Sunday, April 5, 2020

Fantastic Four by Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo Omnibus

Fantastic Four By Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo OmnibusFantastic Four By Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo Omnibus by Mark Waid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After being bombarded with cosmic rays, scientist Reed Richards, girlfriend Sue Storm, pilot Ben Grimm, and teenage hothead Johnny Storm acquired superpowers and became... The Fantastic Four!

I'm a Fantastic Four fan from way back and Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo's FF run has been touted as the best since John Byrne's. So why haven't I gone all in on it before? For one thing, I find Mike Wieringo's bigfooted artwork too cartoony for the Fantastic Four. For another, Mark Waid is very hit or miss for me. I actually read a couple issues from this run when it was on the newsstand and wasn't super impressed with Waid's portrayal of Johnny Storm. When I found this big honkin' tome for $40, it was time to take the plunge.

Waid, Wieringo, and the rest of the team take the Fantastic Four on a wide variety of adventures. In addition to bugs from the Leviaverse and Modulus, a computer intelligence in love with Reed Richards, the FF go up against old favorites like Doctor Doom, the Frightful Four, and Galactus.

Right out of the gate, I was impressed with Mark Waid's take on the Fantastic Four. He quickly establishes the who/what/when/why of the group for new readers and dives into the action. While there is some decompression, there's not as much as today and not everything was in convenient 4-6 issue arc. Wieringo's art grew on me as well, even though the huge feet still irked me.

My main gripe with John Byrne's Fantastic Four run is that he didn't break a lot of new ground and it felt like a cover of Lee and Kirby's Greatest Hits. While Waid revisited some old favorites, I thought he put enough of his own spin on them to make them feel fairly new, kind of like Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt. There were enough twists, like Doctor Doom turning to magic to beat Reed, to The Wizard having a daughter, to Galactus becoming human, to distance these stories from a lot of lackluster Fantastic Four runs in the past.

There were some very memorable moments in these 900 pages, like the FF swapping powers and Johnny becoming Galactus' herald. I thought the Fantastic Four meeting God would be hokey as hell until God wound up being Jack Kirby. The last time I got this emotional over a work of fiction is when the Eleventh Doctor met elderly Tom Baker in Day of the Doctor.

Another advantage this run has over John Byrne's is that Waid and Wieringo didn't overstay their welcome. There are something like 36 issues crammed into this tome and I thought W&W left things on a high note. They didn't stick around long enough to start repeating themselves. Hell, there were plenty of classic villains they didn't touch, like The Mad Thinker, Red Ghost and his Super Apes, and the Mole Man.

While the art wasn't quite in my wheelhouse, the Fantastic Four by Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo is easily the best Fantastic Four run since John Byrne's. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

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