Issue(s): Fantastic Four #134, Fantastic Four #135
Cover Date: May-Jun 73
Title: "A Dragon stalks the skies!" / "The eternity machine"
Credits:
Gerry Conway - Writer
John Buscema - Penciler
Joe Sinnott - Inker

Review/plot:
Inks on issue #135 are credited to Joe Sinnott but that is apparently in dispute, with the true inker unknown.

Reed rushes off to Whispering Hill to find out what's going on with Agatha Harkness, but finds that her entire house has been taken away, including the foundation. This is setting up for a plot with Annihilus that has nothing to do with this issue.

Meanwhile, Gregory Gideon is back. He was the rich guy who tried to get the Fantastic Four to destroy itself for money a long time ago. He promised his son he would never try to destroy them again, but that was before his family was caught in a nuclear bomb test, killing his wife (?) and giving him and his son cancer. Now he wants to steal the FF's genetic structures to cure himself. He's acquired Dragon Man in order to do it...

...and is wearing an exo-skeleton that makes him super-strong....

He was originally doing this for the sake of his son, but he's become power-crazed and now barely pays attention to Thomas, letting his goons man-handle him and everything.

He captures each of the FF, including both Medusa, who is with the team, and Sue, who is still separated from Reed and hanging out on her friend Carol Lander's horse farm with Franklin. The FF manage to escape and defeat Gideon, in part because Dragon Man is still in love with Sue. Sue leaves without sticking around to talk to Reed, who had been unconscious since he was captured by Gideon and didn't even know she was there.

Reed is a mess due to Sue's leaving him.

Sue seems to be handling it fairly well, and seems more concerned with Franklin's weird powers, like his ability to talk to ants. "Dear god", she must have been thinking, "Please don't let him turn out to be another Henry Pym.".

In a fun sub-plot, Johnny goes to visit his old girlfriend Dorrie Evans, only to find that she is now plump, married, and with two kids. Johnny quickly backtracks his way out of there. (Dorrie seems to be aging in real-time, not "Marvel time").

Subplots: 1) someone accesses the Baxter Building elevator using a belt key, surprising Willie Lumpkin (we'll find out that it's Wyatt Wingfoot). 2) Alicia says that after tomorrow she may never hear the Thing's voice again.

Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 2 - keeping the Gideons in memory as i wait anxiously for little Thomas to turn into Glorian

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References:

• The Gideons first appeared in Fantastic Four #34.
  
• Dragon Man was last seen in Sub-Mariner #16.
  
• The Fantastic Four's atomic structures were altered by cosmic rays in Fantastic Four #1.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Although she'd been around for years (popping up in several issues of Strange Tales and Spider-Man), #134 is the first time Dorrie actually appears in the FF comic itself.

Multiple gaffes by colorist Petra in #135. She not only depicts Johnny in his anachronistic new costume in the flashback, but also consistently misrepresents him with matching gloves, despite the fact that the "gloves" clearly have fingernails!

Interesting that Dorrie is shown as being married with two children (who look about 2 and 4 years old), and tells Johnny she has been "hitched" for "oh, about two years." New Math, or a sly circumvention of the Comics Code Authority by Gerry Conway?

Gerry seemed to be writing using real time instead of Marvel Time back in the 70s... at the end of the original Clone Saga, the Jackal says Gwen died 2 years ago, which was how long it actually had been.
A few of the Marvel writers of the 70s used real time a lot, I think Englehart did, and I think Claremont says the new X-Men have been together a year sometime about issue 100. Maybe Marvel Time seemed "fake" to them, until they felt they had to slow down character aging.

I think Haydn is noting that one of Dorrie's kids may have been born out of wedlock.

The problem is Buscema's art- Dorrie herself looks like she's 45, but if she was 17 at the time of FF 1, she should only be 29 if she was aging in real time. So I have no problem believing Buscema drew a 2 year old looking like a 4 year old. I don't know what he was smoking when he drew these pages- I'm surprised he didn't draw Franklin with a beard.

Yeah I was wondering if this was an earlier version of the joke in Byrne's She-Hulk that characters without regular comics aged in real time. Clearly it hasn't been 4 years (plus 9 months) Marvel Time since she last appeared, or at least Johnny hasn't aged that much.

One of the last mentions of Dorrie was in #51, when Johnny started college. Wyatt graduates college in #138. That suggests it's been three years.

My apologies; that should be #50. Johnny has borrowed her car.