Fantastic Four: Solve Everything - Jonathan Hickman

It wouldn’t have taken much of an improvement for me to like this collection of Fantastic Four stories more than I did the previous one, Mark Millar’s THE MASTER OF DOOM. Jonathan Hickman picks up where Millar left off and has Reed Richards joining forces with a seemingly infinite number of Reeds from alternate universes to solve the problems of all creation. Not surprisingly, things don’t go well. Once that’s resolved in a fairly satisfactory way, Hickman spends a story dealing with some dangling plotlines from Millar’s run, and then this volume concludes with a story setting up a plot that’s still running in the monthly FANTASTIC FOUR comic.


I liked SOLVE EVERYTHING considerably more than I did THE MASTER OF DOOM, but I was still somewhat disappointed in it. The characterizations aren’t quite there, and the plots are still a little too muddled for my taste. Big, sweeping, time-hopping cosmic epics are hard to do, though, and for me, a little of them go a long way. I prefer stories that are on a slightly smaller scale. I’ve read some of the current issues scripted by Hickman and he seems to have settled in, at least to a certain extent. The art’s pretty good, too.


I probably won’t read the collections reprinting the issues between SOLVE EVERYTHING and the current issues. I think I’m caught up enough just to continue on with the monthly book for now. While FANTASTIC FOUR continues to be my all-time favorite comic book, it wouldn’t be on the basis on what’s being published now. But overall, not bad, and probably worth reading for long-time fans.

Fantastic Four: The Master of Doom - Mark Millar

Since I decided to give Marvel a try again and started reading some of the current books and catching up on the past few years by picking up collected editions, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed most of what I’ve read. And I’ve mentioned before that FANTASTIC FOUR is my all-time favorite comic book. So I had high hopes for this trade paperback collecting an eight-issue run from a couple of years ago that featured the classic FF villain, Doctor Doom. But . . . but . . . boy, I didn’t like it. Characterizations that seemed ’way off, a plot that barely made sense, and art that was good at times but filled with giant panels and double-page spreads that just seemed like a waste of space to me. I know, I know, I’m being a curmudgeon, and I hardly ever post negative reviews of anything, but this one just left a bad taste in my mouth. A new writer, Jonathan Hickman, picked up the title after this run, and I have the first collection featuring his work, too. I’m sure hoping I’ll like it more.

Fantastic Four: First Family - Joe Casey

I’ve mentioned before that FANTASTIC FOUR is my all-time favorite comic book. FIRST FAMILY collects a mini-series from a few years ago that takes a “Year One” approach to the Fantastic Four, picking up the story soon after the disastrous trip into space that gave them their powers and greatly expanding on the origin story from FF #1. This is a dangerous thing to do when it comes to long-time fans such as myself. A writer has to do more than a simple retelling of material, but change too much and guys like me are going to be unhappy.


I’m glad to say that while there’s a little ret-conning going on in FIRST FAMILY, it doesn’t really mess with the established storyline too much, merely updating a few things and adding a villain we’ve never heard of before. The important thing is that Joe Casey’s script does a good job of capturing the characters, and some of the scenes, such as Ben Grimm’s first visit back to his old Yancy Street neighborhood after he’s turned into The Thing, work very well. It’s also nice to see little details like how the FF came to establish their headquarters in the Baxter Building. The new bad guy (who doesn’t have a supervillain moniker) isn’t too impressive, and neither is the FF’s final showdown with him. But the characters are more important here than the action, and on that score, FIRST FAMILY delivers.


The art by Chris Weston is okay, with decent storytelling that’s easy to follow for the most part, and his version of The Thing is excellent, although it’s based on the later appearance of the character, not the lumpier original version that Jack Kirby gave us in the early issues. That’s a quibble, though. Weston’s Torch isn’t bad, either.


FIRST FAMILY is an entertaining collection if you’re a fan of the Fantastic Four and have some nostalgia for those early days, as I certainly do. If you fall into that category, too, it’s worth reading.

Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four, Volume 2

The second trade paperback volume in the MARVEL MASTERWORKS: FANTASTIC FOUR series reprints FF #11 – 20, along with the first FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL. It’s a mixed bag of stories, to be sure, opening with the introduction of the Impossible Man from FF #11. Stan comments in the introduction to the volume that this story is considered a failure, but I never felt like that. Yeah, it’s offbeat, but it’s pretty funny, too. Not much really happens in #12, which features the first meeting between the FF and the Incredible Hulk. (The next meeting in FF #25 and 26 is much better.) The story from #13 is notable because it features the first appearance of the Watcher, as well as the introduction of the Red Ghost and his Incredible Super-Apes. (Yes, super-apes. I thought this was pretty dumb even when I was a kid. The Watcher was cool, though.)

Some other characters pop up for the first time in these stories: the Mad Thinker in #15, the Super-Skrull in #18, and Rama-Tut, the Pharaoh from the Future (who I believe eventually turned out to be Dr. Doom, as did Kang the Conqueror) in #19. I don’t recall if the Yancy Street Gang had turned up prior to these issues, but they’re mentioned quite a bit and always welcome.

For me the highlights of this volume are the stories from FF #16 and #17, both of which feature Dr. Doom as the villain. In #16, the FF are shrunk down into a microverse (shades of Ray Cummings’ THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM, among numerous other SF novels and stories) and get some help from Ant-Man, and in #17 they battle a series of traps set for them by Doom. Now, these stories may not actually be any better than the others from this time period, but they’re special to me because they were the first issues of FANTASTIC FOUR I ever read, indeed the first Marvel superhero comics I read, on that Christmas Day, 1963, at my aunt’s house in Brownwood. (I’ve written about that day before.) Reading them again really took me back to those times.

Also, the story from FF ANNUAL #1, which features Sub-Mariner finally locating his lost kingdom of Atlantis and declaring war on the surface world, is pretty good, and at 37 pages was a real epic in those days.

Still, this is all prelude. Starting a few months after these stories were first published, with the brutal Thing/Hulk battle in FF #25, FANTASTIC FOUR would start a three-and-a-half year run that for my money is the best sustained sequence in the history of comics. (AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1 – 33 comes close but can’t quite top the FF, at least for me.) If Marvel continues to come out with these Masterworks trade paperbacks, I’ll continue reading them and reliving those days. Highly recommended.

Fantastic Four: Lost Adventures

This is an interesting collection of Fantastic Four stories ranging over a number of years. It starts off with a recreation of what would have been the final FF story drawn by Jack Kirby, which was shelved because of plot problems. An earlier story with Kirby art was substituted for it at the last minute. But several issues later, some of the rejected art was used after all, with a framing sequence by John Buscema. This collection gives us all the versions, including the uninked and unlettered panels of Kirby’s original art that survive. Taken any way you want to look at it, “The Menace of the Mega-Men” and “The Monstrous Mystery of the Nega-Man” (the alternate titles for what is basically the same story) are pretty minor pieces of comic book history, but as always, Kirby’s art is interesting to look at.

The collection is rounded out by a much more recent story, “World’s End”, which is also billed as “The Last Fantastic Four Story” (I don’t know about that; isn’t the FF still being published?), “Homecoming”, a reprint from the 25th anniversary issue of the comic book that I must have read when it was new but have no memory of; and “If This Be . . . Anniversary!”, a humorous yarn from the 45th anniversary issue. All these stories were written by Stan Lee (although “Homecoming” was plotted by Marvel’s then-editor in chief Jim Shooter), and as always Stan’s familiarity with the characters and great touch with dialogue makes them fun to read.

Other than the first story in the collection, I don’t see how these are actually “Lost Adventures”, but I enjoyed the book anyway. If you’ve never read the Fantastic Four, this isn’t the place to start, but if you’re a long-time fan like me, I think you’ll find it entertaining, although nothing in here even remotely approaches the top rank of FF yarns.

Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four, Volume 1

I was going to continue reading the Marvel Masterworks editions reprinting THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (I have Volumes 2 and 3 on hand), but I got sidetracked to another title, the original cornerstone of the Marvel Universe and a title I’ve long considered to be my favorite comic book of all time: FANTASTIC FOUR.

MARVEL MASTERWORKS: FANTASTIC FOUR, VOLUME 1 reprints the first ten adventures of the F.F. from 1961 and ’62. The first issues I ever read were #16 and #17, so I had to catch up on these later, but I’d read them all in various reprints and even owned a couple of those first ten issues at one time or another. No need to recap the origin – you probably already know it if you have any interest in this post at all – but I will make a few comments on some of the stories. The menace in the first issue, the Mole Man, seems like a refugee from one of the Lee/Kirby monster comics. I don’t care that much for Kirby’s art here (or in any of the first three issues, for that matter), and Ben Grimm’s personality is really the only one that stands out in the origin. Reed, Sue, and Johnny are pretty much stereotypes. The second issue, which introduces the Skrulls, is a little better because of the nice twist ending, but the third story regresses with a really lame villain, the illusionist known as the Miracle Man.

In the fourth issue, though, something happens that lifts the series to a higher level. The Submariner, the famous Golden Age character and nemesis to the original Human Torch, returns, albeit in a manner that relies ’way too heavily on coincidence. But there are some really effective scenes in this one.

With the fifth issue, the series begins to hit its stride with the introduction of the F.F.’s all-time greatest villain, Dr. Doom. The time travel plot is a little silly, but the art, with Joe Sinnott inking Kirby, is really good, and we get The Thing dressed as a pirate, so what more do you want? The sixth issue teams up Dr. Doom and Submariner against the F.F. and is also a good story with decent art as Dick Ayers takes over the inking chores. I always liked the Kirby/Ayers art, although I think Sinnott was the best inker ever for Kirby.

The seventh and eighth issues are pretty forgettable, although #8 introduces blind Alicia Masters, who becomes Ben Grimm’s long-time girlfriend. The Submariner returns yet again in #9, which has a silly but entertaining plot about the F.F. going to Hollywood to make a movie, then Dr. Doom shows up again in #10, which also features cameos by Lee and Kirby and introduces the concept that the members of the F.F. know there are comic books being produced about them (and it’s even implied that they share in the revenue from those comics).

Up until this point, the complaints I had about Kirby’s plotting in the early issues of THE AVENGERS haven’t really cropped up, but F.F. #10 really falls apart in terms of logic and continuity. Stan’s script basically ignores the fact that characters do things that make no sense and show up in places they couldn’t possibly be. But out of the first ten issues, two of the stories are excellent (#5 and #6), two are pretty good (#4 and #9), and the others are okay except for #10, the only real dog in the bunch. Unlike THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, which started out great, FANTASTIC FOUR had to grow into greatness, despite the cover proclamation about it being “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!”

Which it was, a couple of years later and for several years after that. But who knows when or if I’ll get around to reading the reprints of those stories?

One more comment: These early issues feature the tragic, surly Ben Grimm who’s always losing his temper with his teammates and threatening to quit. Gee, Reed, Sue, and Johnny, do you think he might have felt a little better about himself and been easier to get along with if you’d actually called him “Ben” every once in a while instead of always calling him “Thing”? No wonder he always felt like it was clobberin’ time! (Although that phrase doesn’t actually appear in any of these stories.)

Fantastic Four: Books of Doom -- Ed Brubaker

Like it was yesterday, I remember walking into Tompkins’ Drugstore in the summer of 1964 and plunking down a quarter and a penny for a copy of FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #2. (Just don’t ask me what I actually did yesterday, because I might not remember that.) I was a big fan of Marvel Comics in general and the Fantastic Four in particular, and had been ever since a couple of my girl cousins gave me a stack of comics they didn’t want the previous Christmas.

FF ANNUAL #2 opened with a story called “The Origin of Doctor Doom”. Doom had appeared several times already in the FF’s regular title and was already the dominant villain in the Marvel universe. In twelve pages, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby filled in his back-story, giving him a layer of humanity he had lacked previously without making him any less evil or dangerous. It was a fine story featuring gypsies and witchcraft and super-science and a mysterious monastery in Tibet, along with cameo appearances by the college-age Reed Richards and Ben Grimm, the future Mr. Fantastic and The Thing. Practically every panel was etched into my eleven-year-old brain, and Lord help me, they still are.

FANTASTIC FOUR: BOOKS OF DOOM, a trade paperback reprint of a recent mini-series, takes the information from that 44-year-old origin story (and a few later stories) and expands it into a large-scale retelling of how the young gypsy Victor von Doom wound up becoming the arch-villain Doctor Doom. The script by Ed Brubaker is well-written but doesn’t add much to the story, although he does throw in a fairly nice twist ending. The art by Pablo Raimondi is pretty good and his layouts are easier to follow than those of some modern comics artists, and it doesn’t appear to have any manga influence, always a plus for reactionary curmudgeons such as myself. The reprint is maybe a little misleading in its title, since the only members of the Fantastic Four to appear are Reed and Ben, making the same sort of cameos they did in the original origin story. Overall, I enjoyed revisiting this yarn, and I’m glad that Brubaker didn’t try to update it very much. BOOKS OF DOOM is worth reading if you’re a Fantastic Four fan.