EVAN: The thing about the family-of-adventurers conceit inherent to the Fantastic Four is that they tend to be really well adjusted. Sure, there’s been all kind of episodic trauma, but mostly they deal with it pretty well. What I really liked about this issue was how dark it was. I mean, members have died or left before, but the remnants always had a “we must soldier on” mandate that kept the book going.
This issue didn’t feel like that. Susan closing herself off, the Future Foundation kids planning to kill Annihilus and Ben’s brooding didn’t evince the kind of stiff-upper-lip heroism that tends to be typical in superhero books. The scene with Reed, in particular, where he threatens Annilhus with the Ultimate Nullifer was particularly chilling because, as fanboys remember, it’s suicide to pull the trigger on that cosmic weapon.
I read the Ben fighting out his grief sequence as intentionally obscured, though. I kept thinking “Who’s that with Don Blake?,” and when Banner finally Hulk-ed up, it clicked for me that that might have been meant to be a surprise.
I liked the Spidey back-up a lot, and it linked to this week’s issue of Amazing in a really strong thematic way. There’s something mournful about Spidey’s origin (which the musical on Broadway totally gets wrong), and there’s a bit of thematic bridge to the new FF book in this back-up. If the usually bright and shiny Fantastic Four have to change by virtue of losing their heat source, then a character who owes his superhero-ness to loss seems important to the recipe. As oddly programmatic as the last issue felt, this issue feels a lot more… confident? I’m not sure if Hickman’s building a seminal FF run here, but it is very strongly his own.
DOUGLAS: Speaking of silent comics: Avengers #10, by Brian Michael Bendis and John Romita Jr., starts with a long, partly silent scene that’s mostly a chance for John Romita Jr. to show off his big-action chops. Which are totally there in the layouts, not nearly as much in his rendering this time: once again, JRJR’s work here looks like he’s struggling to knock it out at the same time as he’s drawing Kick-Ass, Part Deux. Same thing goes for the next big action set-piece—a giant Danger Room fight, of all things! Bendis must have been itching to write one of those for years.
It’s actually kind of fascinating to me the way this issue is Bendis playing to both his strengths and his weaknesses. The last third of the issue is mostly straight-up talky-talk dialogue—which Bendis is great at, and he knows it. (The last couple of issues of New Avengers have been all but entirely dialogue-driven, and they’ve been the best ones of the new series so far.) It’s also almost entirely in the form of two-person conversations, interestingly. And then we get to the big confrontation at the end, and it’s over in literally three panels: that’s a problem when you’re working with plot devices that make your characters omnipotent. Even after six years or so of writing the Avengers titles, Bendis still sometimes has a hard time making the really big stuff work. Actually, that’s one of the things that keeps drawing me to read nearly everything he writes: that he keeps pushing himself out of his comfort zone.
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GRAEME: I can’t work out why Bendis’ Avengers – as opposed to New Avengers, or any other Avengers books he’s written – doesn’t work for me. He’s certainly trying his hardest, and when you break this issue down to its individual scenes, it feels like the right kind of math for what should make a grand scale, “widescreen” superhero book. But issue after issue, it somehow fails to add up to the sum of its parts. Nothing really seems to have any impact, and everything feels very disconnected and unimportant, instead of the other way around. (I know you like Bendis’ dialogue here, Douglas, but I find that it undercuts the book. This type of book benefits, I think, from the kind of over-the-top sincerity that Morrison brought to his JLA than the snarky asides and comedy of Bendis, especially when he can scratch that itch more successfully over in New Avengers.)
It’s not helped by the art, which continues John Romita’s slow slide into a specific kind of genericism. Am I imagining it, or did he used to be more able to differentiate faces and characters than he is here? Didn’t his action scenes used to be more dynamic? It’s clearly his work – it’s not as if he’s lost any of his own signature style – but it feels lesser, somehow, for reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s an oddly ugly book, and I don’t think I used to feel that about Romita’s artwork.