Fantastic Four #11

Matt Fraction's Fantastic Four started out as in incredibly promising potential for an adventure beyond the scope of imagination, especially from the man who brings us Hawkeye every week. Unfortunately it soon became a painfully generic 'time/space adventure story, and it's kind of amazing that something like that became generic. The planets they've been to have been only mildly interesting, and pretty much all the time periods they've visited have been pretty 'safe' in terms of storytelling. There's been no inter-dimensional travel, no reality-defying worlds, not even any parallel universes visited. FF has been infinitely more out-there, and it's the one set back at home.

This issue starts to get into some of that more bizarre territory I've been hoping form even if just a bit, but it's still not quite up to standards. For starters, Mark Bagley's artwork is incredibly off this issue. I don't know if it was the inks of Joe Rubinstein or not, but things were a lot less detailed, and generally peoples faces looked awkward and blocky any time there was a close view. And the fight scenes in this issue were particularly confusing.

I was definitely excited about this issue in the first few pages. One of the things I loved most about Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four run, and a key factor in his run being the one that made me truly like the Fantastic Four in general, was the utterly adorable snarky genius that was Reed's daughter, Valeria. Reed's always such a stuffy, out-of-touch, know-it-all; it was infinitely amusing to see him constantly outsmarted by his own not-even-preteen daughter. Icing on the cake when Reed's time-traveling father constantly took Valeria's side. But up until about two issues ago it seemed that Fraction had forgotten she was a hyper-genius and was writing her like any other little girl. But lately she's finally been showing her rebellious genius side and I'm loving it. After the big argument that ended the previous issue, Reed has given his daughter control of the next destination to both mend the father-daughter relationship, and get a new opinion on where to go next for the cure now that he's stuck. So where does Val choose? A crazy-futuristic planet that utterly worships her. So promising for potential Reed character development at the hands of his daughter completely overshadowing him.

But this issue barely lingers on that idea and instead jumps right into an action story. A pretty damn unique one, but a superhero vs. supervillain story nonetheless in a setting that had high potential to be so much more. Putting that bias aside, like I said, there was a lot to like about this particular story. I mean, a futuristic planet is being harassed by historical terrorists. People who look backwards, pine for the 'good old days', so they screw with society using literal 'time bombs.' Bombs that literally distort time. They cut and paste patches of reality across time, but not space. That's... just... so wild. But the idea is a bit too science-y for its own good, and unraveling this problem ends up being some crazy dialogue heavy mass of mumbo jumbo that I found really hard to follow. There was a point where they explained the whole concept with simple analogies, and yet that didn't seem to hold for the solution, so most of the issue dragged on with lengthy attempts to explain what the hell was happening when things seemed to stop happening. We did finally meet FF's 'Future Johnny,' so to see the pieces starting to fall into place was nice.

In Conclusion: 3/5

There were a LOT of great ideas in this issue, even ignoring the missed potential, but they were presented in a way that was far too complex for its own good and then some. Add in the fact that Mark Bagley's artwork just wasn't up to his standards, and this promising issue ends up being pretty much as so-so as most of the recent issues have unfortunately been.