantastic Four meet a tragically dark, feral team of evil counterparts created by an unexpected villain. The Fantastic Four have faced an unusually diverse collection of villains, many of whom formed specifically to challenge Marvel’s First Family. Red Ghost and his Super-Apes often overwhelm the Fantastic Four in numbers, and the Terrific Trio, while Doctor Doom has often assembled temporary coalitions with enemies like Namor, Kang the Conqueror, Molecule Man, and even Galactus. Meanwhile, cosmic organizations have also threatened the FF, from the Kree and the Skrulls to the Annihilation Wave and the Universal Church of Truth.

The Fantastic Four attract so many enemies because they continually venture into places that almost no other Marvel heroes dare to explore. Reed Richards’ relentless scientific curiosity pushes the team toward unexplored dimensions, and most recently to distant points in the timeline. Their headquarters also houses all kinds of inventions that often cause more harm that good, including stashes of dangerous weapons like replicas of famous Marvel villains’ most powerful gadgets. Every expedition risks creating another enemy, which is more often than not with the Fantastic Four’s life-or-death battles.

It’s safe to say that the Fantastic Four are usually their greatest enemies, though the team sometimes takes this statement too literally.

Marvel Introduces The Feral Four

Fantastic Four #15; Written By Ryan North; Art By Humberto Ramos, Victor Olazaba, And Edgar Delgado

As the Fantastic Four continue their adventures through time, Nicholas Scratch reverses their flow of time, causing them to hop backwards in periods of twenty years. After the eighteenth-century scientist Clarina Canady uses her life’s work to save them, the Fantastic Four take a final stand against Scratch and his team of “Feral Four,” a Fantastic Four team ripped from the timestream and mind-wiped to serve him. The Feral Four have the exact same powers as the original heroes, which makes them even more dangerous than if Nicholas Scratch tried to give them different abilities.

The Feral Four are an especially tragic creation, as they aren’t clones, or even multiversal variants taken from a different universe. These Fantastic Four duplicates are the same people as the original team, only taken from a slightly earlier point in the timeline. Fortunately, the Feral Four don’t die when defeated, but instead fade out of existence when Nicholas Scratch loses his magical connection to them. And curiously, it’s Johnny Storm who achieves it by removing his infamous mustache to impersonate his Feral Four counterpart and sneaking up on Scratch.

All Fantastic Four Copycats Lack What Makes Marvel’s First Family So Good

The Feral Four Are Only One In Many Alternate Versions Of The Fantastic Four

The Fantastic Four have inspired multiple teams that deliberately mirror or distort Marvel’s First Family. For example, Simon Utrecht recreates the Fantastic Four’s cosmic-ray experiment, believing identical circumstances would grant him and his companions the same powers. The resulting team of Vector, Vapor, X-Ray, and Ironclad, a.k.a. the U-Foes, become one of the Hulk’s most dangerous recurring enemy groups, each member reflecting a different aspect of the Fantastic Four’s abilities. Meanwhile, the Frightful Four have followed a similar path ever since the Wizard started assembling lineups featuring villains like Trapster, Sandman, Medusa, Thundra, Titania, Hydro-Man, Klaw, and numerous other villains to challenge Marvel’s First Family.

Each member of the original Fantastic Four also has at least one evil counterpart somewhere out there. Reed Richards and Sue Storm’s dark mirrors are the most famous. In Marvel’s original Ultimate Universe, Earth-1610’s Mister Fantastic loses all hope in his timeline and redirects his scientific curiosity into a destructive philosophy, becoming the Maker, one of the multiverse’s most dangerous villains. Likewise, an Invisible Woman variant from a parallel universe loses her ability to feel empathy and adopts the villain moniker “Invincible Woman” as she wipes out all life on her Earth. While powerful, Nicholas Scratch’s Feral Four are harmless compared to dark counterparts like these.

Which Fantastic Four copycats are your favorite?

Fantastic Four #15 is now available from Marvel Comics

Video Game(s)

Fantastic Four (1997), Fantastic Four (2005)

First Film

The Fantastic Four

Cast

Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis, Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell, Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, Ebon Moss-Bachrach