fajrdrako | Fantastic Four #587... (Reply)

I read Fantastic Four #587, the much-publicized death issue.

I am not a big fan of Jonathan Hickman's plotting or characterization, which is why I haven't been buying this comic on a regular basis; and Steve Epting isn't a favourite artist, either. He makes Johnny Storm look like DeForest Kelley - what's with that? Johnny should look like, say, Daniel Burda. Sadly... not here. If Ben hadn't been wearing a green shirt, I'm not sure I could have told them apart.

For the first half of the story, I was thinking, "this is hokey", and "this is the kind of story Stan Lee was writing in the 1960s; this comic hasn't matured or progressed at all."

But then I started to be drawn in.

Now, I tend to like it when the Fantastic Four are together, and all in the same story. This story has them all over the place; Sue's having an adventure with (or, rather, against) Namor; Johnny and Ben are with Val and Franklin and other children in Annihilus's dimension; Reed is fighting Galactus. More or less. Well, at least Johnny and Ben were together.

I really enjoyed this exchange between Sue Storm and Prince Namor:

If I hadn't known from the publicity it was a big death issue, I wouldn't have guessed. It ends with Johnny Storm going down under a billion Annihilus-style insectoid monsters, not so different from a million other typical cliffhanger endings, though perhaps with more build-up than ususal. Val even promises they'll come back to save him. So, I would normally ask myself: how will Johnny get out of this one? Confidently assuming he will.

It seems he won't. At least, not in the short term.

By that time I'd long since totally bought into the story. The children have to escape from the dimension they're in; of the two adults there (Johnny and a depowered Ben Grimm), one has to take the kids through the portal and the other has to push the button on the outside. What kind of escape-portal design is that? Ben, of course, true to form, plans to stay outside, but Johnny pushes him through and slams the transparent door.

Ben is distraught:

They touch hands through the glass like in Star Trek:

Johnny has a moment of glory:

And the last panel is truly moving:

Other things I liked:

Ben Grimm looking a little like Nick Fury, with a big gun
Leech masking Franklin's powers with his presence
Johnny is usually the immature jokester of the family: nice to see him doing something grand and heroic
Reed is taken seriously. This shouldn't even be an issue, but sadly, compared to some FF comics I've read... it is.

Thing I didn't like so much:

Three different adventures for four characters - I'd rather have one massive adventure featuring all of them. This is like an anthology book of ongoing short stories.
"Goddess Mother X - the Worldmind". How silly is that? Okay, maybe I shouldn't gripe, in a story that has Annihilus and his monsters in it, but... It isn't as if we get one big bad without personality: we get three threats, each villainous entity as uninteresting and uncharacterized as the last. At least Sue gets to square off against Namor, who has personality to spare.
Val , as usual, strikes me as creepy rather than sympathetic. How old is she supposed to be?

So that's the end of a long-running comic, and next month it's FF #1. What will "FF" stand for?