BACK ISSUE BLUES: FANTASTIC FOUR - WORLD'S GREATEST (TP)

Writer: Mark Millar Penciller: Bryan Hitch Inkers: Paul Neary, Hitch, Andrew Currie, Matt Banning Colour Artist: Paul Mounts Letterer: VC's Rus Wooton Editors: Molly Lazer, Janine Schaefer, Tom Breevort Collects: Fantastic Four #554-#561 (April 2008 – January 2009) / TP / Marvel

By Paul Dunne

31st July 2023

The Pitch: Marvel's First Family meets Millar and Hitch! When one of the world's greatest writers teams up with one of the world's greatest artists, the result is the truly World's Greatest Comic Magazine! Following their epic successes with ULTIMATES and ULTIMATES 2, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch reunite to forge a new future for the Fantastic Four! Taking their cue from the wild-eyed, creative abandon of the classic Lee/Kirby years, Millar and Hitch make the book decisively their own! First up is the return of Reed Richards' old flame, Alyssa Moy, with news of worldwide calamity that only Mister Fantastic can help divert - but what if the price is his marriage to Sue? Next, the Defenders are back and barraging New York with high-velocity attacks. This mysterious group of heavies has taken out Doctor Doom and Johnny Storm - and that's not even their biggest surprise!

There's always been something quite... out of style about The FF. Maybe because of their origins in the sixties (although other Marvel heroes don't seem to have this issue), it's because they're one of the few fully formed nuclear family units in comics, at least that springs to mind. But no matter the writer or artist, the FF seems tethered to the silver age. So how would the most distinctly modern writer and artist team of the time handle taking over Marvel's first family? How would they apply what some might consider outdated weird science? How would they meld the tradition of the FF with the new attitudes of Marvel? Attitudes they helped create? By looking forwards and backward at the same time.

Millar is an interesting writer. He doesn't seem particularly literary, in that like Tarantino, he takes his influences from films and TV rather than any scholarly sources. I'm not bringing this up as a gotcha. There's plenty of great stuff in pop culture and especially cinema. And Millar likes his pop. He can't hide it – the book even begins with a chase in the old West, right out of Back To The Future Part III. This FF is given thoroughly modern traits to build their future foundation on, as Millar takes the tropes of Lee and Kirby and amps them up. Johnny Storm seems to have ADHD coupled with a moderately heavy dose of narcissism. Ben is the rough-hewn ladies’ man. Sue seems to be subordinate to Reed's intellect but is in fact the backbone of the entire FF, happily putting Alyssa, Reed's ex-girlfriend, in her place when she tries to move in on her man. And Reed... Reed is ever the scientist, but also the loving husband, who in this iteration probably wouldn't risk his wife running off with Namor. Yet, in this iteration, the team feels ever so slightly like the fractured four. Hitch also looks ahead, as he did in the Ultimates, precluding the TV we consume so much of now, switching between epic wide shots of artificial planets and tight close-ups, one has to imagine that this is like an episode of Succession with Superheroes instead of billionaires. Or superheroes that have become billionaires.

And with Millar, there's that same cynical edge to it, too. Or is it optimism? Millar has the World's richest men (note that it's definitely men), all clubbing together to fund 'Nu-Earth', a home for all of us when our planet dies. It's naive as fuck. Luckily, it's soon revealed that this is not the case. It's part of the conundrum of Millar. He's a man that puts a lot of effort and money into charities, particularly ones based in his hometown, but also seems to lean to the right, politically, which in the present climate is very unfortunate. There's a lot of likeability in the man and his work, but he often strays into a kind of cool-kid slickness. The clickbait nature of some of his plotting is in evidence here, but.. it is fun. There's no denying it. He plants interesting seeds for future use and plays with the past and the future of the FF. And there is a sense that eventually, everything must end...

But ultimately, The FF can't help but be an optimistic book. Their very nature is to turn the negative aspects (like being blasted by cosmic rays and mutating) into something positive. As with so many heroes, they should be the villains. And in Millar and Hitch's Nu-World order, they kind of are. They become the antagonists, trying to stop the future – or at least one version – saving it from themselves. When we meet the future Defenders, their powers are very FF-like, something I doubt is accidental or done instinctively. I think that very little sneaks up on comic writers and artists, very few ideas that appear suddenly, without warning causing happy accidents. The form feels a little too rigid for that. This means we have to really applaud Millar's planning. The idea that heroes swerve towards villainy and the villains are victims is a strong theme that plays throughout Millar's work - especially this - since he had just published Civil War. Hitch gives us epic, 'holy shit' comics as cinema. The scale of both the writing and the art is immense. Galactus brought low by the defenders, the attack by future Sue on the Baxter building... All designed to be the jaw-dropping bug action scene in the 200 million dollar movie. Whilst it doesn't get too caught up in moral debate - these are superheroes after all - there's still intelligence in the writing, despite the clickbait nature of the covers and some of the premises. We've seen how this can undo a book, but Millar keeps it tight here. There's a sense that the Marvel Universe is as malleable as Reed's body - both in the past and the future.

Hitch creates a huge canvas like nothing the FF has ever seen. Or in all probability, the audience for that matter. The inks, by Hitch, Neary, Currie, and Banning accentuate Hitch's pencils nicely, keeping his movement and scope clearly defined. Mounts' colours eschew the wild expressionism in many comics, going for a more photographic look akin to JJ Abarams' lens-flare style. Wooton's letters sharpen up Millar's dialogue, pacing the flow of the chatter nicely. In all, this is a great beginning to what was the next great phase of The Fantastic Four, one where some coll new hard science would replace the weirdness of the First Family and lay the groundwork for the Future Foundation.

Fantastic Four: World's Greatest TP is currently out of print.