Fantastic Four #4: Perception

Fantastic Four #4 puts One World Under Doom firmly in the rearview and returns to the series’ bread and butter: a family oriented story built around scientific phenomenon. Like many of the one and done stories in North’s run, this is relatively low stakes in that, while it is made out to be a global threat, it is mainly a team/family concern. After several life-or-death One World Under Doom tie-ins, this simpler story is a breath of fresh air.

North makes use of a fairly ordinary concept in Fantastic Four #4: pareidolia, the meaningful interpretation of meaningless data. The example North uses here (explained via Reed) is the mechanism by which humans recognize faces–something that routinely misfires resulting in the perception of faces in all manner of things. North conceives of a villain that “hacks” pareidolia which allows it to be perceived as something harmless.

This is the kind of issue where North’s choice to use the Fantastic Four’s entire extended family as main characters, and even heroes in their own right, pays off. Alicia is the perfect character to combat this threat, and because North always treats her equally, he doesn’t have to jump through hoops in the story to get the other characters to listen to her or take her seriously.

Alicia makes for a strong viewpoint character as well. North pairs her briefly with Reed in a key sequence. This character pairing worked very well previously in the Blood Hunt tie-in issues, and once again North shows her being especially capable of putting Reed’s mind on paths he might not have gone down otherwise.

The issue’s opening is also made more shocking because the first page is merely a sequence of black panels with dialogue. Like Alicia, the reader is told what to expect by the other characters only to have that immediately contradicted on the following splash page where Alicia interacts with the threatening creature for the first time.

Caramagna’s placement of the dialogue bubbles in the first page’s dark panels reinforces the point of view of Alicia’s blindness. The bubbles help identify the relative placement of everyone speaking to Alicia with tails extending to the left or right. Characters immediately in front of Alicia are indicated by dialogue bubbles that are slightly to one side or the other but have no tails.

Ramos’s art, especially his tendency to use smaller lines for softer shading on facial features, is a strong companion to North’s frequently lighter storytelling. Fantastic Four is not an edgy book.  However, the creature design successfully flies in the face of that. the asymmetrical mass of tentacles and protrusions that seem to be teeth but aren’t inside any kind of mouth is appropriately alien. Greater detail on the creature results in more shading than usual around its various folds, ranging from lighter patches to fields of straight black. It’s a creative design that’s right out of a horror story.

Edgar Delgado reinforces this with a rich purple color scheme that sets the creature apart from the other characters. Its high level of contrast and comparatively unusual color easily draws the eye to it.

North continues to find unexpected ways to use the team’s powers. In Fantastic Four #4 he has Sue shield a patch of sunlight around the group which replaces the blue sky with a dark starry one, allowing Reed to look into space despite it being midday. Ramos and Delgado depict this as a kind of shattered window in the sky with a nightscape on the other side. This gives a different kind of intensity to the image, making it feel like an act of brute force.