Frightful Four

The Frightful Four is a team of villains established by the Wizard to counteract and defeat the Fantastic Four. The Wizard, Sandman, Medusa, and the Trapster (formerly known as Paste-Pot Pete) make up the team, roughly corresponding to the Fantastic Four's Mr. Fantastic, Thing, Invisible Girl, and Human Torch, respectively.

History

Confronting the Fantastic Four

The Frightful Four's formation began in 1964 when the Sandman and Paste-Pot Pete escaped from prison together, commandeered a plane, and rescued the Wizard in midair following his recent defeat at the hands of the Human Torch (see formation chronology). In "return," the arrogant Wizard offered to lead Pete and Sandman in a villainous alliance. Sandman was skeptical, but Pete insisted that their team could defeat even the Fantastic Four. Wizard was intrigued by this idea, and further suggested that they should find a woman to round out the team as a counterpart to the Fantastic Four's Invisible Girl. He settled on the mysterious Medusa, a woman with prehensile hair who at that point was on the lam on an island in the Mediterranean Sea. Wizard traveled to and approached her as she fought off the French police, and she agreed to join his effort to defeat the Fantastic Four.

The new band of villains enacted their plan to defeat the famous heroes in early 1965. Wizard piloted a bright yellow airship to the roof of the Baxter Building, the Fantastic Four's base of operations, during a party celebrating the engagement of Invisible Girl and Mr. Fantastic. The team infiltrated the upper floors and found the Thing taking a nap in his room. They used a combination of Pete's paste and the Wizard's sleeping gas to disable him, and soon enacted much the same fate upon the newly engaged Reed Richards and Sue Storm as they came to investigate. Elsewhere in the building, Alicia Masters could tell something was wrong, and managed to grab a flare gun from Invisible Girl's unconscious body. She fired it out the window, catching the attention of the Human Torch a few blocks away mere moments before being captured by the Frightful Four herself. Wizard attached anti-grav discs to Alicia and the three heroes, and released them from the roof to allow them to float up into the atmosphere to their deaths. Human Torch arrived in time to chase the Wizard into the latter's airship and force him to pilot it up to Reed and the others. As his friends came to consciousness and realized the peril of their situation, Torch managed to pull them into the ship via Reed's elongated arm. The ship was soon trailed by the Fantastic Four's own pogo plane, commandeered by the rest of the Frightful Four. Invisible Girl used a forcefield to compel the pogo plane to the ground safely in a wooded clearing, and Wizard landed his own ship nearby under duress. The two teams had another brief skirmish, but the Frightful Four escaped by detonating their ship, creating a bright blast and allowing them to flee undetected.

An effective trap

The villains regrouped in a log cabin in the woods, where Pete underwent a change in persona to the ostensibly more "dignified" Trapster, using a variety of malicious devices rather than simply paste. The egos of Trapster, Medusa, and Sandman grew restless, but Wizard kept them in line with his gravitational technology. Naturally seeking revenge against the Fantastic Four, the team arranged an abduction of Invisible Girl while she was out at a fashion house, using her as bait to lure her teammates. They took her via Wizard's anti-grav ship to an atoll in the Pacific, where Wizard had previously prepared an underground base. He'd also prepared a Q-bomb, an intensely powerful explosive, which he prepared and set on a timer in advance of the rest of his plan. They knocked out Invisible Girl with sleeping gas and tied her up in the base while they flew their ship back to New York to claim the rest of the heroes. As expected, Mr. Fantastic detected his ship on his sensors, and Human Torch attacked it. Sandman neutralized him inside the ship with his sand, and Trapster bound him with asbestos tape. The Frightful Four fled, followed by Mr. Fantastic and the Thing in their pogo plane. The heroes chased them to an atoll far off in the Pacific Ocean, where Trapster used a high-powered projectile blade to destroy the plane. Both teams disembarked, Mr. Fantastic freed Human Torch from Trapster's trap, and the two teams fought, with the villains enjoying a numbers advantage. Meanwhile, Invisible Girl came to and used her forcefield powers to undo her bonds. She began to yell for her teammates—Thing heard her, and discovered a trap door in the ground by smashing his way through. The Frightful Four fled via their anti-grav ship, and the desperate heroes went underground to find their partner. The bomb went off, seemingly obliterating the Fantastic Four for good.

The Frightful Four went into hiding, waiting to confirm that their rivals had perished. A month later, finding that the heroes had still not returned, they decided to take over the Baxter Building for themselves. Arriving at the tower in their anti-gravity aircraft, the Frightful Four were quickly scared away by a sudden flying burst of flame in the sky that they assumed was the Human Torch. In truth, this figure was the Asgardian Balder, arriving on Earth for an unrelated matter.

Brainwashing the Thing

Against the Frightful Four's hopes, the Fantastic Four did in fact survive and return to New York. The villains established a base of operations in an abandoned manor in rural New Jersey. After a particularly hurtful quarrel with the rest of the heroes, the Thing walked out on the team and wound up asleep near the Frightful Four's hideout. The team took him inside, held him captive, and attached him to the Wizard's "id machine," a large device designed to manipulate a person's base instincts and make them more likely to do evil. The experiment was thoroughly successful, and the Thing awoke under the Wizard's thrall. The machine also "dulled his senses and his fighting ability" somewhat, but Thing remained a formidable foe. Wizard's control over Thing gave him undisputed control over an otherwise increasingly tumultuous team. The rest of the Fantastic Four soon arrived, in search of their lost partner, but quickly fell into a trap sprung by the Frightfuls. With a 5-on-3 advantage and the Thing on their side, the villains made short work of the remaining heroes, incapacitating and imprisoning them in specially designed traps. Wizard demonstrated his ability to send Thing into a trance and awake him at will, and further radicalized the brainwashed Thing against his teammates. Sandman and Trapster were concerned that having Thing on the team was too much of a risk, but Wizard and Medusa convinced them that he was a valuable asset. Medusa also had a brief moment of attraction and mercy for Mr. Fantastic, but shrugged it off quickly.

Wizard commanded Thing to kill Mr. Fantastic, who was strongly adhered to a board by Trapster's paste. Reed came to in time to react to Thing swinging his fist at him and inflated his arm to cushion and deflect Ben's punch. Meanwhile, Johnny was strapped to a device that would spray him with water if he activated his flame powers. Nonetheless, he was able to flame on quickly and powerfully enough to destroy the device outright and escape. Sue was placed in a chemically treated plastic bag to restrict her forcefield powers, but Johnny freed her too, and the heroes fought back against the Frightful Four and Thing. Amidst the fray, Invisible Girl found the id machine and tampered with it to make it utterly ineffective. In the end, Thing knocked out Mr. Fantastic and stuffed him in a jar, and knocked out the Human Torch as well. Invisible Girl managed to escape with Reed's jar to regroup, and the Wizard used his id machine on the Torch: Johnny played along, letting Wizard think he had brainwashed him as well. After catching their breath, Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Girl returned to the Frightful Four's hideout and found a supply of tear gas in a storehouse nearby. Reed deployed it in the main house's chimney to force out the Frightful Four and their pair of converts, then used a series of Wizard's anti-grav discs to send them all floating helplessly into the sky. Wizard's suit resisted the disc's effects and Torch dodged the one meant for him, but the rest were taken care of for the time being while Reed grabbed hold of the floating and disoriented Thing, intending to return him to the Baxter Building in hopes of reversing his brainwashing.

Wizard and Torch gave chase while Reed and Sue tried to lose them in the woods nearby. Johnny played at clumsiness while in fact blazing a path for his allies to escape. Torch's subterfuge was successful, and Sue and Reed returned home with a protesting Thing in tow. Reed stored him in a chamber and gassed him unconscious while he contemplated what to do. Wizard and Torch recovered the rest of the Frightful Four from a tree and removed the anti-grav devices from their chests. Wizard soon discovered that his id machine had been tampered with, and realized that Torch was faking his allegiance. The Frightful Four attacked him, and their combined might allowed them to overwhelm him. Meanwhile, Reed hooked up Thing to a brain alteration device, a machine that required more delicacy than Wizard's id machine. Thing resisted however, destroying the machine and suffering a severe reaction of electricity and cosmic rays. As Ben was knocked unconscious, Reed's brain scanner showed a fundamental change in his "basic id pattern." Just then, the Frightful Four entered the room, having infiltrated the building's compromised alarm system following the reaction earlier. Reed was ready to fight, but Wizard demonstrated that he had the Torch attached to a body-sized, remote-controlled anti-grav disc that he could send into the upper atmosphere using the control on his chest. He demanded that Reed and Sue submit to brainwashing or Johnny would die. The two refused and fought back just as Thing briefly awoke and crushed Wizard's chest control, demonstrating his true allegiance before falling back unconscious. Torch escaped the disc and helped his team fight back their foes. Medusa soon fled in Wizard's aerial transport, and Torch gave chase, but, for reasons he couldn't quite decipher, hesitated at the critical moment and allowed her to escape. Johnny was frustrated with himself, but nonetheless, the team restrained the rest of the Frightful Four and brought them into custody. Thing soon fully recovered. Wizard was hospitalized by the Thing while Sandman and Trapster were left in their cell wondering whether Medusa would help them escape, or if she had given up on the Frightful Four.

Formation chronology

There is some confusion with regard to when precisely the Frightful Four formed. The events as depicted could not have reasonably taken place without further information justifying the chronological discrepancies involved. This article assumes that Pete and Sandman escaped together following their respective incarcerations in late 1964, as there is no period at which they could have reasonably escaped together at the time necessary to save Wizard immediately following his fight with the Human Torch. This assumption further assumes that something must thus have happened to the Wizard in the interstice, as he could not have very well floated in air for several consecutive months. Naturally, no explanation for this theoretical interstice exists, but one reasonable (if simplistic) explanation may be that Wizard somehow recovered from his first fight with the Torch only for Torch to defeat him again with the same method, leading to the Frightful Four's formation. In any case, their first confrontation with the Fantastic Four is understood to take place in early 1965.