PLOT & PENCILS: JIM LEE
SCRIPT: BRANDON CHOI
In the mid-1990s Marvel had a bit of a problem; anything X-Men and Spider-Man related was selling well, anything else really wasn't. The Avengers and its' satellite titles - Captain America, Iron Man, Mighty Thor and several smaller series - weren't selling well at all and neither was the venerable Fantastic 4. Part of the problem was a sequence of ever-convoluted storylines and retcons, most notably The Crossing event which saw Tony Stark outed as a bad guy, killed off and replaced by an alternate reality teenage version - this being in the days when Marvel would actually keep stupid ideas like that it continuity rather than the current method of just pretending they didn't happen.
The solution was a pair of publicity stunts; these groups would be tied into the gigantic X-Men led Onslaught crossover and 'killed off' - and by killed off it means shunted into a pocket universe created by Franklin Richards, though this precise revelation would at least be teased out. In the meantime for part two of the event their old ongoings were cancelled (with the exception of Thor's book, which returned to the name Journey into Mystery and covered other Asgardian happenings) and the books were relaunched with a new #1, always Marvel's default idea for anything in 1996.
For further attention the books were 'outsourced' - while still actually remaining under Marvel branding the actual content was handed to former employees at Image, in the form of Jim Lee's Wildstorm and Rob Liefield's Awesome Comics, for 12 months. This was a smart idea; regardless of the merits of either both were sales gold at the time and embracing big name creators rather than losing talent was something of a new direction for Marvel, who had a rigid structure and was still overrun by long-serving staffers.
Wildstorm took over production of Fantastic Four and Iron Man and the decision was made to do a new if not fresh origin for each group. Fantastic Four benefited from the pencils of Jim Lee himself, who also laid down the framework for the altered reality. Much of the basics are the same; like the later Ultimate universe it's more of an update as once again a situation is contrived to get scientist Reed Richards, his squeeze Susan Storm (here a high ranking executive in the Storm Foundation business empire), her brother Johnny (who handles the Foundation's casino in Las Vegas) and their broken down pilot friend Ben Grimm into a spacecraft in time to get a healthy dose of cosmic radiation - thus ending up with Fantastic powers.
The leaden dropping of the word fantastic, the characters' self-selected superhero names, the ease with which they deal with their transformations, Sue creating the team logos out of electrical tape and the general lampshading of the situation makes you wonder why they bothered with an origin story instead of starting up with the Four in full flow after a brief summary or even just handle it in flashbacks and dialogue, such is the level of discomfort in meshing the Silver Age cheese and modern trappings.
Still, once that's done Lee and Choi don't hang around, rapidly introducing us to the pocket universe's versions of Mole Man the Black Panther, the Silver Surfer, Doctor Doom and the Super Skrull across six issues - not to mention Alicia Masters and Wyatt Wingfoot, plus Namor. An odd thing that would run across all four titles is that not all of these were actually swallowed up by Onslaught, which can be explained by Franklin drawing on his knowledge of the heroes to fill out the world but does also somewhat go against the spirit of things.
No comments:
Post a Comment