A few issues in, Matt Fraction’s promised pan-dimensional adventure with Marvel’s First Family has finally gotten off the ground. By the end of his 3rd issue, it still remains to be seen whether this will be a journey worth taking.
Written by Matt Fraction
Illustrated by Mark Bagley– A new year on a new world! The Richards family rings in 365 days of adventure on a brand new planet!
– Someone’s having second thoughts. Really? Already?
– How long can Reed keep his secret? How long can anything be kept a secret when you’re travelling through time & space with your family…?
Matt Fraction is having something of a critical revival, as of late. His “Casanova” and “Hawkeye” have both received rampant critical success across the board. Is it any coincidence that these series’ have been Fraction operating at his most offbeat? His concurrent work on “FF” (with a lot of help from Mike Allred’s offbeat pop art sensibilities) looks to be headed more down that path, while “Fantastic Four” is frustratingly stuck being as conventional as it can be.
The Fantastic Four (six?) has just crossed through the portal and lightyears away from Earth as they know it. Reed looks to keep the research about his actively degrading state separate from the “adventure” that he and the gang are supposed to be having. The story is thusly presented as a Johnny Quest-esque trek into the unknown that results in our heroes in the clutches of a deadly planet and the combining of all of their abilities to try and escape by the end of the issue. Fraction has said that he’s attempting to evoke the “Lee & Kirby” sense of adventure in his run on “Fantastic Four.” It’s one thing to evoke that feeling and it’s another to write a comic that feels stuck in that past. It’s an okay comic, but it has no real aspiration to break new ground or be its own thing.
Beyond a plot that is straightforward and unmemorable, Fraction writes the characters as their most basic archetypes. Ben Grimm is the lonely monster he’s always been, Johnny Storm is the cocky goof, and the kids behave as annoying kids do. Speaking of Valeria and Franklin, not only do they not feel like the same kids that Jonathan Hickman was writing a few months ago, but they don’t feel like the same prematurely enlightened kids that Fraction wrote them as over in “FF.” They haven’t been given much to do yet, admittedly, but right now they’re just punchlines to bad jokes. None of the growth that Johnny Storm showed under Hickman is present here, which is to say that he is far more irresponsible than he should be at this point. There’s no doubt that Fraction is intentionally going broader here than he is in his other more successful comic books.
Unfortunately, much of the blandness of “Fantastic Four” has to do with Mark Bagley, who turns in his usual brand of serviceable cartooning, but doesn’t present the bigger moments of the issue as grandly as he could. Whether it was his final choice in the design or not, the planet that they land on is barren, grey, and ordinary. The threat is essentially an amorphous blob of tentacles with no other characteristics of note. The displays of power from both the heroes and the villain are equally amorphous, and lack much tension. The character design is appealing enough, but there are some problems that arise. More than once, it occurred to me that Franklin looks more grown up than he has been depicted in recent years. If this is a conscious choice, then it could turn out to be neat, but he still acts like a very young kid and because of that the effect is distracting at times. He looks an awful lot like Johnny Storm at some points, which creates a strange effect, even if you can easily differentiate between the two of them. So while the cartooning is handsome enough, the lack of detail causes problems in both engaging the reader in the plot and the characters. Bagley used a similar style to great effect in “Ultimate Spider-Man”, but he errs on the side of generic with “Fantastic Four.”
While Fraction and Bagley are terrific comic talents, whatever they’re doing here doesn’t amount to a book that begs to be read. “FF” and “Hawkeye” are titles that aim outside the realm of what the average comic book is trying to do. That is, they aren’t content to spend a whole issue throwing a team of cookie-cutter personalities against a generic bad guy. That’s what this book is right now, and with respect to Lee & Kirby (who are undisputed past-masters of the medium), that doesn’t work as well as it did over 600 issues ago. This team has the talent to push the series forward. Hopefully they will, but they haven’t yet.
Final Verdict: 5.7 – Browse. As average as average gets.
