Fantastic Four: Grand Design #1
J.A. Fludd
Recap
“The story of The Fantastic Four is the story of the universe,” says the narrative of this strange homage to the history of “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine.” And it’s a valid claim, considering that The FF is in fact the original, defining Marvel comic book. That’s true enough. What Tom Scioli has done here is to recap that most illustrious history of all comics, starting with a version of the origin of Galactus and leaving off with the approach of The Silver Surfer to Earth. You’d think this would be a wonderful thing, and yet…
This whole thing is written on something like a sixth-grade level, at best, and is positively riddled with inaccuracies! Here are some of the highlights—if you want to call them that:
Alicia Masters has black hair and dark olive skin. Why?
Werner Von Doom tells young Victor that his mother was a witch. (No, he didn’t; he kept it a secret; Victor found out after Werner died.) Werner flees with Victor into a snowstorm to escape from a pogrom. (No, he didn’t; he fled with Victor into a snowstorm after failing to cure the Baron’s ailing wife, who died.) Victor swears after Werner’s death that he will make his father proud. (Wrong again; Werner died begging Boris and the other gypsies to protect the world from Victor, who swore vengeance against all mankind.) The mystic order of monks in Tibet is about “self-mortification” and helps Victor create his armor as “a personal torture suit”. (EXCUSE me?)
The Invincible Man reveals to Johnny that he is Johnny’s father and delivers him into the hands of the Skrull Emperor, then turns on the Emperor and sacrifices himself to save Johnny’s life. WHAT?! Paging Mr. Lucas; Mr. George Lucas…
The Wizard claims superiority to Reed because he has a second brain in his helmet. HUH?
The powerless Fantastic Four must reach Dr. Doom at the top of the Baxter Building—through three floors of artificial Earth micro-environments that Reed has created to re-create Earth’s ecosystem on some other planet in the event that some unforeseeable disaster forces humanity to flee the planet. Leaving aside that the whole thing makes no bloody sense, is this Scioli guy crazy? And Ben is made The Thing again by drinking some potion that Reed cooked up—which he does without protest? Do you remember the drama of Fantastic Four #40 and its climax, in which Reed uses Skrull technology to make Ben The Thing again to stop Dr. Doom against his will, and the furious Thing tears into Doom and smashes his chest plate and crushes his hands? I’ve talked about this in my reviews of the regular FF book. At this point I am seriously wondering, What the hell has this Scioli guy been smoking?
After the big donnybrook with all the heroes and villains on Reed and Sue’s wedding day, The Sub-Mariner comes to walk Sue down the aisle! Think of this now: The subplot of the first two years of the book was about Namor trying to seduce Sue away from Reed, which caused Reed to go wild and him and The Sub-Mariner to come to furious blows—and then Namor comes to walk Sue down the aisle to marry Reed and the two of them and everyone else are okay with it! If the writing staff of a daytime soap opera handed in a script like that, the lot of them would be sacked! And Marvel paid this Scioli character for this foolishness! Good freaking GOD, what were Scioli and the editors thinking? The Sub-Mariner wasn’t even in Fantastic Four Annual #3, anyway!
For all the foregoing, the best thing I can say about Scioli is that unlike every other Marvel writer and every other comic book fan in the world, he at least remembers that Prince Namor has a heroic title; that he is THE SUB-MARINER, not just “Namor.” But I swear, the inaccuracies in this book are maddening. And there’s still going to be a whole second issue of this? Give me strength…
Review
I’ll give the book this much: It’s a cleverly gimmicky sort of homage to classic FF and Marvel Comics. The whole book has been produced to resemble a back issue such as you’d buy from the longboxes or from behind the counter at your comic book dealer, with pages yellowed with age. The cover has kind of a 3D effect going for it. And the art style makes you think of something that a fan, perhaps someone in high school or college, would draw and have printed for a zine you’d get at a convention, or an APA. It has a very “fannish” feeling to it. And that gives the whole thing a kind of rough-hewn charm. That, unfortunately, doesn’t make up for the content.
I’m seriously not seeing the point of doing a visual recap of the history of The Fantastic Four—and getting the facts WRONG. ON PURPOSE. What exactly is the thinking and reasoning here? If there is any, I’m missing it. I’m going to give Tom Scioli enough credit to assume that he is a longtime fan and he actually knows the way these stories really went and what the history really was. So why isn’t he using it? Why is he deliberately either misrepresenting the facts or swapping out the real details of many of the most important stories in comics history for story points that are blatantly wrong? What does this accomplish except to make readers who also know this stuff sit reading this book and wincing in pain?
And what is it with this artistic habit that Scioli has of drawing Sue invisible with her bones and organs showing? That’s not invisibility; that’s a medical school anatomical model! The Invisible Girl/Woman’s powers work by bending light around her so that SHE CANNOT BE SEEN. AT ALL. Neither her outsides nor her insides—she becomes INVISIBLE; it’s in her call sign! To indicate Sue when she was invisible, Jack Kirby during the time covered in this issue would draw her in dotted lines and draw the background and other figures through her. He didn’t do her as a diagram of the inside of her body. The way her powers are portrayed in this issue are gratuitous and, I’m sorry, stupid.
Fantastic Four: Grand Design gives me the same kind of problem that I have with the Marvel Comics movies. People go to these movies and watch these TV shows, and watch these things that aren’t really adaptations of the comic books, and come away thinking they know something about real Marvel Comics. New, young readers are going to come to this book and others like it, and they’re probably going to think from reading it that they now know the way the history of the Marvel Universe and its heroes actually happened. People new to Marvel could have learned from this book. Some of the things they’re going to “learn” are not authentic. It’s a missed opportunity. And they, like the filmgoers and TV viewers, are probably not going to bother to look up the actual stories of The Fantastic Four and find out how they really were. For someone like me, who’s been on board since Fantastic Four #62 (and I know readers who go back even further than that!), the whole thing is just galling. If you’re going to write about the history of the best comic book that ever came off a press, it is incumbent on you to get the facts and details RIGHT! Otherwise, I seriously do not see the point.
Scioli’s actual writing… You know, the first ten years of The Fantastic Four were scripted by Stan Lee himself, and are filled with some of the best English, most crackling dialogue, and most stirring, dramatic speeches ever put down on a comic book page. This is most especially true in the period that Scioli’s dubious narrative has entered, with the intro stories of The Inhumans, The Silver Surfer, and Galactus; and he’ll be moving on from there into the first stories of The Black Panther and the tale of the cosmic-powered Dr. Doom. The writing of FF: Grand Design conveys nothing of the richness, the grandeur, the drama, and hardly any of the wit of Stan’s scripts. It’s another way this book does no justice to the best comics ever to greet a fan’s awestruck eyes.
And yet, this is going to continue for another whole double-sized issue. After the questionable standard set by this first one, I can’t see the follow-up being any better.
Final Thoughts
This book is full of pointless, gratuitous, and in some cases inexcusable things that needn’t have been so. An homage to the history of The Fantastic Four should be done with love and care. What I see here is someone being allowed to treat it all in a cavalier fashion, in a style that is adolescent at best and juvenile at worst. I don’t know whether it’s more maddening or saddening.
Fantastic Four: Grand Design #1: That’s the Way it Really Wasn’t
- Writing - 6/106/10
- Storyline - 7/107/10
- Art - 6/106/10
- Color - 7/107/10
- Cover Art - 6/106/10