WHY YOU SHOULD BE READING THE FANTASTIC 4!

By Mike McDaniel
          

     The Secret Invasion and Final Crisis are packing in the sales and have dominated the top of the charts of comic tracking data. The Dark Knight is going through a massive psychological breakdown in the pages of Batman: RIP and its many parts. These series and their seemingly endless spin-offs and series-within-a-series are hogging most comic collector’s budget this summer and as a result some really good comics which might be getting otherwise overlooked. One that you might have missed is the Fantastic Four run by the guys who brought us the first two volumes of The Ulitmates , Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch.
    The Millar/Hitch era started out in issue 554 (see here for a review of that issue) with a four issue arc entitled “World’s Greatest” which was a well received but moved a little slow in some parts. This might be due to each character in the FF had something new going on in their lives. The first mom of Marvel, Susan Richards and some of her powerful super-heroine friends decided to start a relief fund for victims of the recent World War Hulk storyline who have been left homeless by the Jade Giant’s latest hissy fit. Trying his best Britney or Paris bit, Johnny Storm has founded a new band and is trying out to be a pop star all the while balancing his playboy lifestyle and a new love interest who happens to be a super villain. Talk about headlines for the tabloids! The rocky Ben Grimm has set his sights on a new love interest Debbie Green who just happens to be an elementary teacher from his old primary school on Yancy Street.
     Reed’s attention is consumed by the plot of the first crux of the twelve issue run. The storyline focuses mainly on an impending climate crisis which threatens to destroy the earth within the next thirty years. The Fantastic Fours’ patriarch, Reed Richards, is made aware of this by former girlfriend Aylssa Castle. Her and her husband’s solution to the crisis is to engineer a replacement planet in a parallel dimension. Nu-Earth, as it is dubbed, is patrolled by a near omnipotent robot named CAP (Conserve And Protect). Everything is fine and dandy till the robots programming goes haywire and it turns on its creators. Wow! Didn’t see that coming, huh? Well of course the Fantastic Four prevails and defeats the Ultron-wannabe.

     The second story arc is ominously entitled “The Death of the Invisible Woman” and pretty much begins soon after the heroes return to their headquarters in Manhattan. The Thing, the Richards’s children, and new nanny are confronted by beat-down Doctor Doom who is being hounded by the New Defenders!? After a brief but awesome fight scene within the FF’s HQ in which poor Ben Grimm is shot out of the building and through several others by Doom’s pursuers, the New Defenders make off with Victor Von Doom as their captive. It is revealed soon after that Johnny’s now ex-super villain girlfriend is a member of the team that is lead by a Hulked-out Doctor Bruce Banner (who looks like he’s leapt from the pages of Peter David’s classic Incredible Hulk run from the late 1990s).
     The story telling is top notch and is just what you’d expect from Mark Millar who is writing both Wolverine and the mini-series Marvel 1985. The best part of Millar’s writing is his dialogue between characters doesn’t seem to be forced and doesn’t distract you from the action of Hitch’s pencils like some other Skrull-writing hacks at Marvel that I won’t name. Bryan Hitch’s artwork is perfectly suited to the scribe which his name seems to be tied with.
     If you like your comics self-contained and straight forward and then this is the one for you. If you like reading a comic and knowing exactly what happened without having to form a hypothesis about what is going on like in the current pages of Batman, you just might like this run.  It is reminiscent of FF comics from the 1980s and is has an old school simplicity to it when compared to most of today’s comics. If you like great art and good story, then you’ll love it.