Fantastic Four (2022) #1-4

Fantastic Four #1-4

Originally released in 2022

Written by Ryan North

Art by Ivan Coello

This Fantastic Four run starts out as something of a mystery, with the team split up and going on individual adventures.  I don't recall the full context surrounding it (there was a period where Marvel seemed determined to ignore or downplay the team, seemingly out of spite over the 2015 movie releasing, but this was well past that)

Ben Grimm (a.k.a. the Thing) and his wife Alicia Masters-Grimm have stopped in a quaint little town that feels like it hasn't changed a day since the 1940s. In a way, it hasn't, as according to information that Alicia can find on her phone, the town disappeared in 1947, and they should just be in a field. In addition to being married (a big shake-up to the status quo), Ben and Alicia adopted two kids, a Kree and a Skrull, though they're absent for reasons that are seemingly tied to why the team is temporarily split up.

As it turns out, the town is caught in a time loop thanks to the wish of one man who doesn't even know that he has powers.  Ben and Alicia are a lot of fun in this as they try to get him to stop making that wish (and get frustrated in the process) before dealing with the root of that problem and having a conversation about romance and personal growth.

At the end of issue 1, Ryan North outlines his mission statement for the book.  It's fairly short, but it's a good way to get an idea of how he plans to handle the team, and fittingly, it's divided into four points.

The second issue focuses on Reed and Sue as they're trying to stay under the radar in a small town. This becomes more difficult when it turns out that seemingly everyone else in the town is a Doombot in a holographic disguise.

They quickly uncover an elderly woman at the center of all of this, as the Doombots either drop their disguises when they're far enough away from her or when they're aware that they're dealing with Reed Richards. (they were seemingly built shortly after the accident that caused Doom to leave America - even before becoming a full supervillain, Doom was just that petty) Thankfully, Reed's shapeshifting and Sue's invisibility make it easier to move around undetected, allowing Reed to introduce himself to the woman and learn about her connection to Doom.

It's nice to see individual issues focusing on different couples and how they solve problems not just with superpowers, but with empathy as well.  However, Johnny's on his own, so his situation (which gets focused on in issue 3) is going to be different.  Given how much he's hyping up his fake name (and his facial hair), I have a gut feeling that they're going to be hilarious.

The name wasn't quite as goofy as I thought, but between his hairstyle and mustache, along with that wink, it did get a laugh out of me.

Johnny managed to find a job that doesn't require documentation, but the boss cuts corners, steals wages, and generally makes things miserable for his employees (and puts them in danger) while doing just barely enough to avoid legal trouble. (as it turns out, he's a former Maggia grunt, which explains a lot - I chalked it up to him being a cheap jerk)

With the help of his coworkers, Johnny manages to expose his boss's illegal activities to the police and the higher-ups in the business.  Things are looking up - Reed and Sue even call him with news that they found Ben! There's just one problem...

Issue 4 reveals the incident that caused the Fantastic Four to leave New York City (which involved a massive crater in the middle of it), along with why the kids are absent and why the team is separated.  The forces of Annihilus were involved, as invaders from the Negative Zone are swarming the Baxter Building.

At first, it's framed as though, in order to stop them, Reed blew up the Baxter Building and the surrounding block with their kids inside of their headquarters.  Naturally, he didn't do this, but you can see how it wouldn't look great for him:

To make a long story short (as Reed explains it with a string of technobabble), he sent the area around the Baxter Building through time using a new model of time travel.  The invaders were moved in time but not space, depositing them in orbit around the sun, but to balance it, the area around the invaders had to be sent forward in time one year.  Any time travel risks changing the location that they arrive in, which could be catastrophic; it was mathematically the best way to solve the problem, but he left a city block full of people without children, or parents, or jobs, or countless other parts of their life for a whole year.

In the present, Ben and Alicia are trapped inside of a giant dome that resembles Ben's rocky exterior, which is forcing them to relive that day over and over again as it feeds on them.  Despite the rest of the team's best efforts, they can't free the duo, but living through that day over and over again (and having the emotions of everyone involved ramped up as the repeats continue) caused them to notice what they missed in their angry reaction.

I should probably read a wider variety of Fantastic Four runs, as they feel like a team that would change heavily in terms of how they're portrayed under different writers.  Teams like the Justice League, Avengers, and X-Men have line-ups that are constantly changing, but the Fantastic Four is (generally speaking) fairly static in terms of who's on the team, which seems like a lot of things would change depending on the writer - who gets more focus, how specific characters and their dynamics are handled, or details like that.  I'm mainly familiar with the Lee-Kirby era, though I did read Hickman's run (where Reed definitely seemed like the main focus); it seems too early to tell how this run will handle it, and I know that writers like Mark Waid and John Byrne had their own runs on the Fantastic Four that I'm curious about.