Jonathan Hickman gives you your money’s worth as he crams his first volume of “Fantastic Four” with a number of interesting sci-fi storylines worthy of Marvel’s cosmic silver age tales. Reed Richards tries to answer a challenge he set for himself - “Solve everything” - which leads him to a parallel dimension full of other Reed Richards who are tasked with solving everything in every universe. The down side is that no Reed Richards has time for his Sue Storm and kids so they fall by the wayside; Reed must decide what is more important, his relentless pursuit of scientific answers - or his family?
Other storylines feature Johnny and Ben going on holiday to another world and finding it ravaged by Ultron and various other characters; while the last, and maybe best, is the least ambitious of the bunch with Franklin Richards (Reed and Sue’s son) celebrating his birthday with a certain webslinger showing up for a surprise visit.
Hickman can certainly do cosmic very well with his massive storylines which play at a riotous pace - one panel shows Ben fighting robots, the next Johnny is following a stranger into an underground facility, then there’s aliens appearing, then a massive mysterious figure towers over the horizon, then shots of futuristic cities and dying suns, and so on. While I appreciate the range of events Hickman crams into his stories, I feel it’s too much. So much happens so quickly that it has the opposite effect of impressing itself on the reader - it just washes over you. It’s too much to digest in so small a timeframe that even if you do take it slowly, you find yourself asking simple questions that are never answered in the comic; the main one being, “why is this happening?” which is applicable to almost every other page in the book.
I certainly prefer this kind of complaint - it’s too imaginative! - to the more usual complaint of superhero comics which is “they’re just hitting one another - this is boring”. I feel that if Hickman had taken a slower approach, built up the storylines, the characters, the book would’ve had a bigger impact than simply throwing all manner of quirky concepts in and hoping it’ll gel into a story of some kind.
Which is why I much preferred the birthday storyline the most. It’s a simple concept - a kid’s birthday party in the Baxter Building - which has a great moment with Spiderman showing up and making Franklin’s day by taking him for a swing around the building. What kid doesn’t love Spiderman? At least in the Marvel Universe he’s real and that kid can experience the real thing. It’s a really sweet moment. But the story is filled with human moments between the characters (some of whom aren’t even human) and that’s what’s missing from the higher concepts of the bigger, bombastic stories featured earlier in the book. To be fair there is one moment in the weird end of the world on another world storyline where Franklin shares a sandwich with the futuristic stranger that was really good. But I still have no idea what that story was about, so maybe Hickman could work on explaining what’s going on in the stories better than just hoping the reader doesn’t notice and just moves to the next scene.
As it is, “Fantastic Four, Volume 1” is a promising start by Hickman with some great art, some suitably big space/science storylines and some cool set pieces but the overall impression it left me with was strangely unsatisfying and left me wondering - what changed for the characters from the first page to the last? Nothing. Oh...