This is "Never Gonna Be the Same Again," a feature where I look at how bold, seemingly "permanent" changes were ultimately reversed. This is not a criticism, mind you, as obviously things are always going to eventually return to "normal." That's just how superhero comic books work. It's just fun to see how some of these rather major changes are reversed. This is differentiated from "Abandoned Love," which is when a new writer comes in and drops the plot of the previous writer. Here, we're talking about the writer who came up with the idea being the same one who resolved the change. This is also differentiated from "Death is Not the End," which is about how "dead" characters came back to life, since this is about stuff other than death.

Recently, Superman and Lois Lane's son, Jon, was re-introduced into the Superman title aged to a teenager. Longtime reader Tom A. suggested that it would probably be a good time, then, to cover the time that Franklin Richards was artificially aged to being a teen himself, as the superhero known as Psi-Lord!

It all began in Fantastic Four #376 (by Tom DeFalco, Paul Ryan and Danny Bulanadi), when Reed Richards' father, Nathaniel Richards, reveals that he has to kidnap Franklin Richards for some unexplained reason (Agatha Harkness helps him do it )...

As you can see from her outfit, Sue Richards was going through a weird time where she was sort of kind of possessed by an evil doppelganger of herself called Malice. Anyhow, they have a big battle, but Nathaniel is able to get away with Franklin...

Then suddenly Nathaniel seems to come back...but it's actually FRANKLIN!!

In the next issue, we learn that Franklin had been taken into the future so that Nathaniel can train him to become a powerful warrior so that they could fight an undetermined future threat...

Franklin, now calling himself Psi-Lord as his superhero name, even ended up forming his own superhero team, the Fantastic Force, during a period where it appeared that the Fantastic Four had broken up (following the apparent death of Reed Richards)...

After this odd collection of superheroes defeat Klaw, they decide to form the team...

So teenage Franklin Richards was now a pretty well-integrated part of the Fantastic Four mythos at this point. However, of course, stuff like this never seems to remain the same, so let's see how they got out of it!

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Okay, so this storyline remarkably lasted a LONG TIME. Reed even came back from the dead in Fantastic Four #407 and Franklin remained as Psi-Lord. It turned out that Nathaniel had trained Franklin specifically to be able to fight against the villainous Hyperstorm, a powerful mutant who later turned out to be the alternate timeline son of Franklin Richards and Rachel Summers.

However, in Fantastic Four #413 (by DeFalco, Ryan and Bulanadi), as the Fantastic Four was readying to take Hyperstorm on with Psi-Lord playing a major role, Hyperstorm through a wrench into their plans by abducting Psi-Lord and replacing him with the young Franklin!

However, this wasn't enough for Hyperstorm, as he was still defeated by Galactus and a rogue Watcher (DeFalco's run was coming to a close and he had to wrap things up kind of abruptly).

Franklin was now back to being a kid and he remained in that role until the most recent Fantastic Four series, where Franklin and his mother, father and sister all returned to our timeline after being in another timeline where they were able to naturally age until young teendom for Franklin.

Thanks for the suggestion, Tom!

Okay, folks, there are tons of examples of major changes being made to characters, seemingly "forever," that were then reversed, so feel to write in with suggestions for future editions of this column to brianc@cbr.com!