The Dreams Of H.P. Lovecraft In Midnight Fantastic Four #1 (Spoilers)

Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: doctor doom, fantastic four, hp lovecraft, midnight, Midnight Fantastic Four

The Dreams Of H.P. Lovecraft In Midnight Fantastic Four #1 (Spoilers)

The Dreams Of H.P. Lovecraft in Midnight Fantastic Four #1 by Benjamin Percy and Kev Walker from Marvel Comics (Spoilers)

Article Summary

• Midnight Fantastic Four #1 recasts Reed Richards through H.P. Lovecraft: dreams, pills, omens and cosmic dread.
• Lovecraft themes of non-Euclidean math, forbidden knowledge and madness shape Reed’s descent after Doom’s death.
• Sue, Ben and Johnny enter a warped Midnight Universe where trauma, mutation and dimensional breaches redefine the team.
• Galactus is framed as a Cthulhu-like Old One, linking Midnight Fantastic Four #1 to Lovecraftian horror and doom.

Midnight Fantastic Four promises us an H.P. Lovecraft take on The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine. And that means going into dreams, hallucinogenic periods and what they portend and reveal. H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, dreams, both sleeping and waking ones, function as a gateway to other dimensions, a source of forbidden knowledge, a means of confronting cosmic horror, often more vivid, coherent, and “real” than waking life, revealing truths about the universe that the conscious mind cannot bear. Midnight Fantastic Four #1 opens with a lighthouse…

In H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, sensitive artists, poets, and dreamers across the world experience simultaneous visions of the sunken city of R’lyeh and the stirring of Cthulhu. These shared dreams function as a kind of psychic broadcast from an alien entity, linking personal nightmare to global cosmic threat. Beyond the Wall of Sleep presents dreams as a literal connection between a dying man’s consciousness and a luminous stellar being. And so in Midnight Fantastic Four, we have Reed Richards, a troubled, pill-popping scientist and mathematician.

Reed Richards attracts omens of ravens, of crows, hitting the window and falling to their deaths.

Hallucinating monsters within, and that is before what happens next. As he breaks back into the Institute for his stuff… is it the pills?

Popping pills and propped up by a preppy student, one Victor Von Doom. Even Reed is aware of what he is doing to himself…

As he enters worlds of other mathematics, key themes in H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror that represent the incomprehensible, alien structure of reality that shatters human sanity and anthropocentrism, with pseudomathematical ideas, non-Euclidean geometry, higher dimensions, and Riemannian concepts, to evoke dread. These stand for knowledge that is true yet lethal to the human mind: the universe is vast, indifferent, and operates by rules that defy ordinary intuition and common sense. such as the sunken city of R’lyeh in The Call of Cthulhu, having “abnormal, non-Euclidean” geometry that is “loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.” Sailors describe vast angles and stone surfaces “too great to belong to anything right or proper for this earth.” The wrong angles and impossible architecture symbolize the intrusion of an alien order that cannot be reconciled with human perception. While in The Dreams in the Witch House, Walter Gilman, a Miskatonic University student, studies “non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics” and develops an “intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations” and gains insight into fourth-dimensional problems. Mathematics here merges with witchcraft and higher-dimensional travel that opens doorways to entities like Brown Jenkin and Nyarlathotep. Euclidean geometry assumes, among other things, that parallel lines never meet and that the angles of a triangle sum to 180°. Higher-dimensional spaces add directions inaccessible to three-dimensional perception.

And its these mathematical equations with unfamiliar Lovecraftian symbols that distract Reed Richards at the most crucial moment.

Kill Doom, blow everything up and leave Reed Richards with only one response…

The search for knowledge. And the idea that he has opened a door to hell.

And in jail, without pen and paper, he still keeps trying to open something.

As a very different Susan Storm and Ben Grimm enter the Midnight Universe.

They want what he has. And are willing to give him what he wants. In H.P. Lovecraft’s Dagon, the narrator is dependent on a drug, morphine or a similar opiate, that alone makes life endurable after a,traumatic encounter. In Hypnos, the narrator and his friend use “exotic drugs” to deliberately court “terrible and forbidden dreams” in pursuit of higher realities. And Ex Oblivione involves seeking a drug or potion for oblivion or entry into dream-lands.

And Reed Richards seems reliant on them for all these things. As we meet the fourth of the foursome… even a podcast brings symbolism here.

In one of H.P. Lovecraft’s earliest stories, The Beast in the Cave has a tourist becomes lost in the vast, labyrinthine Mammoth Cave after wandering away from his guide confronting and killing a wild animal which is revealed to be a large anthropoid ape, snow-white, bleached by long life in darkness, with thin/sparse body hair but long hair on the head, black iris-less eyes, clawed extremities, and a somewhat human-like face. In its dying moments, it makes sounds that reveal the truth, the “beast” was a man who became lost in the cave years earlier and degenerated into this pale, semi-bestial form through isolation, adaptation, and loss of humanity.

While Johnny himself is less than he was, with his own crash trauma and prosthetic legs. He is not the only one going through such, as it seems that Victor Von Doom’s body has been recovered and returned to Latveria…

He is being revived in a Frankenstein fashion by someone else in an iron mask. Lovecraft was a great admirer of the Frankenstein novel, saying of Mary Shelley, “the wife of Shelley, was much more successful, and her inimitable Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, is one of the horror classics of all time… It has the true touch of cosmic fear”, and it was a strong influence on hisHerbert West – Reanimator novel. Lovecraft shifts the emphasis away from moral tragedy toward the idea that humanity itself is insignificant against vast, uncaring forces.

And to match that, suggestions that this may be Mrs Von Doom, Victor’s mother, who in the original Marvel Universe was condemned to hell. As for those “black iris-less eyes” of The Beast…

And later, the “Innsmouth look” from The Shadow over Innsmouth told us that bulging, unblinking, staring eyes are one of the hallmark physical signs of the hybrid transformation, larger and more fish-like as the change progresses. But they see a glowing cave on the rocks, beneath a lighthouse, and voices surrounded by Old Ones tentacles…

The Lightkeepers. I guess they will be back. Lighthouses appear in H.P. Lovecraft as a framing device and symbol of isolation in The White Ship, a grey stone tower on a rocky outcrop far from shore above “sunken slimy rocks”, much as Reed dreams of and becomes the departure point for a mystical voyage, only on returning to find that the light has failed for the first time, causing a real shipwreck on the rocks below. The only remnants are a dead azure bird…

Covers for the series seem to show the Midnight Fantastic Four investigating such caves, with imagery that seems both Cthulu and Galactus.

But for now, Ben Grimm has no time for such hallucinations. And as we meet a fifth member of the team, a H.E.R.B.I.E. with an A.I. attitude…

Susan Storm, an Elon Musk of the Midnight Universe, she is the rocket scientist here, whose accidental explosions have opened their own doorways by similar accident, above where the Manhattan Projects once took place. A breach upon a breach…

With tentacles coming through, a dimensional gate similar to what Reed Richards was working on, with its own explosion, and inside…

Galactus. Cthulu. For Midnight Fantastic Four, it’s the same thing. An ancient, unseeable, unknowable Old One, a god with no care for humanity or anything beneath it. Described by Lovecraft as “a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind” and in size, a “mountain that walked or stumbled” and is “not dead but dreaming”. Will the Midnight Fantastic Four awaken their own Cthulu?

Midnight Spider-Man #1, Midnight Fantastic Four #1 and Midnight X-Men #1 are all published by Marvel Comics today… or at midnight last night at participating comic book stores.

• MIDNIGHT FANTASTIC FOUR #1

  Written by BENJAMIN PERCY Art by KEV WALKER

  FIRST STEPS INTO DARKNESS! An obsessive scientist delves into the secrets of the universe perhaps best left unknown to humankind, leaving himself and three others warped in strange and horrifying ways. What horrible secrets lie in the new dimensions they have discovered? And can humanity survive the discovery?

• MIDNIGHT FANTASTIC FOUR #2

  Written by BENJAMIN PERCY Art by KEV WALKER

  Reed Richards—haunted by a past he can barely recall and a scientific breakthrough he can barely understand—begins his tenuous working relationship with Sue, Johnny, and Ben at Storm Systems. They’re about to test out one of their theories—a theory that will revisit and redefine the perils of the atomic age. November 18th 2026 $4.99

• MIDNIGHT FANTASTIC FOUR #3

  Written by BENJAMIN PERCY Art by KEV WALKER

  FINDING THE HIDDEN WORLD! The Four head to the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated by Oppenheimer and the Los Alamos labs. And here they discover the residue of another world, left behind by a crack in the firmament. December 16th 2026 $4.99

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