Fourth time's a charm...? (A few comments and questions about the Fantastic Four: First Steps movie)

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the fourth live-action Fantastic Four film to make it into theaters, following 2005's Fantastic Four, 2007's Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and 2015's Fantastic Four. It's also the third time re-casting the characters and attempting to start a new film franchise featuring them. 

I was, honestly, a little underwhelmed, perhaps owing to having my hopes raised by all the positive reactions I had seen on Bluesky between the day it was released and the afternoon I got around to seeing it, and perhaps owing to my own expectations based on the cool 1960s, Space Age aesthetic that the trailers and other marketing showed off. That is, it just looked like it was going to be pretty neat, and a sharp departure from the look, feel and tone of the previous FF movies, and the rest of the expansive Marvel Studios filmography.

Instead, I left the theater feeling pretty much like I do after most Marvel movies: That what I had just seen was a perfectly fine superhero movie, a competently made, perfectly adequate adaptation of the comics for a mass, mainstream audience. (Honestly, I liked Thunderbolts* quite a bit more, even though that was much more of a "regular" Marvel movie, in terms of aesthetics and tone.)

Here are some of the thoughts that occurred to me while watching, which, taken altogether, probably make it seem as if I had a negative reaction to the film, but they are really more just questions than complaints. Again, overall, I thought it was fine.

Spoilers, obviously, follow.

•I thought the four principals were all pretty good, and, overall, well-cast. 

I think it helped that, Pedro Pascal aside, I had no idea who any of them were from whatever films they might have been in before, so that when I looked at, say, Johnny Storm or Susan Storm, I saw Johnny Storm or Susan Storm, and not famous Hollywood actors Chris Evans and Jessica Alba, for example.  (This was, of course, helped along by the fact that I see so many fewer movies these days then I used to.)

That said, whatever weaknesses the first two films might have had, I think I might have preferred the casting in them. Evans felt more like comic book Johnny to me than the guy who plays him here did, for example, and Ioan Gruffudd definitely looked the part of Reed Richards more so than Pascal did. 

Pascal didn't look much like Richards (Sorry, I could maybe take Reed with a beard by this point, not just a moustache, and damn, did you see Reed's arms in that opening scene where he's wearing an undershirt in the bathroom...?). But I think he played him well, and I kinda like this slightly darker, much more conflicted view of Reed as a guy whose own genius can make him unhappy and even hurt his loved ones and who, for all his smarts, isn't always smart enough.

Vanessa Kirby was quite excellent, I thought, and the filmmakers did a fine job of giving her a lot to do and a lot of emotional content to work with. 

While I'm hardly a terribly experienced reader of Fantastic Four comics, I always felt that, traditionally, it was too easy for her character to be reduced to that of "The Girl" in them (and, perhaps, in some of the other adaptations), so it was nice to see her being something of a leader and, perhaps, the most prominent of the four characters (I don't think we can put her traditional portrayal down to pure sexism, though, nor to the nature of her powers—that is, literally disappearing from view. Rather, I think some of it has to do with the fact that Johnny and Ben are just so damn colorful and appealing as characters in the comics and cartoons and suchlike that the FF seems to have a "fun" half and a boring, "grown up" half).

•They sure were stingy with the stretching, weren't they? Based solely on what I saw in the film, I would guess that Reed's powers are that he can stretch his arms and legs like five times longer than the average person and, um, that's it, really? 

The filmmakers seem to allow him to stretch just enough to let us know that he does indeed have stretchy powers, but not so much as to overtax the special effects budget...or let us get a look at an elongated arm or leg (let alone a neck!) that lasts more than a split second. 

Given that Marvel Studios had previously changed Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan's stretchy powers for her appearances on her show and in The Marvels movie, it makes me wonder if they just aren't confident about what stretchy powers look like on the big screen, at least in live action? (Elastigirl's powers looked fine in The Incredibles, although that was animation.)

It makes me wonder if the Distinguished Competition will eventually give us a Plastic Man or Elongated Man in one of their future films...

•Was it just me, or did Ben Grimm—who I don't remember being referred to as "The Thing" at all in this film—seem a little too small in this film...? 

Like, he seemed to be the same size as the other three, rather than hulking over them. I just clicked on IMDb to check on the release date of those previous FF films, and I noticed there was an ad for the new film there in which Ben's size is magnified, so that he dwarfs his teammates, even though he's standing behind them in the ad...

•I have no idea what on Earth they were thinking giving Ben a beard midway through the film, but it distracted me the rest of the film's runtime. 

Ben needs to shave? (The first thing I did when I got back to my car in the theater parking lot was to do a Google image search for Ben Grimm + beard + comics.)

So he grows, what, rock hair out of his rock face, I guess...? 

Does it also grow out of his scalp, and he just sandblasts that away daily too? What about his body hair? Does he sandblast his whole body every day too, or...? 

Look, the only context in which I want to see Ben Grimm with a beard in a movie is if he is in the process of being the historical Blackbeard the pirate.

•Speaking of The Thing, I was somewhat surprised that he spent the entire film dressed head-to-toe, never appearing in his original, blue briefs-only look, with his rocky chest and limbs exposed. 

Heck, even in the cartoon show that exists within the world of the film, which we only get a brief glimpse of, he's wearing a shirt.

I guess four years into his career is long enough for him to develop a whole wardrobe of appropriately big and tall clothes, but it struck me as notable.

•I hate to even say this publicly, as I know it is an opinion that was shared very loudly by many assholes and some of the worst people on the Internet, but I wasn't really sold on using the Shalla-Bal version of The Silver Surfer instead of the Norrin Radd version, which was previously featured in the second FF film (And which ended up being maybe the best part of that movie, which sure had a disappointing version of Galactus, imagining him as some kind of cloud instead of a giant with an awesome funny hat). 

I understand that this is a different universe than the "real" universe featured in all the other Marvel Studios movies, and so perhaps they wanted to use a female Surfer to distinguish it, but if there isn't a Norrin Radd version in the other universe, then what's the point, exactly? And it's not like they did anything else to the involved characters to suggest that they were alternate-universe versions of the "real" characters (Reed's moustache aside, of course).

While I suppose they might do something dumb with the multiverse and therefore include the first filmic FF and their Surfer in an upcoming movie, I don't think, otherwise, we're likely to see the standard issue, male Surfer in future Marvel Studios movies, and so the rationale of distinguishing this universe by the gender of its Surfer would seem moot. 

As someone who would like nothing more than to see a Defenders trilogy of live-action movies starring Doctor Stange, The Hulk, Namor and The Silver Surfer, this is important to me. 

At any rate, Julia Garner did a fine job with a role that actually didn't ask much at all of her.

•Okay, I give up: What was Natasha Lyonne doing in this movie, exactly? 

•I did like all the name-dropping of FF villains in the movie, particularly in that passage near the beginning, although I'm a little disappointed that we didn't get to see any of them, save for Mole Man and a singular Super-Ape. 

And I thought that Mole Man, though funny, felt very Marvel Studios in his portrayal, as they basically just gave an otherwise totally normal-looking guy a pair of stylized sunglasses to sort of suggest the character, rather than going the whole nine yards, with the green costume, the cape and the staff. Hell, they didn't even give him Moleoids; just some folks in mining helmets milling around in the background. 

Given how comics-accurate Galactus looked, and the fact that they even spent a second on the monster that breaks through the street on the cover of Fantastic Four #1, I woulda thought the Mole Man's look might have followed suit...

•Again, I'm no expert, but was Galactus a little...too big here...? 

•I can't imagine how these characters will fit into Avengers: Doomsday, which the movie announced via a sentence of text on the screen they will appear in, nor can I imagine how they will fit into the Mavel Cinematic Universe going forward, at least if they are meant to be joining that universe proper rather than staying on their own retro-looking Earth (A scene in Thunderbolts* sure seemed to imply they had entered the main Marvel universe). 

I suppose that's a problem for Marvel Studios to work out, but it does worry me... 

•I am now completely, 100% ready for Namor to meet the Fantastic Four. Bring him on...

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 15: Superman/Fantastic Four #1

Despite their place of honor as Marvel's First Family and theirs being the original comic book that kicked off what would quite quickly become the Marvel Universe, the Fantastic Four had yet to appear in a DC/Marvel crossover as the 20th century was drawing to a close. Not even the 1996 DC Versus Marvel series, which seemed to feature everyone, had made any real room for them, with The Human Torch and The Thing sharing only a single-panel cameo in all of its pages, and the other half of the team not even getting that much space.

Perhaps that was simply because their number made them harder to pair with DC characters. Maybe it seemed like with four of them, there were just too many of them to meet up with DC's traditional crossover stars Superman or Batman, and yet there was also too few of them to battle against and/or team-up with a whole DC team, like the Justice League, Titans or New Gods. DC did have a couple of quartets in their character catalog, in the form of the Doom Patrol and Kirby-created Challengers of the Unknown, but perhaps neither was considered a good fit for the FF and a high-profile book like an inter-company crossover.

Whatever the reason, they seemed pretty low on the DC/Marvel crossover priority list, not being featured until they shared this 1999 book with The Man of Steel (Who, like the FF, was the first character in what would grow into a whole superhero universe).

It seems to have been writer/artist Dan Jurgens—who had at that point long been associated with DC Comics and Superman in particular but had more recently branched out to work for Marvel on Sensational Spider-Man and Thor—who found some connective tissue between the two franchises. 

He drew a line between Superman as the Last Son of Krypton and the FF's planet-destroying opponent Galactus, and further involved his own creation and pet character Cyborg Superman, whose own origin was so clearly based on that of the Fantastic Four. 

The resultant comic, officially entitled "The Infinite Destruction", would differ from most of the other DC/Marvel crossovers in two ways.

First, while it's not obvious from its collection in the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus we've been reviewing our way through, the book was published at the same bigger, 10-inch by 13.5-inch "treasury format" that the first three DC/Marvel crossovers of the late '70s and early '80s were.

This was no doubt a great showcase for Jurgens' art, which is here finished by Art Thibert and colored by Gregory Wright. Even at the smaller size, it looks good; cleaner and smoother than usual. (Although, having seen so much of Jurgens' '90s art of late, I still think it looks best inked by Jerry Ordway in 1994's Zero Hour: Crisis in Time). 

The cover is pretty cool, too. You can't really tell from that bum image at the top of my post, but it was by Alex Ross, painting over Jurgens' pencils, and no doubt instilling the image with an epic sweep that flattered the book. 

Second, in terms of its premise, Superman/Fantastic Four was one of the few such stories in which the DC and Marvel Universes were treated as separate and distinct dimensions within the greater multiverse, their barrier breachable only under certain conditions. 

This was, of course, the case with the1996 Green Lantern/Silver Surfer: Unholy Alliances and Silver Surfer/Superman and, obviously, that same year's DC Versus Marvel, which established a regular means for traveling between the universes going forward in its character Access, who would go on to star in the DC/Marvel: All Access and Unlimited Access, both of which involved Superman travelling to the Marvel Universe (Though he never met the FF on either occasion). 

Here, the people in the Marvel Universe seem to know Superman quite well, but in a way similar to that in which the people of our universe know him: He has a cartoon show that Franklin Richards and Ben Grimm both watch, and Franklin has a Superman toy he carries around with him, apparently occasionally peppering his mother with questions about the DC Universe's hero.

When Superman receives a Kryptonian communication crystal that projects a hologram of his father Jor-El that tells him that Krypton's destruction was actually hastened along by a feeding Galactus, the Man of Steel notes aloud that he has "heard whispers of his existence from the heroes of the other universe." Realizing that if Galactus is able to enter into Superman's own universe, then he could potentially pose a threat to his Earth someday, and he flies off to find experts on the dangerous cosmic entity.

"And to find them...I need Access," he says.

Superman apparently finds him off-panel, and through his powers makes his way to the Marvel Universe, where the story picks up with Superman arriving at the Fantastic Four's then-base, Pier Four. No sooner does Superman arrive though, then villains attack. 

Hank Henshaw, the Cyborg Superman, emerges from the Kryptonian crystal (he had apparently seen it arriving in Earth orbit and hitched a ride) and he immediately possesses the FF's computers and defenses and uses them against the heroes. 

Meanwhile, Galactus arrives, abducts Superman, infuses him with the power cosmic and makes him his new herald, which involves a bit of a makeover: Superman's cape disappears, and his skin and costume both turn a shiny gold color.

Galactus teleports his new herald aboard his ship, with Reed wrapped around him, and then sets off to resume his planet-eating lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the remaining Fantastic three strike a bargain with Cyborg Superman: If he will help them track Galactus through space, using the Kryptonian crystal, then they will release him from Sue's forcefield cage. He agrees, largely because he wants to become Galactus' all-powerful herald (That is, after all, why he had been hiding in the intercepted crystal after all). 

What follows is an adventure through space, as the FF try to stop Superman and Galactus from finding and eating new, inhabited planets. This involves the FF fighting Superman and Galactus. But as Superman is in his new, souped-up herald form—Reed calls him the second most powerful being in existence, presumably behind only Galactus—they're even a less of a match for him then they would usually be.

It will eventually take Reed's smarts and Franklin reminding Superman of his true self to free the Man of Steel from Galactus' thrall, thwart the planet-eating giant, and reach a sort of detente with him that resolves the conflict long enough to end the book. 

There's not much more to it, really, and it turns out to be not necessarily that great of a Fantastic Four story, which was perhaps inevitable, given its main contributor being such a longtime Superman creator. That is, it's not that difficult to imagine this story existing without the FF in it at all; it can certainly be seen as a Superman/Galactus story more than a Superman/Fantastic Four story. 

As for concerns that Jurgens here irrevocably changes Superman lore by putting Galactus at Krypton as it dies, it turns out that story was an invention of the Cyborg Superman, who had over-written and altered the contents of the Kryptonian crystal when he possessed it. 

Thus, things go back to normal for all of the characters involved at the end of the crossover, as is ever the case. Although Franklin does get to keep Superman's cape as a souvenir.

At this late date, the crossovers were winding down, with only three more to go before they officially ceased. One of these—in fact, the very next one—would again feature Superman, and end up being perhaps one of the better, if not the all-around best, of the DC/Marvel crossovers.

Next: 1999's Incredible Hulk vs. Superman

Real quick on that Plastic Man-related announcement.

So a couple of Twitter posts eventually lead me to something official about Plastic Man's return to the DC Universe proper, from which he has been MIA since Flashpoint and The New 52 reboot (not counting, of course, an appearance in a group shot in Dan Jurgens' short-lived Justice League International, what sure as hell looked like the start of his origin during the 2013-2014 Forever Evil event and that cryptic cameo in Dark Days: The Forge #1).

It appears Plas will be part of a Fantastic Four analogue team called The Terrifics, along with super-genius Mister Terrific, Ben Grimm-like Metamorpho and the sometimes invisible girl from the Legion of Super-Heroes, Phantom Girl. That likely explains Plas' terrible-looking new costume, which is meant to be a sort of uniform that echoes that of Mister Terrific's current costume.

Allow me to go on record as hating the new Plastic Man costume. He's got one of the all-time great, there's-really-no-way-to-improve superhero costumes, but that hasn't stopped DC from redesigning anyone else's costume in the past six years, so why exempt Plas? The thing is, Plas' color-scheme is so tied to powers that changing him out of it sorta screws it up. After all, Plas' essential gag is that he can use his fantastic shape-changing powers to turn into pretty much anything, but that anything is always red, black and yellow. Characters in the comics usually don't notice, or don't notice right away, but it's a visual signal to the reader.

Now, I've never actually understood the ins-and-outs of Plas' costume, and how it seems to change with him, since he wasn't wearing it when he was doused in those stretchy chemicals or anything, so perhaps there's a very, very easy fix to this, and Mr. Terrific will just discover some unstable molecules he can use to make a new costume for Plas. We'll see. Maybe. (I honestly didn't like a single one of Jeff Lemire's DC super-comics so far, so depending on who's drawing this, I'm somewhere between completely indifferent and mildly curious about this, and if it were, say, The Elongated Man or Offspring* there instead of Plas, I wouldn't even be mildly curious.) Anyway, seeing that it's just a team uniform, than I suppose it makes some sort of sense for him to wear it rather than his traditional red.

I do kinda like the chutzpah of DC attempting to do a Fantastic Four-like book during a time that Marvel has either given up on the franchise, or are at least giving it a good, long rest until they come up with a new take, which I have to imagine a lot of folks at Marvel are thinking about more-or-less constantly. Seeing Plastic Man on "The Terrifics" reminded me of an idea I used to think about back when I was a youth.

I spent an inordinate amount of time daydreaming as a teenager and in the first few years of my twenties, as that was when I was spending large amounts of time in classes, where one's mind is almost constantly wandering. I remember thinking about a Plastic Man-lead team of former Leaguers that added up to an FF analogue team: Plas, Metamorpho, Firestorm and Gypsy. They would have been The Plastastic Four.

Then my mind wandered to an official DC/Marvel Fanastic Four/Justice League crossover, back when the two publishers could and would still crossover (Their crossovers had calmed down at that point, I think, but the JLA/Avengers one hadn't yet been published). This would have been titled JLA/FF:, with the subtitle of either The Plastastic Four, The Fanplastic Four or The Fantastic, Plastic Four.

The plot, as I remember daydreaming it, would have been that Doctor Doom had developed some new weapon with which he hoped to finally defeat the FF, and he was traveling through alternate dimensions, battling alternate versions of the Fantastic Four to "practice" before taking on the genuine article. He arrives in the DC Universe and targets the Challengers of The Unknown, and he has them on the ropes when the JLA intervenes to save the day.

By that point, Mister Fantastic has figured out what Doom was up to, and the FF also arrive in the DCU to stop him. Overwhelmed by the small army of superheroes, some of whom he's never seen the like of, Doom is defeated. The two teams socialize a while, and when Mister Fantastic expresses how much there is to learn from this new universe, the League invites him to say for a while. Plastic Man volunteers to travel to the Marvel Universe, so that the FF won't be short-handed or long-limbed, to which everyone agrees to a sort of pan-dimensional, foreign exchange student kind of situation.

It quickly becomes apparent that the FF got the short end of the stick though, as even though Plas has Mister Fantastic's powers, he doesn't have his brains or leadership ability. The League, on the other hand, couldn't be happier with their new recruit, who proves an invaluable addition to the League. And Reed is having the time of his life, comparing notes with the DCU's super-scientists, exploring that universe's most fantastic settings and phenomena and even developing theories as to why the two universes share so much in common, but in slightly altered fashion.

The ongoing gag would be that the FF can't wait to get rid of Plas, and are ready to call the exchange off almost immediately, while the League wants to hang on to Reed as long as possible, and Reed's so wrapped up in science stuff--and the luxury of not having to be so responsible for his team, and referee Ben and Johnny's constant fights, that he doesn't want to go back...at least, not right away.

I wasn't reading any Marvel Comics at all back then, so mostly what I knew of Marvel's characters came from cartoons, reading books about comics history and comic shop osmosis, so I didn't know that Reed and Sue had a child (or was it two at that point?), which I guess would complicate that particular story, as Reed's ability to tune out his wife and teammates when he's into some gnarly new science stuff becomes kind of a dark quality when applied to his children (Although I suppose maybe even Franklin and/or Valerie woulda been into having Plas in the Baxter Building instead of their real dad? Plas seems like he would be a lot more fun for a little kid to play with, anyway).

Anyway, that's the sort of stuff I used to think about when I shoulda been taking notes on a lecture. Luckily, I was an English major, so most of my tests were essay ones on things we had to read.



*Although I suppose it's possible that that is Offspring, perhaps posing as his dad, isn't it...? With the Multiverse coming in and out of play,
and the fact that the DC heroes are aware that someone stole ten years from their timeline, it's hard to count on what will be continuity months into the future. Either Metal or Geoff Johns' Superman Vs. Watchmen thing could always return or re-reboot current DC continuity in some way.

My thesaurus lists "ordinary," "usual" and "unimaginative" as antonyms for "Fantastic"

Is this really too much to ask?

I honestly wasn't planning on writing about the new Fantastic Four movie here, certainly not in a post devoted to it and it alone (as opposed to one of those super-long "Everything Else" posts I do every once in a while). Hell, I wasn't even sure I was going to see it, as the trailers for it didn't look...what's the word...interesting! They didn't look the least bit interesting, and usually a good trailer is all it will take to make me see a film. Like, I knew for a fact that Transformers: Age of Extinction would be pretty terrible, based on the fact that the three live-action films that preceded it in the franchise were pretty terrible, but dammit, that trailer put an image of a robot that can turn into a truck that I grew up with holding a sword and riding a giant, fire-breathing robot dinosaur, and how am I not going to see that on the big screen?

Fantastic Four, on the other hand, didn't have anything remotely interesting in its trailers. I guess I just gave the studio and filmmakers the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that was because whoever was in charge of marketing the film was trying to do some sort of low-key campaign, thinking (wrongly) that the target demographic would be tiring of superhero movies, and/or superhero movies based on Marvel Comics characters, seeing how this was going to be the third such film of the summer. I certainly didn't think it was simply a matter of there not being enough interesting imagery in the entire film to cobble together enough for a minute or two's worth of trailer.

I did go see the movie today though, and I did decide to write about it, but mostly just to get this weird feeling of irritated frustration and confusion out of my system, a feeling no doubt fed through some sort of negative feedback loop created by urgent whispers and then loud conversation with my lady friend who saw it with me, who was so incensed about a particular choice made during the pivotal scene of the film that she almost walked out after it happened (and probably would have, if I weren't closer to the aisle in our row).

It's actually kind of, well, fantastical to imagine that someone could make a bad Fantastic Four movie in the year 2015. I mean, not just a weak film, or a rough-around-the-edges film, or an uneven film, but just a wholly, actively, aggressively bad film that has so little resemblance to the source material that it is a complete failure of an adaptation (and, I should note, the film is a much worse adaptation than it is a film unto itself). The franchise is the Marvel franchise, the foundation of the entire Marvel Universe and character catalog...and the foundation of much of the comics industry and the shape and form of the superhero from the Silver Age moving forward. It's initial run was by maybe the greatest creative collaboration in comics history, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, both in their respective creative peaks. The studio, its producers, script writers Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater and writer/director Josh Trank had access to 55 years worth of comic books, four animated television shows and two-to-three other live-action films to mine for inspiration, characters and plot points. You couldn't ask for more fertile ground for a comic book-based movie, this side of Superman and Batman.

I know that Marvel Comics has had some trouble selling the FF in recent years, and their one time first family has dropped from being the prime Marvel Comics franchises to one of their struggling ones, to the point that Marvel's not even publishing an FF comic at the time, but then, it's not like the filmmakers need to regularly trick 25,000 or more people into spending $4 a month on 20-pages of comics; they only need to sell about two hours of a live-action adaptation to an audience that has proven more than willing to buy tickets to see live-action films based on Marvel Comics characters as un-loved as Ant-Man (whose never even had his own monthly title that's lasted 12 issues) or as obscure as The Guardians of The Galaxy, a who's who team of footnote characters.

Seriously, how do you fuck up the Fantastic Four? You could probably narrow down the top 25 FF storylines of all time, pick one out of a hat, and film it with slightly polished dialogue, and you'd be golden.

They didn't do that. Instead, they seemed to borrow a little bit from the early issues of Ultimate Fantastic Four (the title characters being young, Sue Storm being a genius rather than just Reed Richards' love interest, the involvment of her and Johnny's father, inter-dimensional exploration replacing space-exploration), but then otherwise focus on a mostly-original take on an extended Fantastic Four origin story, making it as realistic, character-driven, dark and dour as possible–right down to the dim lighting. The silverest of Silver Age Marvel is awfully goddam gloomy.

This is the story of child-super genius Reed Richards (Miles Teller), who at age 12 or so invents a semi-operational teleportation device in his garage with the help of his little friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), a poor kid from a bad home. He's recruited by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and Storm's daughter Sue (Kate Mara), an expert in pattern recognition, to join them at the Baxter Foundation. Together with anti-government bad boy super scientist Victor Von Doom (Toby B. Kebbel) and Storm's son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), a brilliant engineer who would rather hand-build cars for street-racing, they develop a means for traveling to another dimension, referred to as "Earth 0" (not, I don't know, The Negative Zone).

Once they've perfected it and proved organic matter can travel to and from, poor Tim Blake Nelson (who sadly never got to play The Leader in The Incredible Hulk 2) wants to bring the U.S. government in. Victor fears losing his chance for glory (everyone knows the names of the guys who walked on the moon, but no one knows who built the rockets, he convincingly argues in one of the genuinely good bits of the script), and further fears if the government takes over, they'll find away to weaponize the technology.

And he's right! Outside of the saintly Dr. Storm, no one is more right more often than Doctor Doom in this movie. I think he's supposed to be the hero of it...?

The three boys get drunk and decide to get to the new dimension first, taking Ben along...because....because...just because? Sue, in the film's most perplexing creative choice, does not join the boys on their trip. She doesn't decline; she's just not even asked to go along.

Reed's decision to essentially hijack the device without permission from the government mirrors the comic book origin in that it features Reed going rogue and stealing the rocket ship to be first in space; the cost of his recklessness being that he bathes his friends in cosmic rays, which at least one of them resents him for.

In the first film they simply added Von Doom, so there were five of them. Different than the comics, sure, but it also ties the villain to the heroes' origin, something pretty damn common in superhero movies, if only because it streamlines them so much more (see The Kingpin killing Daredevil's dad in the Daredevil film, for example, or Jack Napier killing Bruce Wayne's parents before going on to become The Joker in Batman '89).

I can't think of any reason why they would subtract Sue and replace her with Doom in this film. Why would they choose to have 1/4th of the Fantastic Four left out of the Fantastic Four's origin story? And the fact that it is the female one who is is left out will probably be particularly galling to a lot of viewers, as so many superhero fans and film fans so scrutinize the various studios' general reluctance to use female characters in their films...including not having one headline a solo movie yet.

Instead, Sue gets her powers when the shuttle device returns in an explosion; she simply gets caught in the backlash of the explosion. This is the point where my friend became flabbergasted, and never quite recovered from her flabbergastation. (On the other hand, she never gets saddled with the moniker "Invisible Girl," but that's only because no one gets codenames; Johnny Storm refers to himself as the Human Torch and ben as "a thing" only at the end of the film, and then only joking so; likewise "Doctor Doom" is a comment Sue makes derisively of Victor when he's being negative, and he only refers to himself as Doom once).

Doom was, as I said, completely right, and the highe-ups do immediately try to weaponize the four, something that Ben and Johnny seem totally cool with, while only Reed and Sue have reservations...the former so much that he escapes the dark, military prison they're all being kept in. Then a year passes.

It's not until about the last 20 minutes of the film that any conflict actually arises, and that we see the four title characters using their powers, or even sharing scenes with one another. A return trip to "Earth 0" results in the discovery of a presumed dead Von Doom, who is unhappy with being "rescued," and decides to return to the other dimension, destroying the world in the process. Again, it's hard to argue with much of his logic–the United States military industrial complex are already using the disturbingly naked, oddly-voiced Grimm as a killing machine, and are about to send Johnny into the field to do the same. Their long-term plan is to figure out how to send more and more soldiers into the new dimension, where they too can be bathed in its strange energies and return with super-powers.

I went to the bathroom during one of the two action scenes in the film, one that was so brief that I apparently missed the entire thing in the time it took me to take a quick piss. I was there for the entirety of the latter one, where the film finally becomes a superhero movie, with the title characters fighting Doom to the death.

So what we have is a dark film that seemingly includes a few elements of the comics only very reluctantly. There's a "It's a clobbering time!" used once, and a "Flame on;" the latter quietly, embarrassedly spoken. There are super-powers, but only near the end of an interminably long origin story. No costumes. No codenames.

There's a nod toward teamwork in there at the end, but the characters' relationships, like their familiar characterizations, are non-existent. Reed and Sue flirt for about a minute of the film's entire run-time, and that's the extent of their romantic relationship. Johnny teases Ben once, in the last seconds of the film, and it's more of an insult than the kind of brotherly bickering the two usually engage in. Reed feels guilty for what he did to Ben, and Ben's not happy about having been turned into a rock monster with no genitals, but they never seem to resolve their issues.

They also lack their typical characterization. Ben never emerges from quiet, brooding self-loathing to be the fun, funny character making the best of the bad hand he's dealt. Johnny has a chip on his shoulder regarding his father, but he doesn't seem particularly cocky, or funny, or likable. He doesn't even seem to have a relationship with his own sister.

Mostly, everyone's just pissy. Doom is the sole character to emerge with a personality, motivation and definable relationships with other characters. But, you know, he's the villain, the guy we're supposed to root against and be happy when we see him die.

Most unusual of all though, for a movie of any kind, is that there is no real conflict at all. I can't remember the last time I saw a film that was so much event without conflict. There's nothing driving the film, it just moves on from scene to scene with no real reason.

It's a very long, very tedious origin story for a group of characters that don't really need an origin–bathed by cosmic rays during a reckless bit of scientific exploration, super-genius Reed Richards and his friends are imbued with fantastic powers. The end. Bring on the bad guys. Instead, what should be the first act is all three acts, with a tacked-on superhero movie climax.

You know what I personally want from a Fantastic Four movie?

I want to see scientist, wizard and dictator Doctor Doom wearing a Man In The Iron Mask-style mask and suit of armor with a cape and hood (mini-dress optional), lounging in a medieval castle, drinking wine from an ornate chalice, attended to by Doombots and saying "Bah!" and calling himself "Doom" constantly.

I want to see mostly-naked, dripping wet weirdo hunk Namor trying to seduce Sue while sea monsters and whales with arms and legs ravage New York City.*

I want Mole Man and his army of giant underground monsters. I want a downright apocolyptic version of the Galactus story, with the sky on fire, a Watcher, the Surfer and a giant planning to eat the word. I want a motherfucking Fansticar. And Skrulls! Oh, how I want Skrulls! And I want catch-phrases galore: Flame on, flame off, declarations of clobbering time, I want to hear "Ever-lovin'" and "Aunt Petunia" and "blue-eyed boy."

Instead I got a gloomy sci-fi film adapting the first half of the first story arc of Ultimate Fantastic Four.

I guess they'll try re-rebooting in a few years, and maybe that time they'll get it right, and we'll finally be able to move ahead and get to the good stuff of The Fantastic Four, the stuff that makes the Fantastic Four the Fantastic Four.

Positives? There are a few. This Doom is better than last Doom, and I think the special effects on The Human Torch and Thing are both improved. The same goes for those regarding Mister Fantastic, at least when he's naked. Seeing his arms and legs stretch out, without stretchy material hiding the skin and musculature from the viewer, is really fucking freaky. The bit in the film where our heroes find themselves thrown back to Earth transformed, with Johnny seemingly nothing but a burning corpse and Ben thinking he's buried in rocks, was pretty damn scary.

And...um...wait...huh. Yeah, I can't think of anything else. The logo? I liked the logo. The actors are all fine, and the ones who seem most miscast–Teller as Reed Richards, Bell as Ben Grimm–fit the movie just fine, they just don't at all seem like the characters in any other iteration.

But then, isn't the point of film adaptations of other source material to transplant those stories and those characters into the medium? There have certainly been worse films based on superhero comics before, but it's difficult to think of worse adaptations.


*Yeah, yeah, yeah; I know. A different studio owns the rights to Namor at the moment.

******************

As the film ends with the team struggling to think of a name for itself, I like to imagine this is what happens next.

******************

I also like to imagine that this is what precisely went wrong behind the scenes:

Tom Spurgeon tweeted that image a while back. I haven't read that particular story, but the idea that perhaps an old foe financed and produced this new Fantastic Four film as a way to embarrass and discredit the Fantastic Four out of pure spite certainly makes more sense than the fact that the filmmakers just made this movie the way they did on purpose.

Review: Fantastic Four Vol. 1: The Fall of The Fantastic Four

I was a mildly surprised last month when Marvel announced the cancellation of Fantastic Four, but not shocked or distraught or anything. While the comic book and the team of characters that star in it have long since faded from the center of the Marvel Universe (and line of comics), the characters remain foundational elements in much of what Marvel publishes.

For example, meetings or teleconferences with, or at least namedrops of, Reed Richards are all but mandatory in any Marvel comic plot involving super-science, and you can't have a big, line-wide crossover story without featuring him and his family fairly prominently. Given that Marvel is now always running a big, line-wide crossover story, well, you see a lot of Reed Richards and the gang.

In other words, The Fantastic Four have been present in Marvel Comics constantly, no matter what's going on in their book, and I can't imagine that will change just because their book isn't going to be published monthly for a while, even though the book's primary (even if only symbolic or totemic) importance to the publisher is such that I just kind of assumed it was one Marvel would always publish no matter what, in the same what that DC will never cancel Action Comics.

The reason I wasn't shocked or distraught was because this didn't seem to be all that sudden a decision by Marvel, and it's not like they haven't given the book plenty of chances to become a huge hit over the last few years, granting a seemingly "Do Whatever You Want" level of creative leeway to superstar teams like Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, or Jonathan Hickman, Dale Eaglesham and other artists, or Matt Fraction, Mark Bagley and Mike Allred. They let Hickman give the team new costumes, found a school for little super-geniuses and launch a sister book (Future Foundation); they let Fraction have two books too (With FF replacing Future Foundation, and featuring a different team). They killed off Johnny Storm and added Spider-Man to the line-up.

The late, great Dwayne McDuffie got to write a short, mildly gimick-y (but ultimately awesome) run in which The Black Panther and ex-X-Man Storm replaced Mr. and Mrs. Richards temporarily. Brian Michael Bendis made The Invisible Woman one of the major players in his Age of Ultron.

And then there was this run, the post-Fraction one that relaunched the title as part of Marvel's "Marvel Now!" rebranding campaign. In addition to the new #1, the book also got a new creative team consisting of the recently-imported-from-DC writer James Robinson and pencil artist Leonard Kirk and the team got snazzy new red costumes for no immediately apparent reason other than the fact that they looked kind of cool (I liked Bully's theory, though).

The new costumes as Arthur Adams drew them on a variant cover for the second issue.

I didn't read Fantastic Four #1 when it was recently released, despite my default setting being one of Interested In The Fantastic Four, my appreciation for Kirk's artwork and the fact that I was curious about and attracted to those red costumes (Oh, and the fact then when I flipped through it in the store, I saw it included a fight with Fin Fang motherfucking Foom!). It was one of Marvel's $3.99/20-page books, which aren't really worth purchasing serially. I figured I'd wait for the trade but, by the time I got my hands on the trade, Marvel had already announced the book's cancellation.

And, as I said, I was mildly surprised, but not shocked or distraught by that news. Now that I've actually read the first five issues of the book, I have a new emotional reaction to the news of the cancellation—disappointment. Robinson and Kirk's Fantastic Four is actually pretty good.

Granted, the tonal shift from the last Fantastic Four comics I read is pretty drastic. If I'm remembering correctly, the last issue of FF ended with everyone literally having a big party, and the first image in this issue is of The Invisible Woman sitting at a little desk in a pitch black room, writing a letter to her children (With pen and paper? Invisible Woman is 400 years old), in which she talks about how terrible everything has become while tears stream out of her eyes. After previewing the dark events of the near-future—Reed is "a broken man," Ben is in a laser jail for murder, Johnny "a lost soul" drinking himself stupid in a bar—the narrative then jumps backwards to the point where everything started to go wrong.

Which is the point where everything looks awesome: The Fantastic Four Vs. Fin Fang Foom!

(Incidentally, the first page of the first issue is a full-page splash; the second and third pages each have two panels on them, so that the two-page spread they form consists of four panels, each featuring a member of the FF; the fourth and fifth pages are a two-page splash. So there are only six panels in the first five pages of Fantastic Four #1; that's one-quarter of the length of that first issue. That's one of the four dollars you would have spent on this comic. They are very nice drawings and all, the pacing reads nicely in a trade, but good God, is it really a surprise the book shed readers so fast? This first issue—which contains two more two-panel pages and one more splash page—took less than four minutes read).

After Sue's letter presages doom, we follow the FF into a pretty typical FF adventure, in which their characters, powers, personalities and generally positive relationship with the rest of society is illustrated. It's a nice reminder/primer on the FF, a necessary start for a story about their "fall."

Later that night, a secured portal to a dangerous pocket dimension Reed keeps in the Baxter Building for study opens up, and a horde of strange alien space bug monster creatures pour out and start wreaking havoc all over the city. A generous helping of guest-stars cameo in the battle, and Reed eventually figures out a way to stop them all, but it comes at a very high price: Johnny loses his Human Torch powers in the process.

Over the course of the first four issues, the characters each get a conflict arc, with Reed and Sue worried about daughter Valeria (who has moved to Latveria to try and bring out the good in Dr. Doom) and Johnny struggling with the loss of his powers while trying to put on a brave face (I liked the scene where Reed promises to try and figure out how to restore his powers, to which Johnny replies "I won't hold my breath...Look at Ben. How long have you been working on a cure fore him to no avail...and you're the smartest man alive."). And as for Ben, he tries to rekindle his relationship with Alicia, and it seems to be going well, although her one concern is that every time things go well for them, something big and terrible happens.

And, of course, there's some superheroing, as The Wizard's latest Frightful Four, which consists of himself and three of The Wrecking Crew, attack the city, the Wizard letting slip that all of these recent events may be connected to a single, mysterious puppetmaster (Shocking, I know). The substitute FF from FF—She-Hulk, Ms. Thing and Ant-Man show up to help in this battle, in their snazzy uniforms; I really like those costumes, and that group of characters (Medusa, the fourth of their foursome, is probably off doing whatever The Inhumans are up to post-Infinity).

Kirk's cover for FF #4

And then, in the fifth issue, it's the trial of the Fantastic Four, as they're summoned to court to answer for every bad thing they've ever done. They have She-Hulk as their attorney, defending them.

Robinson writes the opposing attorney pretty well, well enough to at least sell the blatantly ridiculous nature of the proceedings: That anyone on Earth could really be all that mad at The Fantastic Four about anything. Each of the events mentioned basically boil down to a story in which the FF save the city and/or the entire world and/or universe, but the attorney objects to the way they save it.

I suppose that too will prove to be part of the mystery villain's plan, but, in the meantime, it allowed for a string of amazing guest-artists to line up and draw the flashback scenes, each to a fairly well-remembered or momentous event in FF history: Chris Samnee, Dean Haspiel, Paul Rivoche, Phil Jiminez, Mike Allred*, Jim Starlin, Jerry Ordway, Derlis Santacruz and June Brigman. About a half-dozen of those are artists whose names alone are usually enough to get me to pick up a book.

The result is that the kids of the Future Foundation are taken away from Reed and Sue, and placed in SHIELD custody at Camp Hammond, where The Avengers Initiative was based. Camp Hammond has a new commander, however, Jim Hammond himself, and the original, Golden Age Human Torch will apparently be playing a role in Fantastic Four going forward (I guess this explains what Robinson had in mind when he had Captain America asking Hammond to join SHIELD at the end of the first story arc in Robinson's All-New Invaders book).

I get the sense that many of these sub-plots are ones we've seen repeatedly, even in relation to these characters, but this particular franchise is old, old-fashioned and rickety enough that even the most cliche super-comics elements feel comfortable here in a way they wouldn't in other comics or with other comics characters. Is this simple, old-school, soap opera-style superhero comics, but with a modern, more sophisticated model of storytelling? Yes. But what's wrong with that, exactly?

I really love those new uniforms, too. I don't know that red is necessarily, inherently better than blue, black or white, but it's new, and that alone is pretty interesting, giving this particular batch of Fantastic Four comics a radically different look than the hundreds of other ones that preceded them (If DC really wanted to shake-up the visuals of their star characters when they launched The New 52? Instead of taking away Superman's shorts and giving him seams and a high collar, they should have turned his costume red. And dressed Batman in brown).

I like too that they are all slightly different. Reed and Sue's costumes are the same basic design and in the same colors, but the red and black parts are swapped on each. I like Ben's "4" symbol on the hip of his shorts, and the way the black is attached to the "belt buckle" element of them. Johnny's looks just like Reed's, as if there's a boy version and a girl version of the costume (although Johnny's out of his costume and in civilian clothes before too long).

Franklin's costume is red, but the rest of the Future Foundation kids keep their white "school uniforms."

In addition to the slick new costumes**, Kirk also designs a pretty awesome new Fantasticar that splits into four segments, one for each member of the team.

Man, I would have loved to play with a toy of that when I was in third grade.

I also really, really like the new logo.

One final note, as I stop reviewing and just start listing observations at random (Note to self: Don't forget to polish up this review before posting; it's not very good, even by your usually lax standards, Caleb, and just sorta deteriorates at the end). While the main attraction of the court room jaunt through Fantastic Four history was getting to see things like Mike Allred draw Galactus or Chris Samnee re-drawing panels of Jack Kirby's from the first Fantastic Four #1, it was also neat to see some of the more obscure bits of their history mentioned.

Many of these events I never actually read in their original comic book form, but have seen referenced repeatedly in other comics (Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross' Marvels version of the fight with Galactus, for example) and/or multiple cartoon series and/or the live action films: I think the Silver Surfer/Galactus story has been adapted into every multimedia version of the FF I've seen (save the Roger Corman live-action omvie), for example, and I've seen multiple cartoon versions of the Thing/Hulk brawl.

One story I have never seen adapted elsewhere*** or referred to in another comic, however, is the one where Sue was possessed by the Hate-Monger and became Malice, which, because she was a woman who became evil, meant she had to dress like this:

Ordway

Oh, wait, a second, she also had a spiked leather gimp mask to go over it too...?

I know superhero comic books are weird and pervy now, but it's sometimes easy to forget that they were always weird and pervy.



*The ideal Fantastic Four artist in our post-Kirby world. Behold:

**As for why they are red now, there's no in-story explanation, but editor Mark Paniccia explains the decision in a little editorial feature on the back page. The original thought, Paniccia explains, was to return to blue uniforms after wearing the white for so long:

...but since this was a bold new direction, we thought now was the perfect opportunity to do something completely unexpected. Leonard did about nine versions. Since this arc is about the fall of the Fantastic Four, we decided red would help message that our characters were in danger.

***Actually, the Internet tells me she was turned into Malice in an episode of the 1994 FF cartoon, which I watched a complete DVD collection of around the time the first live-action movie came out, but I have no memory of it. I'm pretty sure they toned toned the dominatrix aspects a bit...if only because I feel reasonably certain I would remember a cartoon show in which Sue Storm was wearing a spike-covered leather gimp mask.

Review: Fantastic Four Vol. 2: Road Trip

I was pretty excited when they originally announced the "Marvel NOW!" plans for the Fantastic Four books: Writer Matt Fraction handling the plotting and scripting for Fantastic Four, featuring the original team taking children Franklin and Valeria Richards on a field trip through time and space as penciled by Mark Bagley, and FF, featuring a fun, fill-in Fantastic Four taking over teaching the Future Foundation kids while the First Family are away, drawn by EDILW-favorite Mike Allred.

One writer I like on a two books full of characters I like, one drawn by an artist I like pretty well, the other drawn by one of my all-time favorite comics artists.

Well, after a somewhat problematic first issue, and a few more not-so-good issues, I dropped the Fantastic Four book, figuring I'd check it out again later in trade, and simply stuck with the generally excellent FF, which featured the wild, fun, funny spirit of old Fantastic Four comics, and even featured art that seemed more in line with what I expect from the old World's Greatest Comics Magazine, even if the cast of characters were completely different...but similar in some ways. The villains, locations, supporting cast members of the Fantastic Four were all to be found in FF, not Fantastic Four.

As to what I didn't really care for in the Fantastic Four title proper those first few issues, I would have a hard time defining it exactly, at first, but the tales seemed a little lifeless, bloodless and uneventful. Big things were happening, of course, in one issue, they land on a planet that is a sort of lure for a titanic space predator, for example, but it read more like a plot outline for a comic book than an actual comic book story.

The characters all behaved like they should, but they seemed to be play-acting themselves, like under-contract actors who have been at it too long, delivering catch phrases and going through the motions for a pay check.

Unfortunately, reading the title in a different format—a free, six-issue trade in one sitting vs. serially published, $3 issues about once a month or so—didn't really improve the reading experience. The book still seemed to be missing...something, despite being generally well-plotted, full of incident and full of cosmic super-science adventures. I'm actually having a hard time putting my finger on it, which makes me wonder if it's the book or if it's me, but I don't really feel any connection to the characters.

Reed Richards remains the remote scientist always so lost in thought and so far removed from his own emotions that he irritates and alienates his loved ones; here he's concocted a cosmic field trip as a cover for the search to a cure for a mysterious disease that seems to be killing him and will, perhaps, also infect the remaining Fantastic three. Sue Storm is the bad-ass grizzly mom and uber-mother, long-suffering from her husband's poor social skills and aware of the secrets he thinks he keeps. Johnny and Ben bicker and play pranks on one another, but their few interactions here seem forced and unfunny; Ben is struggling with feelings and his own medical problem he is trying to keep secret (The fact that, at least in one panel, he semi-reverts into his evil hammer-possessed form from the Fraction-written Fear Itself might present a clue that his problem differs from that of Reed's).  The kids talk like little kids, albeit ones with minds like their father and some ill-defined powers of their own.

The Bagley-drawn five issues (inked mostly by Mark Farmer, although Andrew Hennessey and Joe Rubinstein each ink an issue apiece) feature a done-in-one issue where the family visits a planet that worships them and, in particular, Sue (thanks to some screwing around with a time machine that Reed does) and he decides to tell Sue about the problem with his powers; another where they visit Ancient Rome in time to witness the death of Julius Caesar, and meet the "pink cloud alien" that replaced Caesar (which will become a character in FF); two issues where they go to witness the Big Bang and end up having to deal with Blastaar (one of my favorite names to type) both there and at the end of time; and, finally, an issue in which Ben Grimm decides to spend his one day a year in human form on Yancy Street, circa the 1940s or so—and he ends up Thing-ing out before it's all over.

It's all drawn well enough, and written competently, but there don't really seem to be much in the way of new ideas, at least not in terms of riffing on the characters in new ways or from different angles. It just seemed to be going through the motions.

Now, this volume does contain Fantastic Four #5AU, a Fantastic Four tie-in issue to the Age of   Ultron crossover series; rather than publishing a miniseries or allowing the Age of Ultron storyline to "take over" the monthly ongoings for an issue, Marvel decided to publish extra issues of many monthlies, with one of them devoted to the event series tie-in. So Marvel published both Fantastic Four #5, drawn by regular artist Mark Bagley and continuing Fraction's story from the monthly series, and something entitled and numbered as Fantastic Four #5AU, a second fifth issue of the series, tying-in to Age of Ultron.

Yeah, I don't really get it either. Surely Fantastic Four: Age of Ultron #1 or Age of Ultron: Fantastic Four #1 would have worked just as well, right?

That issue, drawn by Andrew Araujo in a more detailed, more illustratorly style, featured the grown-ups leaving the kids alone so they could answer a distress call on Earth, which is being overrun by golden-colored Ultron robots. They leave holographic goodbyes to the children, and then fight to their deaths on Earth, and the comic alternates between the kids watching a character's hologram message, to that member of the Fantastic Four getting killed by Ultrons, with only Invisible Woman surviving (It's my understanding she plays a decent-sized role in the Age of Ultron series proper, teaming up with Wolverine at one point, which is nice, but the way it plays out is that her survival mainly relies on each of the male character heroically giving his life to save her and the others one at a time).

The most interesting idea emerges in this story: Ben's hologram confesses to the children that he thinks he might have been responsible for creating Doctor Doom. Near the end of the collection, Fraction picks up on that idea, as both children remember the events of that night as a dream, while I assume whatever happens during Age of Ultron mostly un-happens, as it was a possible alternate future dystopia kind of story.

I do want to see where Fraction goes with that particular idea, and to see if or how the book changes when Fraction leaves the scripting duties to Karl Kesel (as he left the scripting of FF to Lee Allred in order to focus on other, bigger and likely more lucrative Marvel comics).  But as of the tenth issue of this series I really expected to really like, I remain oddly, surprisingly disappointed.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I wrote a few million more words about Fantastic Four #1, in the context of the book as part of Marvel's "Marvel NOW!" initiative. You can go read those millions of words here, if that's the sort of thing you're into.

Reading through the comments that were posted so far, I see that someone noticed a pretty dramatic error in the script: When diagnosing a mysterious injury, Reed "Mr. Fantastic" Richards says that it looks like the unstable molecules that gifted the Fantastic Four with their powers are starting to break down, and may ultimately kill them. In actuality, the FF's "unstable molecules" refers to the material that their costumes are made out of, and was long ago given as an explanation as to how their costumes can stretch, and turn invisible and appear and disappear when one flames on and off, I guess. The Fantastic Four themselves are not made out of unstable molecules.

Makes me feel extra silly for worrying about when dinosaurs became extinct in the Marvel Universe but missing that. But I guess I shouldn't feel too bad about it; I'm just some guy critiquing the book, it's not like I was paid a large amount of money to write the story or edit the book or anything...

Review: Spider-Man/Fantastic Four

This four-issue, 2010 miniseries looks at Spidey’s relationship with Marvel’s First Family as it has evolved through the years, with each issue checking in at various points in the two franchise’s history and where they intersected, hanging untold stories in between told stories and forming an overall narrative goosed along by a time-traveling villain’s plot.

It bears a great deal of similarity to the 2005 series Spider-Man/Human Torch, which has the exact same remit, albeit that series focuses in on Spidey’s relationship with the Torch, with the rest of the FF merely playing supporting roles. The comic it bears the most resemblance to, however, is 2009’s X-Men/Spider-Man, by the same creative team of Christos Gage and Mario Alberti. The FF-focused sequel even used the same cover design as the X-Men mini when published serially.

The book opens “Years Ago,” less than a month after Dr. Doom fought Daredevil and the FF in their headquarters, which probably puts it in context to those who know FF history very, very well (a glance at the first page's worth of FF covers on comics.org seems to indicate it must be a reference to this 1965 issue). Doom is secretly visiting the campus of Empire State University to help negotiate peace treaties among his neighboring European countries, and he has insisted the FF provide security for him.

Why? It’s all a ruse to that he can switch bodies with the Human Torch. This being ESU though, Spidey shows up and, randomly but welcomely, Namor and the Atlantean army arrive to avenge themselves upon Dr. Doom.

On the last page, a mysterious villain in a green hood and cape who appears to be Doom (Spoiler: It isn’t!) arrives on the scene, to plot out loud. This villain then appears breifly in each of the following issues doing…stuff, until he reveals himself and his plot in the fourth issue, set in modern times, for a climactic battle.

In the next issue, it’s already the 1980s, and Spidey turns to Reed for help with his living black costume, which possesses Sue and Reed before ultimately being defeated. And then it’s the 90s, maybe, when there was a She-Thing and Spidey, Wolverine, The Hulk and Ghost Rider were the Fantastic Four for a little bit, and a Skrull gets fought, and Mole Man and the First Issue Monster hanging around too.

And then we get to the big villain reveal and it’s…easy enough to understand, even though I’ve never heard of the guy. He makes sense in the context of the overall story, which is the idea of the Fantastic Four as a family (hardly novel, I know) and whether or not Spider-Man fits into it, and how important family is to keep super-powered loners from becoming supervillains.

Gage’s writing is sharp and funny, and it no doubt helps that he’s dealing with some of the best-defined characters with the most unique voices in superhero comics—you have to try awfully hard to get, say, The Thing or Doctor Doom or Namor wrong, to have them say things that don’t sound like the characters themselves are writing their own dialogue (It can be done though! I’ve seen Brian Michael Bendis do it, for one!).

His invention of stories between other stories seems to work just fine, too . I haven’t read, let’s see, any of the stories these ones are built on top of, but they definitely felt as if they were part of a bigger narrative, without alienating me or punishing me for not having read all of the comics Gage has read.

I enjoyed Alberti’s artwork much less. He’s a strong artist, and one with a very individual, very present art style, but not one that necessarily fits with his subject matter. He’s certainly not an artist who does a Silver Age Marvel pastiche well, for example, and makes no attempts to do anything cute light calibrate his style to match the look of the various decades being depicted (Oddly enough, none of the characters seem to age at all either, but then perhaps that is due to the fact that Marvel’s timeline is constantly compressed).

He draws a pretty cool Venom-possessed Mr. Fantastic, all elongated and bendy, and he does fine work on a huge, strong and sexy She-Hulk and the finely detailed armor of Doom and…the other guy, but the guys with their name on the marquee? They don’t quite look like themselves, and perhaps it’s simply that he didn’t draw the series like I would have liked to have seen him draw the series, but it would have been nice if the art reflected the constantly changing settings in time and relative history in the same way that Gage’s writing did.

It’s certainly not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, of course, but it’s not the first or second one I’d recommend to anyone who wants to read a trade paperback featuring Spider-Man teaming up with the FF.

Because it would simply be monstrous for Marvel to charge $15 for an 88-page comic, this trade also includes two issues worth of a "classic" Spidey/FF team-up from 1980 written by Bill Mantlo, with Mike Zeck and Jim Mooney drawing the half that was published in Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man and the half that ran in FF by John Byrne and Joe Sinnott. These mainly serve to demonstrate how off-model Alberti's versions of the characters are (not that Marvel or DC even attempt to have artists stay on-model anymore when it comes to character design), and how badly comic book coloring has devolved; the back-matter is so bright you can read it in the dark, while the 2010 storyline that fills the bulk of the book is so dark I got seasonal affective disorder while reading it.

Review: Fantastic Four: The Master of Doom

The second half of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s short run on Fantastic Four is collected in Fantastic Four: The Master of Doom, and it ends quite a bit more strongly than it began.

Ironically, the last few issues were ones in which the presence of Millar and Hitch were increasingly diluted, as Joe Ahearne scripted the last two issues from Millar’s plot and Hitch worked with additional pencilers Neil Edwards and Stuart Immonen on those issues (Throughout the eight issues collected in this volume, seven different artists assisted Hitch on inks, although the artwork remained surprisingly consistent looking until Hitch had to be helped with pencils too).

I think this fact is more of an interesting coincidence than any sort of indictment against the two guys with their names above the logo on the cover. While they may not have done as much during the finale as they did during the build-up, it’s very much still their story, and the fairly satisfying conclusion is clearly one that Millar had envisioned and been working toward, before either getting too busy or moving on to devote his full attention to more successful and lucrative endeavors.

The volume title takes its name from the climactic story arc, which is teased and foreshadowed throughout the entire volume, with little in the way of a meaningful break (The family’s trip to spend the holidays in Scotland and the children’s encounter with a Lovecraftian monster god—which Hitch does a great job of designing—being about it).

So who is this Master of Doom? Well it’s, um, Doctor Doom’s former master, the so-called original supervillain under which Marvel Comics’ greatest bad guy apparently apprenticed under for a while. He looks a bit like a naked Judge death in a veil, and he’s accompanied by a new apprentice, and the pair of them are traveling through alternate realities, killing Marvel Universes and Fantastic Fours on their way to check up on how Doom is doing in his dimension against his Fantastic Four.

I can imagine this development may have proved galling to long-time Marvel fans, as the idea that Doctor Doom—who is really pretty much a perfect supervillain—needs his origin retconned can’t have been a popular one, but in trade form one doesn’t have months between issues to think about whether or not that’s a dumb idea and, if so, how dumb an idea it actually is.

Millar does a fair job of presenting the Master as a terrible, apocalyptic threat, using many of the hyperbolic tricks Grant Morrison employed during his JLA run, and while Hitch’s designs for the new villains are pretty uninspired, he does occasionally land a great, menacing image, like the pair riding black vapor trails through a shining New York afternoon.

So the villains are built up as the ultimate of ultimate villains, they dispatch everyone, even Doctor Doom, and then it’s up to the FF to save the day against these impossible odds. They eventually see the way to do it, but to do so they’ll have to do something awfully unheroic—kill an innocent person—and, faced with two bad choices, Reed Richards must find the impossible third way (You know what else is ironic? That this story is plotted by Mark Millar, who wrote Civil War, in which Reed Richards constantly chose the lesser of two evils instead of either bothering to find the impossible third way).

It all comes down to our FF and a few allies trying to hold off armies of infinite, alternate universe versions of themselves while also dealing with a guy who seems like the biggest Big Bad they’ve ever battled.

It’s an exciting, imaginative story, and one that ends much more optimistically and, well, heroically than almost anything I’ve read from Millar since he was writing DC’s superheroes.

That’s followed by the resolution of the Ben Grimm/Some Random School Teacher Lady sub-plot, which is remarkably effective and even a little touching.

I’m still not convinced Hitch is the very best artist for The Fantastic Four (which, of course, does make him an interesting choice), but his art seems to flow better with Millar’s scripting through most of this volume (perhaps because he was slowing down, and didn’t have the time to over-reference and over-render everything to the extent he did earlier in the 16-issue run?).

He seems to have gotten a really good handle on The Thing by the time he leaves the book, giving the big brick gorilla expressive, soulful eyes, but for everything he does right, he does something as wrong as Doctor Doom’s nose—no longer the little bolted on triangle of Kirby’s design, but a big, honking metal bird-beak. I can’t look at Hitch’s Doom without giggling a little; it’s just too realistic, to the point of complete silliness.

It’s a little difficult for me to judge how clever the ending of the Master of Doom story arc was, given that the reveal of his identity seemingly invoked an old, obscure FF story I’d never read or even heard of (I assume; otherwise Millar just assigned him a back story that sounds like an old, obscure FF story I’d never read or even heard of and…well, that might be kind of cool, actually). At any rate, much of what seemed wrong about the presentation of the villains is made to feel right by the end (well, it felt right to me anyway).

I don’t think I’d go so far as to say that this volume was so good it redeemed the first volume (and, obviously, it didn’t suddenly turn the book into the sales juggernaut Marvel was probably expecting a Millar/Hitch book to be…and the major development regarding Doom seems to have so far been pretty much ignored in the Dark Reign business I’ve read, despite Doom playing a prominent role). But even still, it ended well, so that I left the Millar/Hitch FF run with much warmer feelings toward it then I had at the beginning, and that’s certainly something.


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OH, YEAH: I forgot to mention that there’s a point in the Master of Doom story where the big bad guy and a guy with similar powers think really hard at one another and bend reality and fill up a splash page with Marvel characters and alternate reality Marvel characters, which results in this:
Was there an issue of What If…? entitled What If Captain America was a Tyrannosaurus Rex for Some Reason…?

And, if not, why not?