Fantastic Four #2

Sep 16, 2018 11:47



At this point the F4's adventures have shifted from the Cosmic to the almost Metaphysical. This makes sense, as in their previous adventure they sorta defeated God, and Franklin is arguably the Creator of this iteration of the Multiverse. Talk about an escalation of stakes...

Because the Big 2 these days don't seem to know another mode of arc-to-arc progression than "raise the stakes constantly and ridiculously, then reset with a drastic change" (often involved destroying the universe, or at least a magic Rest button of a major aspect of it), to drive this new tale Marvel decided to come up with a new, possibly unnecessary, Nearly Omnipotent Expression of an Abstract Concept; perhaps by this point I should embrace the confusing, inelegant, self-conflicting, frankly ridiculous multi-layered pantheon of the Marvel Multiverse, but I can't, it's just too... ad hoc, and not even in a stable way.

Some positive highlights of the issue: seeing the Fantastic Foundation happy, Val having moved from the not-as-coldly-rational-as-she-thinks pragmatism that made her write to her father something along the lines of "You can't win. Time to start thinking not how to lose." to (in a parallel context of multiverse collapse) "We won't lose any more universes! We draw the line here!" (perhaps not coincidentally: "here" is where her crush lives), Reed being not just a scientific meta-super-genius but also a crafty bastard. It's annoying how often he screws things up by completely misjudging the human reaction to what he comes up with (seriously, you didn't need his social prediction maths to know what the Registration Act would lead to, that his family would not just let him seal himself with Doom in a prison dimension, or that sending Hulk into space was Not A Good Idea - the place is riddled with spaceships, and all roads taken by dangerous and angry people do lead to Earth), so it was nice to see him as the cunning and experienced adventurer by all rights he should be.

comics, fantastic four

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