DOUGLAS: FF #1 is such a carefully conceived, nicely designed, attractively executed book in so many ways that it pains me a little that I’m totally not down with it at all. I mean, I admire the fact that Jonathan Hickman and Steve Epting are trying to dropkick what was formerly (and what I’m sure will soon again be) Fantastic Four into the 21st century; I like the graphic-design sensibility Hickman’s introduced to it. But “putting Spider-Man on the team” is still the same thing as grafting him into a family, and that makes no kind of sense. And the final-page twist is beyond ridiculous, the sort of thing that starts as “wouldn’t it be rad if…” and ends up feeling awkwardly sticky-taped onto a story.
EVAN: Before I even opened this issue, a whole bunch of questions popped into my head. This title is destined to be a weird little offshoot of the Fantastic Four’s publishing history until, as Douglas has said, the FF goes back to the mainline version in some anniversary issue or another. So, how different can it be from the World’s Greatest Comics Magazine? How different do readers want it to be?
When we talked about Fantastic Four #587 before, I’d mentioned how Hickman plots like someone with a design background. Every character beat is well-considered and gels with the others. The plot movements fit nicely together, even if the energy’s sometimes lacking. He engineered himself a unique opportunity here, so it’s a shame that this entry into the brave new world is so flat.
(More on TIME.com: The Comic Book Club: Fantastic Four’s Finale)
DOUGLAS: Mostly what it’s missing for me is what Tharg the Mighty used to call “thrill-power”: the wow-cool factor whose presence or absence is often the difference between good Fantastic Four stories and bad Fantastic Four stories. Epting’s good at character acting, at domestic scenes, at people sitting around and chatting–which this issue has a whole lot of for the first issue of what used to be Marvel’s flagship superhero series. (A four-page scene of the team sitting around eating dinner? In a 24-page story?) That makes sense in a kind of ground-level espionage/suspense story like Epting’s work on Captain America, and I can understand why he and Hickman would’ve gone for the least Jack Kirby-like approach to storytelling they could devise; the problem is that the low-key route they’ve taken is kind of dull. The one big action scene in here is so pro forma that after reading the issue for the first time I couldn’t remember if there’d been one, and for all the characters’ talk about building the future, there’s nothing particularly futuristic about what’s happening on the page.
EVAN: See, the thing that rankles me is that Hickman won me back with the ‘last’ issue of Fantastic Four. The emotions in that issue made me really curious as to how he’d create a new springboard for the post-Johnny continuity. But, really, FF #1 doesn’t pick up from the issue preceding it. Oh, we’re told that the characters are hurting but something about it doesn’t ring true. They’re in new suits, they’re talking fancy projects, they’re giving Spidey a tour. Yet we’re not given a sense of how Reed, Ben and Sue have bridged the gap; we’re just plunked down into the new space.
And, yeah, the Crazy Idea Big Science stuff was sorely lacking in this issue. You don’t start with AIM–terrorist scientists, mind you–and not give the reader some big idea to gnaw on. Too much teasing went on here, all of it about stuff we don’t know that we’re supposed to care about. Compare this to Xombi last week, where ideas came at your eyeballs hot and heavy. FF–no matter what it stands for–needs that OMGWTF plot beat (as in, that guy eats planets) to really make it sing.
And that really atonal cliffhanger is not the kind of OMGWTF I’m talking about, either.
(More on TIME.com: The Comic Book Club: Xombi and Fear Itself: Book of the Skull)
GRAEME: Again, FF #1 just felt really light to me – It felt like a collections of scene-setting bits that should appear in between the actual meat of various stories, instead of a full issue in-and-of itself. It didn’t help that there was a lot of exposition (Hey, Reed’s dad showed up! We set up the Future Foundation and redesigned our costumes and everything in between issues! AND THIS IS HOW WE ARE FEELING) instead of the readers actually getting to see those things happening… I can imagine that Hickman probably wanted a new status quo for his new series, but the way it was introduced, with Sue telling us via Spider-Man, was just weak, as if Hickman lost his nerve while writing the book and wanted to explain everything.
You’re both right that there’s nothing particularly futuristic about this book, for all its posturing – we’ve seen all of these tropes before, from the “death” of a member, to a replacement coming from another franchise, to Reed’s dad being a time traveler, to Doom joining the team, in earlier runs on Fantastic Four. And the sheer genericism of the jailbreak sequence (seriously, the villain essentially says “You’ll be sorry! Bwah-ha-ha!” and then escapes) just underscores the idea that this is, instead, an exercise in nostalgia and revisiting old tropes instead of doing anything new. It’s especially unfortunate that it comes out on the same day as this week’s Ultimate Spider-Man, which also centers around a jailbreak and, even though it too is generic and familiar, does so, so much better with the idea.
Douglas is entirely correct: There’s no thrill-power to this book. The problem is, this book should be ALL ABOUT the thrill-power.