While Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards is one of the great heroes of the Marvel Universe, he’s also perhaps its most dangerous individual – as proved by his future X-Men team. Reed has long been an ally to mutantkind, especially since his son Franklin Richards was found to possess the X-gene. In the Marvel Universe, mutants are hated and feared, with their rights and lives constantly under threat by a fearful humanity.
Plans to wipe out mutants have included custom-made superhumans, genocidal robots, and deadly viruses. However, as inventive as the many evil scientists who have targeted mutants have been, no-one can touch Reed Richards when it comes to thinking up unprecedented technology. It was a clone of Reed who told the Skrulls how to hide their shapeshifting and infiltrate Earth in their Secret Invasion, and another reality’s version of Mister Fantastic who destroyed Asgard with a race of cyborgs. Famously, the Council of Reeds gathered together different versions of the scientist from across the multiverse, carrying out questionable missions on an unprecedented scale.
In X-Men: Millennial Visions #2, Ariel Olivetti and Jorge Lucas’ ‘New Mutants: First Soldiers’ tells a story of Reed Richards finally wiping out mutantkind. When the X-Men are murdered by an unprecedented human attack, Professor Charles Xavier finally comes around to Magneto’s way of thinking, and the two mutant leaders set out to massacre humanity so their remaining charges can live in peace. In response, S.H.I.E.L.D kidnaps Reed’s family and forces him to work on a custom virus that will kill off all Earth’s mutants. Reed succeeds, but destroyed by guilt, he immediately leaves Earth and makes a new home on Mars, where he raises the last four surviving mutant children who he managed to smuggle off-planet. Reed’s new team is made up of laser-eyed birdman Tarf, telepathic shapeshifter Lys, poisonous chameleon Trago, and time-stopping speedster Frodo. However, Reed is well aware that should this final team of X-Men discover how their predecessors died, they are likely to turn on him, seeking revenge.
X-Men: Millennial Visions was a project launched in 2001 in which some of Marvel’s most acclaimed creators theorized about what stories the mutant team would encounter in the new millennium. Casting Reed Richards as a morally compromised equivalent to Professor X, his New Mutants blend the idea of the Fantastic Four and X-Men to create one last, tragic team meant as Reed’s final shot at redemption. Many ideas from Millennial Visions have since entered mainstream canon, and interestingly Reed’s potential to wipe out mutantkind is among them. After thinking up a device that would theoretically rid mutants of their powers in 2020’s X-Men/Fantastic Four, Reed was visited by Professor X, who tampered with his mind to make it impossible for him to remember his invention. The two have been frosty ever since, with a bubbling resentment from Reed which still has to come to a head.
Millennial Visions Predicted Major Storylines
Despite initially being depicted as something close to a saint, Professor Charles Xavier has become a more complex figure over the years, committing dark sins to achieve his dream of mutant/human coexistence, such as the secret team exposed in the iconic Deadly Genesis. ‘New Mutants: First Soldiers’ predicted the idea of the X-Men reckoning with a morally compromised leader as well as the implicit threat Reed Richards poses to mutantkind, decades before these ideas would become central to Marvel’s mainstream stories. It also strangely predicted the X-Men’s future on Mars, which was only recently terraformed in the comics as a new mutant world.
Reed Richards’ final X-Men team turned the Fantastic Four’s leader into a monster presiding over the final generation of mutants – a dark prediction of the future which has gradually come true in different ways in the years since.
