This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Graeme McMillan, Evan Narcisse and Douglas Wolk talk about Fantastic Four #588 and Avengers #10.
DOUGLAS: Fantastic Four #588 has a big FINAL ISSUE banner festooned across its front cover. And I’m sure it will indeed be the final issue… for almost an entire year. (I can’t imagine that the new “FF” series beginning next month will miss its opportunity to switch its numbering back for the big #600 next January.) The lead feature itself is a very clever piece of writing from Jonathan Hickman, an almost entirely wordless story—“almost” because Hickman keeps finding ways to sneak text in. (And then there’s the backup story, featuring Franklin Richards and Spider-Man, which has a bunch of dialogue anyway.)
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Nick Dragotta draws this issue, and deserves a ton of credit–he should get a lot more credit than he does, in general (for too long I thought of him as “Michael Allred’s understudy” because of his work on X-Statix). I think it’s interesting, though, that Marvel’s essentially been framing the series as “Jonathan Hickman’s Fantastic Four.” Whoever gets to draw it comes out secondary.
GRAEME: Well, the artists haven’t been consistent throughout the entire run. We started with Dale Eaglesham, then had a lot of fill-in issues in different styles before settling with Steve Epting, and now Dragotta comes in with a surprisingly Kirby-influenced take. And, yes, I know that it’s weird that I said this was “surprisingly” Kirby-influenced, considering that FF is maybe the most Kirby book at Marvel, but I really feel like the series hasn’t really felt like Kirby since… maybe Walt Simonson, back in the mid-1990s?
DOUGLAS: Dragotta really gets the story here across, which is a good trick under the circumstances. The only sequence that doesn’t quite work here is the big action scene with the Thing—the “let’s get one more Thing-vs.-Hulk fight in there” bit seems forced.
GRAEME: It also just doesn’t really work, on the page. It took me a while to realize that that was Donald Blake and Bruce Banner, and the scene just lacks a particular clarity without dialogue. On my first readthrough, I pretty much went “Who is that? Oh, it’s Thor. Why are they fighting? Is that the Hulk? What is this? This is ridiculous.”
DOUGLAS: What’s odd about this issue is that nothing much seems final about it: it seems much more like a transitional issue than a conclusion. (Not to mention that the main feature ends on a cliffhanger.) Maybe “the FF appeared in the first issue of Amazing Spider-Man/Spider-Man appears in the last issue of Fantastic Four” is an intentional point of symmetry, but Spider-Man’s appearance here seems much more like a lead-in to his role as the fourth member of the new FF.
Which also strikes me as weird in a number of ways. The FF are a team because they’re a family; if your uncle dies, you don’t go holding auditions for a new uncle, you know? I’m of two minds about the new Marko Djurdjevic-designed costumes that appear at the back of the book, too: the black-and-white color scheme is sharp, but I hate the fact that Reed and Ben’s look mostly functional and Sue’s is all sexy and check-out-my-panties.
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GRAEME: I liked the new costumes just fine when Frank Quitely designed them for Plastic Man’s son way back in 1999. (Seriously, they’re really similar, right? It’s not just me?). I agree with the addition of Spider-Man being odd… I can see the point of adding him as a regular guest-star, and also of the “Future Foundation” expanding and changing purpose following this traumatic event, but there’s something too traditional, maybe, about the idea of just replacing Johnny on the team. Especially with a character who used to be all about not having enough time for a double identity, never mind a double identity that now has a full-time job and membership on two other superhero teams.
Overall, I thought this issue was… okay? It was necessary, definitely, to set up the new series, but it felt too much like that: Like everything was set-up, instead of anything close to a real follow-up of the last issue. There was no real resolution or – and I presume this was a very intentional choice – emotional exposure in this issue, because of the silence, just implication and melodrama, and I found it surprisingly disappointing. I keep being told by almost everyone that Hickman is all about the long game when it comes to his writing, and I hope that that’s true, because the last couple of issues have felt entirely like a dry solving of logistical issues so that he could get the characters to the place he needed to relaunch everything. I want more than this, and it’d be nice to think it’ll come eventually.
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.
EVAN: I’ve been reading this storyline for a bit now, and I keep coming back to how weird it is that the proceedings are centered on a event crossover from over a decade ago. Mind you, it’s all structurally sound: the Hood’s motivation as power-hungry has-been, the way that searching for Infinity Gems lets the big mainline Avengers team break up into smaller units, the ethical considerations and the way that those fit into Bendis’ strengths.
But so much time is spent in talking-head mode that this book doesn’t feel like the mainline Avengers book. As clever and well-executed as it is, this title is where you want the widescreen, epic-feeling storylines to go down. This still feels smaller than it should. It’s all of Bendis’ pet storylines from The Illuminati coming home to roost, but not feeling like they’ll have a larger impact on the Marvel Universe as a whole. That’s not something that you should ever be able to say about the core Avengers title.
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Bendis’ characters all tend to sound the same, but voice isn’t the problem here. It’s more a issue of scale. His storytelling habits don’t lend theselves to pulling the virtual camera way back to establish scope. He’s an on-the-ground guy at heart, and that’s why I think his writing is still (after all these years) better in Powers and New Avengers than to this kind of storyline. Yet, like Douglas, I like that he keeps pushing himself. I just want him to crack the nut already. If he’s going to continue being one of the chief architects of the Marvel Universe, then I want to see him pull out a different toolset for when it’s time for thing to get B-I-G.
I tend to be a JR, Jr. fan no matter how loose or tight his pencils are. Still, I hate how bulky everyone looks here. I remember in his X-Men days how he could draw a variety of body types. Still, he pulls off really effective acting in the faces and body language. The underwater sequence that Douglas called out, the rooftop talk with Ant-Man and Iron Fist and the scenes inside the plane all show off how Romita can still tell us how the characters feels about each other. I just wish it were all tighter.
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DOUGLAS: Evan, you told me I should really be reading the new Heroes for Hire series, so I was looking forward to seeing the entire first issue (from, what, two or three months ago?) reprinted as a backup feature here. It’s the same trick as when the first issue of Chew was reprinted in The Walking Dead: give the struggling new book a boost by including it in the top-selling title. I approve of that as a strategy in general. If Marvel’s going to keep charging $4 an issue for Avengers, it makes it a lot easier to buy if they can throw in a juicy backup like this one.
I’ve recently been catching up with some of Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning’s other Marvel titles from the past few years: for a while, they were concentrating on their own little quasi-weekly cosmic line (Nova, Guardians of the Galaxy, and various Annihilation/War of Kings/Realm of Kings-related miniseries). I think this is the first entirely Earthbound Marvel series they’ve been doing in a while. It’s a nice, solid meat-and-potatoes superhero team book: solid premise, clever end-of-first-issue twist, art (by Brad Walker and Andrew Hennessy) that’s a little cluttered but basically functional. (I’d like to declare a moratorium on figures of superheroes in action extending over panel borders, though: it’s the kind of trick that only works if you do it infrequently.) As for the surprise character who shows up on the last page: my, those Jack Kirby character designs from half a century ago sure are durable—!
From this sample, I’m not totally sold on the new Heroes for Hire as a series, but I can see picking up a few issues for cheap to read on the cross-trainer at the gym. That’s actually how I feel about the rest of the recent Abnett/Lanning Marvel stuff, too: it’s not something I seek out when it comes out, but if it falls into my hands, it’s a fun way to pass the time.
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EVAN: I’d already gotten H4H #1 when it came out, but it was good to revisit with some distance. I’ve always been a sucker for the ad-hoc strikeforce concept in superhero comics, and this one’s off to a promising start. I love how Misty served as a kind of Greek chorus here, and how the various different missions dovetailed into one larger arc. I wasn’t expecting a done-in-one structure here, but I hope it keeps up. The great joy of these books is how they service under-utilized, cult characters, but the problem is that the characters can remain static because no real development can happen on them when they drop in and drop-out. A few style notes: as a black nerd, I always look at how artists draw black folk, and Walker does a great job here. The lips, especially, on Falcon and Misty Knight are great. An odd thing to mention, I know, but it stuck out to me.
GRAEME: As far as the Heroes for Hire extra goes… Yes, I like the idea of having an entire issue reprinted in the back, especially from a value-for-money standpoint, and this was fun enough. But I’m with Douglas; there’s something about it that I enjoyed, but not enough for me to rush out and catch up on what I’ve missed. It feels like a back-up, if that makes sense, and that’s not a good sign when it’s really a freebie asking you to spend $3.99 per month to keep going.