Remember that time DC spent a whole month publishing #1,000,000 of each of their titles that were to take place one million years after the publication of “Action Comics” #1, and it was awesome? This isn’t that, but it was the closest comparison I could find as Jen Van Meter and Joanna Estep bring us “Fantastic Four’s” 100th Anniversary issue 47 years too early. Join us as we take a look into a future that just might be.
Written by Jen Van Meter
Illustrated by Joanna EstepA REMARKABLE ARTIFACT FROM THE FUTURE OF MARVEL COMICS! It’s 2061 and the world of the Fantastic Four has turned upside-down, complete with the granddaughter of Doom…and the Richards-Banner twins?
Alternate futures are one of those things in comic books that just feel so comic book-y. Because of the nature of their publishing, comic books often feel like they are chronicles of these vast universes that hold the tales of every corner of time and space held within. So, naturally, one of the things that arise from telling stories that cover every moment of the present and the past is “What will the future of this universe look like?” Eventually that question was asked enough that the amount of alternate futures that exist in comics now populate that majority of comics’ endless alternate universes, somewhat taking away from the poignancy of a story saying that this is a future that might happen.
Then, sometimes a comic comes along and says “This future will happen” with a force that makes you stop and actually consider that it might. The last time that happened was with “Daredevil: End Of Days” and now Marvel is presenting the 100th Anniversary issues of many of their titles as if we were just shy of 50 years in the future.
Of note: this is apparently the first issue of “Fantastic Four” that has been both written and illustrated by women. That doesn’t change the quality of the comic, mind you, but it is a Cool Thing to mention. The Fantastic Four have always struggled against the shackles of its nuclear family trappings and things like this thankfully make it able for the title to keep moving forward. Then again, it wouldn’t be able to move forward without the creative energy of those working on it in the first place.
The year is 2061. The Fantastic Four are legends lost to time. Time travel is illegal. And the FF are unlike anything you’ve ever seen. That’s the basic premise of this issue and the whole experiment of the 100th Anniversary special in and of itself: what will these comics look like in 2061? If you ask Jen Van Meter and Joanna Estep, then they might say that they’re not really much different from now in the same way that, if you think about it, “Fantastic Four” now isn’t that much different than what Jack Kirby and Stan Lee came up with in the 60s. The key is in the thematics. “Fantastic Four” at its core has always been Marvel’s First Family, and that focus is front and centre here as Van Meter and Estep weave a tale of a family separated by time and space trying to bring themselves back together. What that culminates in is a heart-warming feeling emanating from the issue as there is an assurance that, no matter what, even 100 years since their inception the Fantastic Four are always going to be that same family that raced into space against the Communists all those years ago.
That feeling of a heart-warming reunion, that showing for how everything new in this issue there’s just as much that hasn’t changed, really comes from Jen Van Meter’s writing. She nails the family aspect that permeates the issue, showing what happened to the Fantastic Four we knew between now and 2061 and creating a new generation of characters that have enough potential to become permanent mainstays of the book. While the new FF in the issue don’t quite get as much panel time as I would have liked (they really only exist to show that the team continued on in some form over time) the characters already seem to have nuanced inter-personal relationships and interactions; almost as if they had nearly 50 years of continuity that we haven’t seen (yet). They’re additions to the story that layer the idea of jumping forward with some credibility by creating characters ingrained in the continuity of the franchise while giving them unseen continuity that leads to idea that, hey, these could very well become genuine additions to the canon one day.
Continued belowVan Meter’s writing also plays into the other strength of “Fantastic Four”: sci-fi. Ever since the days of Reed Richards leading his own space race against the Communists, the Four have been at the forefront of Marvel’s science fiction writing. Well, seeing as Van Meter has propelled them nearly fifty years in the future, the science has also, and we see the story layered with Star Trek-esque science fiction (not too hard, but sounding smart enough that it might be) that, again, only adds to the credibility of the idea that this might be what comics are like in 2061. Then again, we might end up downloading comics to our retina projectors (the comiXolog-eye™) in 2061 so maybe our immersion only goes so far.
Jen Van Meter has built a story worthy of being the opener to this mini-event as it builds on the theme of family and propels it into the future of what might be. Thankfully, then, the artwork by Joanna Estep is able to back up that story with some great visuals. Just as Jen Van Meter put a focus on filling her writing with the sci-fi feeling of comic published almost 50 years from now, Joanna Estep’s art works to bring the feeling of a world that feels both familiar and new. This is the Marvel Universe, just changed by stories we have yet to experience. The bleeding edge feeling of Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta’s issues of “FF” feel like they have influenced this new presence as the world is built on a lived-in version of that clinical, shining technological world.
Then there’s the dimension-hopping. Because it’s the Fantastic Four, there’s always dimension-hopping. This is what shows Estep as an artist with immense imagination and the ability to create entire worlds on the page that feel real as they spread off into this distance. It’s one of those little things that could have made or broke this issue as the immersion created in Estep’s artwork, from the designs of the new FF that create a whole history without words to the look of the new Marvel Universe, is one of the main reasons that this experiment works. If this were to feel like just any other issue, it would have felt like a waste of time, to be blunt.
This is an experiment that could have very easily fell flat without the energy of the creators involved. Not to compare too much, but one of things that made “DC One Million” a book that holds up is that, even now, it still feels like a book handed back from the future. Whether this is a book that has that kind of lasting effect is for time to tell, but I can tell you now there is no reason to pass this up. The writing and the artwork wholly embrace the family-focused aspect of the Fantastic Four that makes it such a long-lasting title and builds around it a world that feels both new and familiar. Whether the rest of these 100th Anniversary can live up to this opener is something we’ll have to wait and see for, but this issue is an experiment that has paid off.
Final Verdict: 8.6 – A strong, experimental issue that fans of “Fantastic Four” should not pass up.
