Fantastic Four #10: Haunted Space

Fantastic Four does it all. Magic, biology, Doombot caretakers, labor practices, love. memory. time travel–it’s all here. Fantastic Four #10, delivering another very strong performance from its creative team, adds haunted house in space to that list.

Fantastic Four #10 is set mainly on an alien ship on a multi-century journey in search of a new home. The aliens are all in suspended animation except for one caretaker who is supposed to be awake for roughly a century before training their replacement. The issue begins with one caretaker waking up only to find their predecessor dead. The issue flashes back 500 years to a different caretaker, this one contending with a problem: the ship is in a dark area of space devoid of stars and is no longer moving. A bright flaming figure suddenly appears outside the ship, its light filling every porthole. Eventually this caretaker, unable to fix the ship, walks outside convinced that the flaming person will keep him safe. They’re wrong. The next caretaker, awakening 400 years ago, encounters a monster banging on the ship’s hull. The banging gets louder and more persistent despite her efforts to kill the monster. Finally she is driven mad and kills herself. Another 100 years pass before a third caretaker awakens. This one gets trapped behind an invisible barrier and slowly dies. The next one gets in a fire fight with invading tendrils and accidentally kills themself. Is it possible that the Fantastic Four, investigating a disturbance in space-time, are responsible for the aliens’ madness?

North piques curiosity immediately by setting Fantastic Four #10 on an alien ship with no prior frame of reference. It doesn’t take long to get up to speed, though. The first flashback follows that caretaker longer than any of the others, and along the way it delivers the basic exposition to understand what is at stake for the alien crew. After that, North leans heavily into a haunted house vibe. There’s a monster-in-the-dark quality to the aliens’ side of the story. And even once it’s obvious that the Fantastic Four are somehow connected, their manifestations range from strange to fear inducing. The sequence featuring Sue’s manifestation is especially creepy and by far the most cruel to the caretaker of that cycle.

At its heart, Fantastic Four #10’s story structure is showing the same events from two points of view. As the team examines the ship, there are lightbulb moments when they perform an action that corresponds to a horrible thing the aliens experienced. In this way the issue is almost telling two stories–the haunted house story mentioned above, and a relatively straightforward science fiction dilemma with the team.

North once again uses real science concepts in his explanation of what happened to the stuck alien ship. Whether they’re applied correctly and make sense is for someone else to figure out. Nevertheless, one of the series’ strengths remains North’s willingness to pull in real science when possible.

Fantastic Four #10 requires aliens that the reader can connect with if the haunted house story is to work. Two thirds of the issue is told from their point of view. The aliens are a four-armed biped with a dog-like snout. As a result, they have an almost anthropomorphized animal quality to them that makes them feel recognizable. Fernandez is then able to give them identifiable emotions: anger, happiness, sadness, thoughtfulness, etc. With each individual tragedy, they become more and more sympathetic.

And in a particularly interesting visual moment, Fernandez goes borderline body horror with Sue.

Aburtov doesn’t have quite as much opportunity to shine in this issue. To date the series has been Earthbound and fairly bright. This issue, set primarily on an alien ship (and otherwise in space) is mainly a collection of blacks and grays. Color is more of a punctuation. Especially significant is the way Johnny’s flames shine into the ship, sending rays of yellow/orange light through every porthole and brightening the otherwise monotonous environment. Also well realized are the slight blue outlines denoting Sue’s power and the bright purple of alien gunfire.

Two of the aliens that go mad almost seem to do it as a result of Caramagna’s lettering. The lettering in Fantastic Four is usually very restrained, but Caramagna knows when to let loose as he does in this issue. The BANGs that drive the second caretaker mad fill panels and at one point appear to surround the alien. The noise is inescapable. The fourth caretaker (the one fighting off a room full of tendrils), blasts away with his gun–a series of large uppercase KRRAKs accompanying each shot until he is dead and surrounded by tendrils that are making a quieter but far more disgusting lowercase “schrrlk”. The competing sound effects contribute to the feeling of horror–the inevitability of the slower enemy/monster somehow killing a seemingly stronger victim.