Opinion

Fantastic Four

Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Mike Wieringo and Karl Kesel
Published by Marvel

Issue #60

I'm betting you know this one: A rocket leaves the Earth crewed by Reed Richards, its inventor, his pilot best friend Ben Grimm, his partner, Sue Storm, and her brother Johnny. Due to unforseen problems with the rocket's shielding, cosmic radiation penetrates the hull, and when the ship crashes back to the ground, the four have gained extraordinary powers, becoming, respectively, Mr Fantastic, The Thing, The Invisible Woman, and The Human Torch. Adventurers, heroes, but above all else, family, they are The Fantastic Four.

In one week, Marvel have launched high-profile series with new creators; The Avengers have gained writer Geoff Johns, and The Fantastic Four have added this entirely new creative team in a special promotion issue retainling for nine cents in the US. Johns has chosen to throw his team straight into a new world-threatening situation, but Waid, cannily, (and no doubt at the behest of Marvel's chiefs, as this is widely being promoted as a 'get people who don't read comics to read comics' issue) has chosen to write a stand-alone issue which gets right to the heart of who the FF are and why they do what they do.

Reed Richards, concerned that the public face of the team is not as high-profile as it should be, hires an image consultant to come in and advise them. This offers the opportunity to present a literal outsider living and working with the team for a week and thereby showing the reader what this team, who dimension-hop as easily as they cross the street, is really all about. Along the way, the team dynamic is touched upon, the kind of situations that the reader might expect to see in coming months is introduced, and perhaps most importantly, an insight into the way the team see themselves is provided. The FF are almost unique, I think, in that although they have all the trappings of typical superheroes; the costumes, the powers, the gadgets; that's really not what they are. They're adventurers, explorers and trailblazers - they may encounter 'bad guys' as they do all this, but that's secondary. The motivations that drove (and continue to drive) Richards, their leader, are the most complex of all, and Waid has a very solid grasp of them, as shown in this issue

On the art front, I'm not too familiar with Wieringo's work, though he's been in the industry for several years, mostly at DC. He has a slightly off-centre style, not quite naturalistic, but not so for from it as to be called stylised. He's got a good grasp of the characters though, and hints at an ability with the wild and phantasmagorical that makes him a worthy successor to the man whose art started the whole thing almost forty years ago, Jack Kirby.

One of the things that Marvel is suggesting people do with this issue is pick up a handful and give them away to encourage people to try comics. If I knew more kids, I think I'd probably do just that, as it's definitely a kid-friendly series. If they did a similar thing with some of their other series, like New X-Men, Alias, or X-Statix, which I think would appeal more to my adult friends, I'd certainly give it a go.

That said, if anyone wants to try some 'pure' super-heroics, drop me a line, and I'll see about getting you a copy.