The Fantastic Four have been waiting for a writer like Jonathan Hickman.
While various approaches have been taken in recent years to Marvel’s ‘first family’, often emphasising the ‘family’ angle while torn between retro, silver age callbacks to the Lee/Kirby originals and current comic book fashions, none of these variations have really stuck.
Most spent far too much time revisiting Lee/Kirby creations and not enough of their page-count actually trying to match the invention of those early issues.
What Hickman brings to the usual elements of family-friendly adventure is a genuinely sharp high-concept imagination. While ‘Fantastic Four’ should probably never be a hard-SF book – apart from anything else, most SF comics sell terribly – Hickman writes stories that are the best kind of populist sci-fi.
In this first volume of Hickman’s ‘FF’ run (following on from his ‘Dark Reign: Fantastic Four’ mini-series, which you don’t need to read as prep for his run but which is nonetheless highly recommended) Hickman uses familiar SF tropes like parallel dimensions, time travel and cloning, but on an amped-up, superheroic scale.
Refreshingly, he ties these big ideas to logical, compelling plotting, a sense of scientific and personal ethics, and a continuing emphasis on family not just as a source of heartwarming comedy moments or off-the-peg angst, but as a major thematic plank; family as a source of commitment, and as a burden of responsibility.
The first story in this collection, ‘Solve Everything’ focuses heavily on Reed Richards. In fact, with Reed encountering an organisation of parallel versions of himself, there’s a lot of Reed to go around. Hickman avoids the usual nutty professor cliches and provides a great story built around the burden of Reed’s genius, without drifting too far into too much post-’Civil War’ angst/tedium. There’s a cosmic scale to the story, thankfully without either devolving into outright fantasy or slowing to a crawl under the weight of high concepts, ‘Planetary’-style.
Dale Eaglesham provides both pencils and inks on these three issues, coloured by Paul Mounts, and covers all the bases of dramatic imagery, fluid action and solid characterisation. Eaglesham’s Reed is buff without being a standard superhero hunk, and he can draw children as something other than tiny adults, an underrated skill in comic artists.
The other two issues in the book, penciled by Neil Edwards with inks by Andrew Currie and Mounts maintaining continuity on colours, shift attention to the Richards kids, Franklin and Valerie. Surprisingly, this emphasis really works – Hickman writes Franklin and Valerie better than any writer I’ve read before. These kids are funny, brash, and possibly smarter and braver even than their parents. They’re child protagonists who actually work, charmingly portrayed without being overly cutesy.
Edwards isn’t quite the artist Eaglesham is, although he’s clearly been picked because his style is similar: his characterisation isn’t quite as solid, with faces that are a bit less convincing and less consistent than under Eaglesham’s watch, but he does a sound job, and draws the hell out of the big stuff.
Although the latter two issues are standalones, there are threads which start in ‘Solve Everything’ which roll through both the later issues. Hickman is treating this as an episodic serial, and seems to be building in threads for a long run. The last issue in particular raises a lot of good, big story questions which leave me eager to read the next volume.
Smart, fun and thoughtful superhero comics, Hickman’s run on ‘Fantastic Four’ is clearly one to watch, and well worth getting on board at the ground floor.
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‘Fantastic Four vol.1′ is out now in hardcover, and available to pre-order as a paperback. Considering the minor disparity in pricing, I recommend the hardcover, which is a beautifully presented and well-designed book.
