A New Fantastic Four

[Substantial spoilers below.]

In a very long-running comic book series, and Fantastic Four has been published monthly since 1961, one can of course expect to see different phases and storytelling styles. Sometimes these are editorially dictated, sometimes merely editorially permitted. In the old days, one has the impression that when Roy Thomas, say, took over the book to follow Stan Lee and Gerry Conway, he simply told the stories he wanted to tell and thought would sell comics; Marvel assigned him an artist, and he either had a lot or no say in who that artist was depending on his own juice in the organization. Today, it seems that Marvel considers proposals from teams of writers and artists and takes the one that they think further current editorial direction with regard to style and story. The FF is a flagship series for Marvel and tends to get high-profile creators. In recent years, we've had the likes of Mark Waid and Mike Weiringo in an acclaimed run; J. Michael Straczynski and Mike McKone; and a just-completed run by the very popular Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch.

The Millar/Hitch FF sequence over the last year and a half wasn't greeted with any great enthusiasm among Internet critics after its splashy debut, but I enjoyed it. It ended with a whimper rather than a bang, with a climax to the last story arc penned and illustrated by a different team. Oddly, I haven't heard much about how or why that happened. The pair are famous for missing deadlines, but an excruciatingly slow publication pace on Ultimates, for example, was never going to be tolerated on FF. So maybe they just weren't done and the job had to be handed off to quicker producers.

Now comes Jonathan Hickman and Dale Eaglesham's take on the first family of comics. Hickman is a relative newcomer to comics; Eaglesham became popular over at DC in recent years with high profile projects like a long run on Justice Society of America. I don't know much about Hickman, but have seen good reviews, and I've been buying FF since the mid 70s, save for Chris Claremont's early 2000s run, so I will give it a try.

Hickman and Eaglesham seem determined to put their own stamp on the book. The iconic uniforms have been revised again, with short sleeves. The logo has reverted to a long disused late 70s style... not my favorite, I have to say.

Mr. Fantastic is the star here, at least in this first arc. He gets almost all the panel time and space, to the point that the other members of the FF are reduced to secondary characters. This is really an issue of Mr. Fantastic, not the Fantastic Four. Other writers over the years have tended to play up one or another of the characters, of course. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby seemed to use the Thing as the most prominent character; many writers have seemed to concentrate on the marriage between Reed and Sue Richards. John Byrne's fabled time on the book began with a visible concentration on Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, and then shifted over time to Sue, whom he redubbed the Invisible Woman. Steve Englehart made the Thing the leader and central character, but also gave tremendous attention to one of his long time favorites, Crystal, and another new member, Sharon Ventura, variously "Ms. Marvel" and "She-Thing". Tom DeFalco gave us a very Sue-centric FF.

Recent writers have seeemed to focus on Reed, but this may also be an editorial thing. Reed has been a central figure in recent company-wide crossovers such as Civil War and Secret Invasion; indeed, like Tony Stark, Reed Richards had come perilously close to being depicted as a villain in Civil War.

Here he's the hero. Eaglesham portrays him, in a somewhat jarringly different way, as broad-shouldered and muscular. (This is hard to get used to. Many artists have depicted Mr. Fantastic with a fairly standard superhero body, but since Byrne, most have shown him to be slender.) In this issue, he very nearly looks like a body builder. I hadn't noticed that Eaglesham did this to many characters before, but maybe it's just the odd juxtaposition here.

There are a lot of things to like about Hickman and Eaglesham's first issue. I like the fact that our heroes are playing the role of superheroes, not merely cosmic adventurers and celebrities. Reed's genius is on full display, along with his rather arrogant unpredictability (he abruptly teleports himself to the headquarters of their enemy the Wizard without taking the others along, merely offering an "I'll be home for dinner," to his teammates, whom the reader can see are not able to follow what he was explaining he was going to do.) Reed has an interesting and not-very-violent discussion with the Wizard, whom he proposes to come and see in the mental hospital, and considerately promises "Maybe we can publish a paper together."

All the way through the book, I had a growing sense of having seen something like this before, and finally the broad-shouldered look for Reed tipped me to what it was: Tom Strong, Alan Moore's very interesting Doc Savage knockoff at America's Best Comics. Strong and his family also had close antecedents in the FF, of course. Hickman's Reed has that same casual inventiveness and physical boldness, the same air of slightly messianic stoicism.

Which brings us to things I didn't like about the new version of the FF. Not that one couldn't mine Moore's very clever Tom Strong for good ideas, but I'd have preferred it not be quite so obvious.

First, I didn't like the depiction of Ben Grimm as rather dim. At one point he actually says "Uhh, dat one," while pointing at something. Johnny, on the other hand, has his usual personality here, brash, eager to play affectionate tricks on Ben. Now, this is an old bit, but previous writers have always understood that Ben was only about a half a step slower than Johnny, and quite capable of turning the tables on his younger partner.

I'm also not impressed with the depiction of Sue, who is a cipher in this issue. But of course it's early yet.

Early in the issue, there is some clunky dialogue, which is ok... the writer is new (he did a mini-series on the FF earlier that I didn't read) and one has to do some exposition, even if clumsily. But since when can Johnny see infrared? Did I miss that or is it new?

Finally, in the climax of the issue, Reed makes contact with alternate versions of himself in order to discuss how he can "solve everything". And we see lots of alternate Reeds in various wild outfits, culminating in three leaders among them, all of whom possess versions of the "Infinity Gauntlet", an all-powerful device long ago unclaimed by our Reed. I don't like much of this; alternate universes are increasingly tiring and have been done a lot by FF writers over the years. And this also felt weirdly like a Tom Strong story. And when he turns on the dimensional device, all we get is a "click"? C'mon now, we need a lot more Kirby Krackle than that for a world-shattering Reed Richards device.

I guess what really is rather off-putting about all this to me is the use of a relatively recent Reed obsession: the idea that he is melancholy over his inability to use his incredible intelligence to create a utopia for all mankind. I'm not a fan of utopias, or of people who are foolish enough to imagine they ought to create one.

But of course the utopia will prove to be a bad idea, so it's a little early to complain too much. We'll see. This version of the FF seems pretty interesting so far.