With “Fantastic Four” #8, Dan Slott continues his own take on the classic confrontation of the first family and Doctor Doom, with Galactus thrown in for good measure. However, the issue is a jarring combination of styles that fall short on delivering something unique and a coherent whole.
Written by Dan SlottCover by Esad Ribic
Illustrated by Aaron Kuder, Stefano Caselli, David Marquez & Reilly Brown
Colored by Matt Yackey
Lettered by VC’s Joe Caramagna“HERALD OF DOOM” continues with “FIRST-WORLD POWER”! Latveria is about to take its rightful place on the world stage. Thanks to the benevolence and ingenuity of your beloved leader, Victor Von Doom, Latverians will soon know a new age of peace and prosperity! All of this shall come to pass — as long as we can repel these four nefarious foreign invaders who have illegally entered our beloved country! Death to the Fantastic Four!
The Fantastic Four are, unarguably, comic’s royalty. One could argue that the entire Marvel Universe is a long series of spin-offs from the concepts, explorations and notions first introduced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby on this book. So, it is only reasonable that any creator involved on telling the quartet’s story attempts to create something special, while still honouring what came before.
And it is perhaps precisely on this balance that Dan Slott’s script and plot face problems, made clear on issue #8. There is a sense of disconnection, from how the story is evolving to how characters behave, and talk that strike as being out of place and tacked on at the same time.
Before dwelling into that, there is a lot of positive aspects to be found on the art delivered by a vast array of talented artists, but mostly from Kuder. First of all, issues with a lot of collaborators such as this one can struggle to find their footing on presenting a consistent art style. Credits go to editorial for being able to pick and choose the more suited artist to different moments of the narrative, be that the main adventure, or the side plots happening on the opposite side of the world, most predominantly with Franklin Richards.
Still, it is on Kuder’s main entry that the issue takes off visually. There is a lot of opportunity offered by Slott’s script – from portraying a fallen Galactus, to delivering the details of the medieval streets of Latveria – and Kuder surely rises to the occasion to portray them beautifully. His sense of movement is energetic and dynamic, without losing sight of key facial expressions; the duality of the alien desperation in Galactus’s eyes is a sigh to behold, no pun intended.
Other highlights by the remaining artists can be traced to how specific traps were designed for each member of the Fantastic Four, to how the arrogant nobility of Doctor Doom is conveyed using his body language, down to the manner he uses his arms, hands and posturing to reflect his sense of grandeur.
Yackey is a key player on “Fantastic Four” #8, as he becomes the unifying thread across all artists. His color choices remain consistent throughout the issue, be it on the energy signature of Doom, Victorious or the Fantastic Four’s several members. His urban pallete is just as impressive as his more cosmic tendencies.
However, there are some relevant problems with Slott’s choices for character motivation, dialogue and overall direction, both within these pages, but even more when analysing those choices on key arcs and adventures that came before.
Maybe what most readers will observe more quickly is that Slott, intentionally, has chosen to portray the family and Doom on their more classic, archetypical interpretations. Doom is megalomaniacal. Reed is the ultimate father figure. Johnny will try to be charming and seduce all the ladies around him. And while this is not a bad thing unto itself, it can only succeed if there is something truly unique about it, to set it aside from the myriad of past tales that used such approach. The struggle that “Fantastic Four” #8 faces is that this style fails to harken back to a golden age of comics, while it also comes up short of being innovative. At the end, it simply feels out of place, like a story found on the long boxes of old, unimpressive and unremarkable.
Continued belowIt can be more jarring when framed in context of what came before, especially on how these key characters evolved during the ‘Secret Wars’ event, later on during Bendis’s further examination of Doom during “Infamous Iron Man,” or even as part of “Marvel: Two in One.” It is almost as if the script requires readers to abandon those pieces to embrace this current tone. It works in opposition of that, rather than building layers on top of it.
As a consequence of this direction, a lot of the plot choices and dialogues follow suit. It stops being surprising and charming to see Victorious slowly appreciating Johnny’s infatuation. Or how Doom falls to his own arrogance and pride, visually even.
All in all, “Fantastic Four” #8 reads like a beautiful reinterpretation of a story the readers have experienced many times before, without a natural sense of progression to what came before it, or even building to something new within this very volume. Hopefully there are still twists and turns in store, but so far, “Fantastic Four” still did not find a voice that makes it modern, and yet respectful, to what came before.
Final Verdict: 6.4 – Despite a beautiful and effective visual narrative, “Fantastic Four” #8 misses the opportunity of being as remarkable as the first family can be.
