The Fantastic Four has always been a comic that stood out from the pack, and there are many reasons for that. It has a sense of family, the four balance each other perfectly in terms of personality, the team has a great rogue's gallery, their powers are visual and fun - well, the list goes on and on. But one of my favorites is the fact that their adventures were (almost) always based in science fiction rather than fantasy. Their stories are certainly incredible, as they tackle alien monsters, armies of super-powered villains and heroes, god-like beings, powerful kings, undersea races and even their own children - but it all has some basis (however tenuous) in the real world.
Where Superman had Mr. Myxptlyx (or however he spells it), Batman had Bat-Mite, and the Justice League often fought demons and other mystic menaces, at Marvel the stories about magic were generally confined to the adventures of Dr. Strange and (occasionally) Thor. Even the FF's wildest opponent, The Impossible Man, had a scientific explanation.
So the mini-series Fantastic Four: True Story takes the team to a realm they've rarely visited - a world of magic. The series centers around a problem in the world of fiction - something is affecting the content of books.
The FF launches into that world and finds it's being affected by Nightmare, one of Doctor Strange's oldest foes, and they must find a way to defeat that powerful menace.
This series isn't as bad as I'd feared it was going to be - it started out reading like a strange version of Classic Illustrated - but writer Paul Cornell has taken it in interesting and unexpected directions - but it still ends up being a Cliff's Notes version of literature that's in the public domain.
The artwork by Horacio Domingues and Rick Burchett is well-suited to storybook illustrations, but doesn't capture the FF well.
So it's not a bad effort, but it's not a compelling read, either. The story is a good argument for keeping the science in the Fantastic Four's fiction.
Grade: C
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