Broken Frontier

From the pages of Amazing Spider-Girl comes the FF of the near-future! And waiting in the wings is a very familiar face from their past…

The Fantastic Five’s convoluted relationships form a major part of this engaging opening issue. Johnny Storm is worried that, with Reed and Sue back in the picture, his days of leading the FF may be over and it may be time to form a new team with Skrull wife Lyja. Ben Grimm’s estranged love Sharon Ventura (the second Ms. Marvel in the regular Marvel Universe) returns wanting custody of their kids while Franklin Richards finds training the extended FF family exhausting in the extreme. It’s a full and fraught house indeed at the Fantastic Five’s future headquarters, but things are about to be put in perspective, when one of the greatest threats the team has ever faced returns from years of imprisonment with bloody vengeance in mind…

Can it really be nearly eight years since the last short-lived Fantastic Five series debuted? One of a number of books that were spin-offs from Spider-Girl’s MC2 Universe (as it used to be known) like A-Next, J2 and Wild Thing, the original 1999 run lasted just five issues before cancellation. There’s certainly something of a mini-MC2 revival going on at Marvel these days with the success of the re-launched Amazing Spider-Girl, a number of digest packages of older material and associated mini-series like Avengers Next all upping the profile of this alternate Marvel timeline.

What’s most striking about this debut issue is how quickly you find yourselves caring about the characters and their various soap opera style problems. DeFalco’s story is also chock full of nods to the past like Johnny Storm’s red Human Torch uniform from the 1970s or in the use of elements like Lyja from his own run on Fantastic Four in the Nineties. There are also a couple of panels where the main villain of the piece references past encounters with the FF that are just begging out for captions with relevant issue numbers. Note to Marvel: no new readers are going to run screaming to the hills if you put in the odd footnote now and again.

Ron Lim gives us some perfectly acceptable visuals with flowing and action-packed fight scenes. Watch out for a couple of particularly dynamic shots when the big Bad Guy makes his play (and Lim always portrays said baddie with a sinister and brooding presence that this top league villain deserves).

It won’t be everyone’s cup of Earl Grey, but if you want a break from all the angst and betrayal of the 616 MU you can’t go far wrong with Fantastic Five #1. So kick off your shoes, slip into your favorite armchair and spend twenty minutes enjoying some good old-fashioned Marvel storytelling. Fantastic Five is escapist comfort reading of the type that we just don’t see enough of in the mainstream these days.