FANTASTIC FOUR #60

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Monday, September 02, 2002

It's fair to say that Marvel's flagship title has not been what it once was for a very long time now. The last positive shakeup FANTASTIC FOUR had was the much maligned HEROES REBORN run some years back (which I will readily admit I enjoyed, if only because it provided the first fresh look at Marvel's First Family in years). Since then, several creative teams have attempted to breathe new life into the aging team without much success-until now.

Reading Mark Waid's first script on FANTASTIC FOUR is like reading a manifesto, but a well-written one. It's not an adventure story per se, nor is it the "week in the life" type of story it pretends to be, focusing on a PR expert's time spent with the team to determine how to make them more marketable. (The irony here is by no means subtle-one of the reasons the PR company's chief cites for the team's need for an overhauled image is that WIZARD hasn't hot-picked their comic for months. It appears that even in the Marvel Universe, that's used as a spurious yardstick for success. Any bets what their hot pick will be next month? And while we're at it, anyone else need a pimp?) Instead, Waid lays out the template for the shape of the team to come, or rather the team that always should have been. It's also a sly dig at those previous creative teams who have tried to make the First Family into just another superhero team, forgetting that they are a family first and foremost, then explorers, and only by default superheroes.

Granted, there's not always the most functional of families: the expert's first day on the job sees him witnessing a fight between Johnny and Ben in the backseat of an interdimensional transport, complete with Reed threatening to turn the thing around. Scenes like this, and the one in which Sue tries to get her little brother to tell her about his recent breakup, demonstrate just how little of the team's lives is directly focused on adventuring and how much of it has to do with their love for each other. The scene in which Ben discovers that rappers have written a song about him seems a bit misplaced, given that goal - and it doesn't help matters much that Waid writes rap like a white boy, and I don't mean Eminem. But when we get to hear what we've been waiting more than forty years to hear-Reed's reasons for making his family so visible, and having them choose such odd names-it not only makes the whole thing worthwhile, it also makes perfect sense. Pity it took four decades to do it, but why quibble?

Wieringo and Kesel's visuals are every bit as impressive as the script. I initially had my doubts, particularly given the science fiction opera-style of the cover, but by the end of this nine-cent wonder, you'll also have difficulty imagining the team ever looking any differently. Sure, it's a tad bit cartoonish, in the same vein as the art in the recent SUPERMAN books, but given the new "science fiction" direction in which Waid's taking the title, it may be the best artistic style to depict those strange new worlds the next few months are promising. Even the new logo suggests that SF feel - and it looks pretty damned good, besides.

I had mixed thoughts about the idea of pricing a book at nine cents simply to grab new readers, but I have no doubt that even had this book gone out at regular cover price, it would have grabbed those readers in spades. Few other books have provided better "jumping-on" points than this one does, and few other "reboots" have worked nearly as well. It's new approaches to old ideas like this that'll keep the Fantastic Four going for another forty years-and beyond.

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