365 Days of KirbyTech, Day 36: Reed Richards' Neuromantic Disruptor

I hope you were here yesterday when I asked the musical question "How do you solve a problem like Victor von Doom?" "Is Reed going to use his totally cool Psionic-Refractor (which Dr. Doom stole) to battle the world's greatest psionic threat, Egg-Fu Onslaught, exactly 300 issues later?


Panels from Fantastic Four (1961 series) #116 (November 1971), script by Archie Goodwin, pencils by John Buscema, inks by Joe Sinnott, letters by Artie Simek
And the answer is...well, not specifically. He's going to create a much more powerful machine, one which I like to guess was based on and improved over the Psionic-Refractor: the Neuromantic Disruptor!


Panel from Fantastic Four (1961 series) #416 (September 1996); script by Tom DeFalco; pencils by Carlos Pacheco; inks by Bob Wiacek and Harry Candelario; ink assists by Ariane Lenshoek, Craig Huston, and Ed Lazzelari; letters by Richard Starkings and Kolja Fuchs



Actually, by all appearances, he's actually just gonna talk about making it. Geez, get on the job, Reed! We're not paying you to sit around yappin' and makin' friends on Facebook!


Noooooooooooo, I don't think Namor would ever actually say that. It must be the ponytail choking off air to his brain. And now here's a real tall panel...


...finally showing Reed putting the finishing touches to his Neuromantic Disruptor he's been promising Sue that he'd assemble, for pretty much every weekend over the past eight months. After that, he's got some cabinets to re-paint, and she wants that dripping hot water tank in the basement of the Baxter Building fixed now! Instead of him spending the weekend watching TV and drinking beer with Ben. But, whaddaya know...he forgot to pick up batteries. (The Neuromantic Disruptor takes 8,000 "D" batteries.) Luckily Ben Grimm, always the hero of every Fantastic Four story, even the ones he's not in, is ready and able to hand over another piece of KirbyTech that was just lyin' around: his giant Brita water filter which turns him back into plain ol' Ben Grimm. Good thing all aliens use universal sockets so Reed can just plug that into a USB 2.0 port, huh?


Not that he's gonna need it again any time soon, as this is the final issue of his comic book.

Does it work? Yeah, it works!


That's another mark chalked up on the "pro" side of SCIENCE! On the "con"-side: MODOK, Ultron, the iTunes App store.

Well, that worked pretty darn well against Onslaught's psionic projections of the FF's enemies. So naturally, the Neuromantic Disruptor will be one of the major weapons against Onslaught in the big crossover issue, right?


Panels from Onslaught: Marvel Universe one-shot (October 1996); co-plot by Scott Lobdell; co-plot and script by Mark Waid; pencils by Adam Kubert and Joe Bennett; inks by Dan Green, Art Thibert, Tim Townsend, and Jesse Delperdang; colors by Steve Buccellato and "Team Bucce"; letters by Richard Starkings and Comicraft
Nope. No, they just hit Onslaught a lot.

Geez, dumbasses, no wonder you wound up trapped in Jim Lee's universe for a year.