Fantastic Four #560

I was slightly late to the Marvel party, joining in about two years after the first issue of the Fantastic Four. (Of course, to most of today's readers, this makes me a geezer.)

I liked all the superheroes, including Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, Daredevil, Giant-Man and The Avengers - but my favorite was definitely the Fantastic Four, which I started collecting around the time of the two-issue battle between the Hulk and the Thing (which, without looking it up, I believe was in issues #24 and 25).

The comic lived up the the tagline: "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine!" That's because it featured Stan Lee and Jack Kirby operating at the peak of their creative powers. Each issue was bigger, more dramatic, more exciting than the one before it, but included very human elements, including lots of humor and romance.

Lee and Kirby created the greatest villain in comics (Doctor Doom), threw in a super-powered race (The Inhumans), the first black superhero (Black Panther), the first God-like villain (Galactus), and a vast array of supporting characters both small (Alicia Masters) and big (The Watcher).

After 102 issues Lee and Kirby went their separate ways, and the FF continued under an assortment of talented writers and artists - but few truly new concepts were created. It sometimes seemed that the book was continuing strictly on inertia.

The latest team to tackle the FF's adventures has built their reputation on creating big stories. Writer Mark Millar and artist Bryan Hitch, along with inkers Andrew Currie and Matt Banning and colorist Paul Mounts, are doing their best to bring the cosmic back to the magazine.

And so far they've been successful. The present issue has the team facing a mysterious and powerful team calling themselves the New Defenders. How powerful is this team? Well, as we saw at the end of the last issue, they've managed to capture the Human Torch, Doctor Doom and Galactus.

The reasons the three have been captured are spelled out in this issue, and it's again a big, end-of-the-world story. Perhaps my only problem with it is that the story hinges on a plot point that's directly lifted from an old episode of Star Trek (the Original Series), but that's a minor quibble.

The artwork is fantastic - I really think Hitch is this generation's Neal Adams or Jim Steranko, in that he is turning out work that is inventive, amazingly (if not insanely) detailed and compelling. You could kill lots of time just admiring some of the panels in this comic.

Where Millar is involved, I always have to proceed cautiously. He has some tremendous ideas, but he's awfully quick to sacrifice character in service of the story he wants to tell. The best example is Civil War, wherein Reed Richards and Tony Stark become the worst villains in Marvel history in order to justify the story. Writers have spent all their energy since then redeeming those characters. But, as someone once said, I digress.

So far, this comic has been very impressive. In fact, the only thing that doesn't work for me is the covers, which seem to be exercises in artistic expression, rather than capturing the reader's attention on the stands. It doesn't help that the new FF logo is so small and easily overlooked. The art on this cover is amazing, but it takes close examination to figure out what's going on - and that's not the job of a cover.

This issue's cover is a good example - it's a thing of beauty, but it's also murky, a maelstrom of rain, lightning, flames - you really have to look close to make out the three figures.

But even if it had a blank cover, this book would be well worth buying. Millar and Hitch are testing the limits of the comic book, and there's no better proving ground than the Fantastic Four.

I'm not sure it's again the Greatest Comic Mag, but it's one of the best out there - and at this rate, it'll soon be wearing the crown again.

Grade: A-