Fantastic Four Vs Godzilla #1 – We’re Going To Need A Bigger Fantasti-Car

Fantastic Four Vs Godzilla #1 is the first of six oneshots pitting Godzilla, the King of Monsters, against the heroes of the Marvel Universe through the decades… The First Family of the Marvel Universe is first up in a story set in the 60’s beginning of Marvel’s history. Tasked with telling this story is Ryan Q. North, current Fantastic Four scribe and no stranger to the workings of the team/family dynamics, who deftly tackles the melding of these two properties to produce a high-action, property-smashing tale that showcases the best of both properties.

North drops readers right into the story without the exposition that many stories like this tend to use, with a page 2 splash page that shows Godzilla attacking NYC as the Four show up to try and handle the situation, which given the types of threats the FF have dealt with in the past, really isn’t out of the norm. North and Romita Jr. showcase the different powers of the Four without the use of exposition through text and dialogue. The issue is well-paced and has a nice ebb-and-flow as the new threat of King Ghidorah, now a herald of Galactus. As this new threat arrives, so does the Silver Surfer in a cameo that provides the means Reed needs to do his brain-thing and figure out a solution, using Godzilla as an ally.

Romita Jr’s art works well and is better than his work over on Amazing Spider-Man, and when combined with Marcio Menyz’s colors, bring both the Kajui and the destruction of NYC to life as the action blasts off the page

Bringing together two properties of this type is not an easy thing to do, especially when not marketed under the “What If..?” tag, which most stories in this vein, but North and Romita Jr do it well and set the bar for the rest of the crossovers that are to follow.