Written by Cullen Bunn
Illustrated by Tom GrummettFEAR ITSELF TIE-IN XXXX XXXXX…one of the most beloved heroes in the Marvel Universe — is now the willing avatar of the Serpent’s malice– an engine of discord cutting an unstoppable path of destruction through the heart of New York City! How did the Serpent’s Hammer seduce him so easily? Can the rest of the XXXXXXX stop him before he levels the entire city in the name of his dark master?
Confession time: I haven’t read any of The Sixth Gun. Boo hiss, I know. I’ve been meaning to check it out for a while, but it’s always easier to just pick up the first issue of something new than to catch up with something in progress. With that in mind, I figured I would pick up Cullen Bunn’s Fear Itself: FF tie-in to get a feel for his writing, as well as enjoy some Tom Grummett art. Have I been successfully tempted to check out more of Bunn’s work? Follow the cut and see.
The story of this issue is pretty simple: we follow around the Worthy-fied Thing – now known as Angir – as he busts up New York City and fights the FF. Of course, there’s more too it then that. Since Johnny’s death in “Three,” The Thing has been quiet, depressed, and sulky, but we haven’t really gotten much more than that from him in FF. In this issue we get a peek into Ben’s admittedly addled head, and truly get the brunt of how Johnny’s death has affected him. The actions of the Breaker of Souls and the words of the creepy barnacle things – nice touch on making them speak, by the way – are entirely Angir’s, but the self-loathing interior narrative? I’m almost certain that’s Ben, through and through. If you never read Kirby and Lee’s Fantastic Four – in which case how many times must I remind you to do that – Ben was constantly upset about his appearance, viewing himself as more monster than man. Eventually he overcame his low self-esteem, but nothing makes someone regress like losing someone that is close to you. Reading Ben’s narration really makes it apparent how hard Johnny’s death has hit him, and it hits the reader equally hard.
Artist Tom Grummett is most well-known for his work with DC in the early and mid-90s, and while his technique has improved, his style hasn’t changed too much. Of course, that isn’t a bad thing. Like a lot of artists of DC’s from that time, Grummett picks and chooses from the styles of various 60s and 70s masters, and then loosens up the lines a little bit, allowing for a different, more raw energy than the crisp styles of Buscema and his like. This works particularly well with Mr. Fantastic – whose wildly stretched out limbs actually look like rubber, rather than the solid plastic many artists many artists come up with – and with that hammer Angir is swinging’ around. Seriously, Grummett is throwing those things around with as much force as John Romita Jr. was in Avengers #15. Those guys are going to break something, at this rate!
The only things that I would consider problematic issue stem from its nature as an event comic, and not from any fault of Bunn’s. Okay, maybe one fault: opening up this issue made me feel like I had picked up a comic that was missing some pages. I understand that Bunn wants us to feel like we’ve been thrust into madness – isn’t that the point of this event? – but even so, there’s no real “opening” bit to give us just the slightest thing to hold onto, and it hurts the comic a bit. As such, this one-shot isn’t the kind of thing that you’ll just pick up to reread on a whim a few years from now; it really only “works” if you’re in the process of reading “Fear Itself,” and it really only has the previously mentioned emotional resonance if you’ve been reading Fantastic Four/FF. Still, that’s just the difficulty that comes with writing an event tie-in that 1) isn’t part of an ongoing story, 2) is a one-shot, rather than a mini, and 3) is set in the middle of the event, rather than at the beginning or the end. Considering the preceding points, I can’t say I fault Bunn too much.
This isn’t a great comic, but Bunn and Grummett try their best to make sure it isn’t just a waste of paper. The two were given the almost impossible task of making a good one-shot featuring some of Marvel’s most important characters without actually… well, doing anything, and they managed to do a lot better than one might expect (not a slight against Bunn or Grummett, of course, just a comment on these sorts of tie-ins). If you’ve been reading Fear Itself and/or FF, giving this a read certainly won’t hurt – quite the opposite, really – but if you haven’t, then I can’t say I blame you if you pass this one by.
Final Verdict: 6.0 – Browse
