Fantastic Four #554 Review

FANTASTIC FOUR #554
Written by Mark Millar
Art by Bryan Hitch

I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed the first issue of Millar and Hitch's run on Fantastic Four. There was crazy time travel adventures, lots of funny lines, the team feels like a family for the first time in a long time (both kids actually show up in the issue and are acknowledged as existing! Shocking, I know.) and it channels a lot of the things that made the old stories great.

However, if you're expecting Ultimates starring the Fantastic Four or even the same thing as Millar's Ultimate Fantastic Four run with Greg Land, you'll be surely disappointed. This is very much an old school take on the team combined with Millar's trademark high concept storytelling.

Another thing that will let people down is Bryan Hitch's art. Now, 'let down' is a bit harsh, but his pencils are much more loose and less refined than his Ultimates work. It's still brilliant artwork, but you can see he didn't put nearly as much time in it as he did with Ultimates 1 or 2. It's probably between his old Authority work and the Ultimates in terms of quality, which is leaps and bounds above just about every other book on the market, but a marked drop from his last work.

Getting back to the story, as I said, I really enjoyed this issue. It's by no means the greatest FF story ever told, but if this is just the beginning of the run, I'm looking forward to what he has in store for the next 15, and hopefully more, issues.

I'm sure everyone's seen the time travel opening segment in previews, but it still needs repeating - that's the kind of hilarious little adventures the team should be getting into. We don't need to see how or why it happened, but it's a nice touch seeing it, kind of like a James Bond action sequence opening before the starting credits and the movie gets going.

This issue introduced Reed's old, hot female friend from university. She's going to be dubbed "Mrs Fantastic" based on interviews with Millar, but I think that's just due to her intelligence and has nothing to do with her gaining powers. She's supposedly 1 IQ point higher than Reed and is currently working on a new project that they want to get Reed's help or input on. The final page reveals it as the Death Star a new planet being constructed through a portal to some unknown place in space in case humanity ever needs to leave Earth due to planet eaters or alien invasions or even space zombies, I assume.

Last thing I'd like to touch on is the format or layout of the issue. As you can see from the cover, it has a very magazine-esque look about it. That's not limited to the cover, as the innards see large, white, rectangular dividers separating all the scenes. I found them kind of distracting, almost as if something got cut out during printing (they don't even put solid black border lines around panels) or as if someone took white out and smeared it across the page. The big white boxes with single huge letters to start of text, such as when they have a scene change and they put The Baxter Building in the corner of the box. In this case, the T will be about half the average panel size with a big white box around it, and still no solid lines or border, leaving this gaping white box on the side of the image.

Verdict - Must Read. Don't let my harping on about the magazine layouts or just about anything negative I had to say stop you from picking this up. It's the most fun I've had with a Fantastic Four issue in years. It's worth picking up just for the Doombot Herbies. The fun story and solid art is just a bonus.

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