Archive for Fantastic Four

Friday Night Fights: Plundered Pulverizin’!

Awright, kids, we got another great weekend ready to kick off, and we’re gonna kick it off the only way we know how — with FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Today’s battle comes from February 1978’s Fantastic Four #191 by Len Wein, George Perez, and Joe Sinnott, as the Thing, Mr. Fantastic, and the Human Torch take on the Plunderer and his minions.

And that’s whatcha call a room-clearing punch!

Everyone have a great weekend — see y’all on Monday!

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Friday Night Fights: Doooom!

Awright, ya long-eared varmints, it’s been a long week, and we all need a little dose of mayhem and chaos to kick off the weekend, which means it’s definitely time for… FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Tonight’s battle comes from September 2003’s Fantastic Four #500 by Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo, in which the Invisible Woman and the Thing use a temporarily magic-focused Dr. Doom as a pinata.

I’m just sorry I couldn’t put that last panel in here full-sized. But a two-page spread of Mike Wieringo’s glorious art would break the page layout — and possibly your brains, too.

See y’all on Monday, and have a Happy Easter, too.

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Violet Violence

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Green Lantern Corps #30

Guy Gardner, Sodam Yat, and Arisia, along with a few of the Guardians, travel to the planet Zamaron, home of the Star Sapphires — also known as the Violet Lanterns. This is a diplomatic mission — but also a spy mission. What are the Star Sapphires up to? Who are they going to ally with? The Star Sapphires have power rings attuned to Capital-L Love, but that doesn’t really make them good guys — they’re ruthless and obsessive and a bit creepy, which actually makes them really similar to the Guardians, come to think of it. Meanwhile, Kyle Rayner and another contingent of GLs are on the trail of a Sinestro Corps member named Kryb — she likes to kill GLs who are parents, kidnap their children, and raise them herself in the biological crib that grows out of her back. Ewww, Kryb is just about the creepiest and most unsettling Sinestro Corps member there is.

Verdict: Despite the presence of Kryb, I’m going to give this a thumbs down. The entire story is a fairly mushy muddle.

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Fantastic Four: True Story #4

Nightmare has apparently triumphed — Sue Storm and Ben Grimm are dead, the concept of fiction is dead, and Nightmare controls everything. Luckily, Reed and Johnny figure out a way to use the remnants of fiction to bring Sue, Ben, and the rest of their allies back to life and to conjure up an army of modern-day movie action-heroes and celebrity cheerleaders to beat up Nightmare’s army.

Verdict: Thumbs down. Parts of it are okay and fairly amusing, but wow, this just goes rattling all over the place, seemingly at random. Too weird, too chaotic, and it definitely fails to live up to what it could’ve been.

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Mysticism and Multiplicity

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Madame Xanadu #5

Time keeps moving forward — Nimue is now a fortuneteller in pre-Revolutionary France. She still needs her potions to maintain her youth, but she has the favor of Marie Antoinette. And the fortunetelling system she’s developed — the original Tarot cards — have revealed to her that bad times for France are on the way. After running into the Phantom Stranger again, she flees Paris and tells herself to stay out of trouble, but her sense of loyalty has her returning in an attempt to save the Queen. But can all her spells save her when Marie Antoinette decides she doesn’t want to be saved?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Beautiful art, nice cliffhanger. Decent stuff about Antoinette, too, who from a lot of the bios I’ve seen about her, was probably one of the least awful people in France during that period.

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Franklin Richards: Sons of Geniuses

Chris Eliopoulos and Marc Sumerak continue their stories about the son of Reed and Sue Richards, as we get a look at the various versions of Franklin and H.E.R.B.I.E. scattered around the multiverse, including Superhero Franklins, Monkey Franklin, Alien Franklin, Robot Franklin, Chicken Franklin, and many more.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Very cute story, very cute art. It’s a bit pricey, at $4, but it’s probably worth splurging on it every once in a while.

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The Rise of Magog

Justice Society of America #18

Well, he’s right there on the cover, isn’t he, so it’s not like this is a big spoiler — Magog, from the “Kingdom Come” series, has his big origin in this issue. Who is he? That’s a spoiler for a bit further down in this paragraph, so be warned, a’ight? Anyway, Gog has discovered that humans make war on each other, and he’s not happy about that at all. The JSA try to disarm the bad guys and keep them from taking hostages or killing anyone else, but Gog takes the villains out of the picture without killing them — he turns them into trees. Of course, that pretty much kills their consciousness and minds, so there’s not much difference, is there? Elsewhere, Citizen Steel is desperate to get his Gog-granted cure, Damage is enjoying his newly-repaired face, Hawkman is bloodthirstier than normal, and Power Girl is trying to find some allies in the weirdly hostile Earth-2. Oh, and David Reid, FDR’s grandson, gets hit with a rocket shell and killed. But with Gog around, that’s hardly likely to be permanent — and Gog likes improving people, too, maybe with a few cyber-enhancements and metal horns…

Verdict: I’m gonna thumbs-down it. This is getting stretched out more and more and more, and it’s way past time to start wrapping this up. I’m also not thrilled with taking a perfectly good character like David Reid and revamping him into the Kingdom Come Magog.

Fantastic Four: True Story #2

The Fantastic Four manage to save Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret, from Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” from hordes of demons, but the team learns that, here in the world of fiction, their own imaginations can alter the characters — Johnny accidentally starts Marianne talking in computer-jargon l33t-speak — and the fictional characters’ imaginations can alter them, too! Ben Grimm manages to save everyone, but the Dashwoods start re-imagining him as a heroic soldier of their own time period. So the FF, realizing they need some more allies, go visiting “Ivanhoe,” “Kubla Khan,” “Last of the Mohicans,” and “Frankenstein.” But the demons have other stories they can dig through, too, looking for their own villainous allies…

Verdict: Thumbs up. A bit confusing here and there, but I’m enjoying the ride so far.

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Truth is Fiction

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Fantastic Four: True Story #1

This is what they’re talking about when they talk “high concept”: a bunch of fictional superheroes travel through the universe of fiction and encounter a bunch of characters from fiction.

Basically, everyone on earth has lost interest in fiction. No one’s reading books, no one’s watching movies. And actually, something pretty nasty is happening within fiction itself — we see something dark and scary threatening Tarzan, Riki-Tiki-Tavi, and the heroes of M.R. James’ ghost stories. So Reed Richards invents the science of, well, let’s call it fictionography and creates an imaginary fictocraft that the FF can use to travel into the world of fiction. Once there, they meet their guide, Dante Alighieri, writer of — and a character in — “The Divine Comedy.” And the team’s first mission? Fight off a horde of imps and gremlins to protect the Dashwood sisters from Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility.”

Verdict: Thumbs up. There are some really funny moments in here — Johnny Storm, Ben Grimm, and a defeated monster surrounded by mimes; Ben and Johnny’s quarrel condensed down to basic script descriptions; Reed happily dropping a “Behold!” on everyone; the FF not understanding why Dante refers to them as “comic book characters;” and Ben dropping Jane Austen quotes while clobbering monsters.

I do wish the story was moving a shade faster, and I’ve got to quibble about some of the selections for the FF’s favorite fictional works — Reed Richards loving the “Josie and the Pussycats” movie and Ben Grimm loving “Of Mice and Men” just don’t really make sense. Reed is so a sci-fi fan, if only to scavenge the plots for new things to invent, and Ben seems like the type to go for either Mack Bolan novels or old action pulps.

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Manhunter #33

Kate, still trying to track down who’s killing scores of women in the Mexican deserts, gets ambushed in a pharamaceutical company by a bunch of superpowered security guards. Elsewhere, her mother and (I guess) dad learn that her (I guess) brother has gotten superpowers. Kate also runs into the Suicide Squad, not knowing that the Birds of Prey are on the way to bail her out.

Verdict: Thumbs down. I know I’m not as well acquainted with Manhunter’s backstory as I could be, but this story confused the tar outta me. Not real thrilled with the art either.

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The Return of Smilin’ Stan and Joltin’ Jack

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Fantastic Four: The Lost Adventure

Here’s something that completely got away from me for several weeks. A “Fantastic Four” story that should have been published in the 103rd issue in 1970. Artist extraordinaire Jack Kirby had turned in his pencils for the issue, but writer Stan Lee apparently needed more time to work on the dialogue, and by the time the story got put back on the publication schedule, the issue needed to be chopped up and altered even more to make it fit in with extra continuity. The altered story was published in issue #108, but Marvel has now reconstructed Stan and Jack’s original story here for the first time.

And what is our story? New York City is attacked by an evil genius who calls himself Janus the Mega-Man. He has technology that allows him to knock the stuffing out of the Thing and the Human Torch, and Mr. Fantastic worries that his weapons may be powerful enough to destroy the city, or even the entire world! Reed remembers a classmate named Janus who resembled the Janus who attacked New York and visits him in Kansas. But he was injured in an accident years ago and can’t get around without his crutches. Besides, he’s a complete milquetoast — surely he couldn’t be the maniac responsible. And in fact, it’s a case of good twin/evil twin — Janus the Mega-Man is a bully and thug lording his powers over his good but weak-willed brother. Can the FF find a way to defeat the Janus brothers before New York pays the price?

And that’s not all — the rest of the book is a breakdown of Kirby’s pencils on this issue, along with a reprint of the altered story that appeared in Issue #108, in which Janus is revamped as the Nega-Man, who gets his power from the Negative Zone.

Verdict: About a dozen very enthusiastic thumbs up. You just can’t go wrong with classic Kirby artwork. The story is both goofy and glorious, as only the best Silver Age stories can be. If I’ve got any quibbles, it’s where Stan Lee, in getting this story ready to publish in 2008, decided to modernize some of the story. There’s really no need to add references to DSL Internet connections or to the “Doonesbury” comic strip — they come across as incredibly anachronistic and confusing. An original story by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby just doesn’t need to be modernized to be relevant and cool.

This one’s a bit expensive. Getting it will set you back five bucks all by itself. But man alive, is it ever worth it.

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