GRAEME: I’m not sure if this would be such a problem if Marvel had not gone above and beyond to hype the event as the DEATH of one of the FF. If the story had happened without all the clamor and early release and the AP running the story because it was a slow news day, I have the feeling I would’ve felt more charitable towards the whole thing. So am I uncomfortable because of the story itself, or because the hype made me expect something that the story wasn’t? I’m not sure, and I’m also not sure if it really matters, in the end.
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That aside, this issue again reminded me that I just don’t get Hickman’s FF. I know that it has a lot of critical praise and people I respect really admire it, but it just doesn’t come together for me. Characters seem less fully formed than Hickman’s pawns or mouthpieces (Valeria, in particular, isn’t even vaguely convincing, even as a supersmart kid), and the mechanics of structuring the story and pacing it well just never seem to be there. Like you said, Douglas, this just dumps the reader in the middle of three emergencies, and none of them are properly introduced in this issue, making all of them feel a little fake… something that’s not helped by the overfamiliarity of some of the plot mechanics required to solve the problems in question. (How many times have we seen a “We have to close the portal… from inside” announcement?) It all feels very… well-intentioned, and almost great, but falling short, if that makes sense.
EVAN: Maybe I was duped by Marvel’s machinations, but I bought the two issues preceding #587, because I too fell away from Hickman’s run early on. And I have to say that #587 works if you’ve been reading the storyline. Yet my bit of catch-up only confirms what you guys say: new readers get dropped in the middle of freefall.
Still, I found a lot to like here. Most of it, however, was away from the big plot beats. Hickman’s characterizations felt nicely modulated: the super-kids weren’t too cutesy, the Ben/Johnny relationship breathes like a longtime friendship and the sexual tension between Sue and Namor gave those scenes some zing. All that made the ending feel way too engineered, with its swell of emotion and Spock/Kirk hand-touching-through-glass riff. I’ve read some of Hickman’s early Image work, and his sense of design meshed with some ambitious ideas to good effect in stuff like The Nightly News and Transhuman. The ideas still bubble invitingly in his FF, but this issue in particular seems to sacrifice the invention in service to a by-the-numbers stunt. If this were just another issue of Fantastic Four, I’d be along for the ride with maybe a few reservations. It’s like Graeme says: I like the issue except for what it’s actually supposed to do.
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DOUGLAS: Onward to Infestation #1. It’s not as if I expected brilliance from this particular comic book–the first part of IDW’s big quasi-crossover involving four of its licensed properties (those being G.I. Joe, Transformers, Star Trek and Ghostbusters). But Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning are often very clever writers, and they’re used to juggling big casts and lots of spinoff projects (as with their “War of Kings”/”Realm of Kings” serials with Marvel’s cosmic titles), so I thought it might be fun.
Instead, they’ve come up with what might be the dullest possible premise for a crossover in 2011: evil zombies attack, and are scattered to four different realities, so everybody gets to spend a couple of issues shooting zombies. The one real flash of D-n-A’s wit here is that the zombies are an information-devouring hive-mind (and can therefore, for some reason, turn robots into zombies too). It’s kind of cute that this issue also brings in characters from both CVO and Zombies Vs. Robots, although I don’t think anyone was itching for a crossover involving them.