Well, we’d theorized. In addition to a skip month for “Hawkeye” in October, September will see the end of Fraction’s runs on “Fantastic Four” and “FF” due to an incredibly heavy workload.
Fraction will be replaced by Karl Kesel on “Fantastic Four” starting with #13 in October and Lee Allred on “FF” with #12 in September, and “Fantastic Four” #12 and “FF” #11 will mark the end of Fraction’s run as writer of the series. He has outlined the rest of his story, according to the article, and both Kesel and Allred will take the stories to their concluding points with #16 for both series.
Fraction is kind of at the top of the comic world now. On top of the critically acclaimed “Hawkeye” at Marvel and his two Fantastic books, he’s got “Casanova” waiting to come back, “Sex Criminals” and “Satellite Sam” at Image (as well as the announced upcoming “ODY-C”) and now “Inhumans” for Marvel post-“Infinity.” That’s a lot, even for someone as talented and prolific as Fraction. So it only makes sense that one book would have to come to an end to lighten the load — and in the case of Fraction’s work here, two intertwined titles make quite a lot of sense.
See, “Fantastic Four”/”FF” was always a slightly limited concept, in that at some point the Fantastic Four would have to end their vacation and come back to relieve the FF. The two books were interwoven in that fashion since the beginning and you could tell Fraction always had a converging endgame in mind for the two books, so tying them off now doesn’t seem to be too much of a shock — even if those books are some of our favorites here at Multiversity.
We will certainly miss Fraction on both titles, but especially on “FF” if only because of moments like this:
and this:
and this:
But we still look forward to see what Kesel and Bagley as well as the Allred brothers bring to their respective works on each series.
