Alex Ross has made no secret of his love for the work of Jack Kirby & Stan Lee, so it should come as zero surprise the artist picked their crowning achievement as the subject for his first OGN as artist and sole writer. But longboxes and bookshelves are littered with stories trying to serve The King and The Man and falling short. Can Ross capture the Kirby Krackle and the Lee Lyricism on his own? Absolutely.
Written & Illustrated by Alex RossCover by Alex Ross
Colored by Alex Ross with Josh Johnson
Lettered by Ariana MaherIt’s a rainy night in Manhattan and not a creature is stirring except for… Ben Grimm. When an intruder suddenly appears inside the Baxter Building, the Fantastic Four — Mister Fantastic (Reed Richards), the Invisible Woman (Susan Storm Richards), the Human Torch (Johnny Storm), and the Thing (Ben Grimm) — find themselves surrounded by a swarm of invading parasites. These carrion creatures composed of Negative Energy come to Earth using a human host as a delivery system. But for what purpose? And who is behind this untimely invasion? The Fantastic Four have no choice but to journey into the Negative Zone, an alien universe composed entirely of anti-matter, risking not just their own lives but the fate of the cosmos!
Fantastic Four: Full Circle is the first longform work written and illustrated by acclaimed artist Alex Ross. With bold, vivid colors and his trademark visual storytelling, Ross takes Marvel’s first team of super heroes to places only he can illustrate.
FF: Full Circle succeeds for several reasons. The first is the successful pairing of creator and subject matter. Ross does a lot of technique expansion on the visual side of this book, but he’s not trying to wow the reader with some fresh, heretofore undiscovered take on Marvel’s first family. One of Ben’s late-night snacks is interrupted by a visitor to the Baxter Building that unleashes a swarm of creatures from the Negative Zone. After defeating the intruders, the quartet don antimatter-cancelling uniforms (but still shorts for ol’ Grimm) and head into the Zone to find out who sent the attack.
The book aims for a ‘lost annual’ feel from the Lee/Kirby era, albeit one illustrated by Ross. At 64 pages, the story zips by at a speed juuuuust fast enough to maintain suspension of disbelief, as all the best superhero stories do. Ross shows he’s as much of a student of Lee as Kirby when it comes to dialogue from any of the Four or any other characters, some of whom Ross pulls from surprising places in FF history. Issue #51 (“This Man, This Monster!”) is such an essential building block to the story Ross tells here I’m actually surprised a reprint of it wasn’t included as backmatter; perhaps for a future reissue? Although given how well Ross handles recapping the necessary parts of it here, I never felt it was missing other than wanting it for compare-contrast exercises.
So Ross succeeds in telling a good Kirby/Lee-era FF story. But Full Circle also succeeds by showing us that story in a completely new way, even if that newness is grounded in the Kirbyisms we all know and love.
One of my earlier Alex Ross discoveries was actually not about Ross directly, but rather Bruce Timm. In his issue of Modern Masters, Timm was asked about Ross’s style of drawing, to which he mentioned how good Ross was at mimicking the Timm/animated style. The book included a few pencil sketches of a stripped-down animated-style Superman with the facial structure of Ross’s Kingdom Come man of steel. I know this seems super-obvious now, but just seeing Ross drawing in a different style made me realize how much of Ross’s painted work I enjoyed because of the different medium he was using versus his storytelling choices of panel arrangement, poses, body language, acting, and the like. Full Circle gives us a Ross ditching the paintbrush, for the most part, for a pen&ink technique combined with color palette that aims to shove the Ross aesthetic closer to the Kirby original it is taking so many cues from. And boy does it work!
Continued belowI’m not entirely sure Ross eschewed the painted technique for the whole book, as Full Circle starts with the same type of double-page origin spread as his DC books with Paul Dini. If this and the ‘flashback’ panels later were pulled off with “just” pencil shadings and colors, then I’m even more impressed. But going from that style to a more obvious pencil-shaded & flat colors gives the reader a more effective transition to a different aesthetic than just switching to Benday dots like a Lichtenstein-lite filter.
All the usual Alex Ross art hallmarks are there in Full Circle (photorealistically detailed environments and realistically proportioned figures) to help sell the ‘reality’ of this story. But what Ross adds on top of that structure with this flat color palette is a way to squeeze much more Lee/Kirby-era emotion out of each scene in ways a naturalistic one just doesn’t allow you to do.
Nobody would accuse this comic of being subtle, with all the double-page spreads, elongated diagonal panels & extended figures paying as much homage Neal Adams’s 70’s heyday as Kirby, and Ross getting to play with Kirby’s collage techniques. But anyone cracking this book open looking for subtlety. . . I don’t know what to tell you. What I can tell you is Full Circle is a cracking good Fantastic Four exploration adventure with all the right Silver Age foundations without feeling like a retread or nostalgia act.
