Fantastic Four Annual #32-"A Little Stanger"
Cover Date: Aug 2010 Price $4.99
Cover Tagline: "Annual" (how creative!)
Writer/ Artist: Joe Ahearne/ Bryan Hitch
(Editor's Note- This issue came out about a month ago, but it's "current" in the sense that it's this year's annual. Since it's an extra long issue, it's kind of a long review. Apologies to those who share my attention span, but I implore you to take it all in!)
What Happened: This issue opens in dramatic fashion with a young woman looking for the Fantastic Four at the front entrance of their headquarters, and being scared out of her wits by the deadly security measures she encounters. Reed, Sue, and Ben rush to save the woman, and when Mr. Fantastic angrily enquires about how she was able to get into the building, she tells him she was given a clearance card by Johnny Storm. Apparently the young woman, who reveals her name to be Amy Brys, needs to talk to the Human Torch about some a very serious matter. And of course Johnny, being the giant cad he is, has been avoiding Amy's calls. Reed covers for Johnny, saying he must be in the Negative Zone or something, once again proving that having the world's smartest man for your brother-in-law pays off in new and fun ways all the time!
Cover Date: Aug 2010 Price $4.99
Cover Tagline: "Annual" (how creative!)
Writer/ Artist: Joe Ahearne/ Bryan Hitch
(Editor's Note- This issue came out about a month ago, but it's "current" in the sense that it's this year's annual. Since it's an extra long issue, it's kind of a long review. Apologies to those who share my attention span, but I implore you to take it all in!)
What Happened: This issue opens in dramatic fashion with a young woman looking for the Fantastic Four at the front entrance of their headquarters, and being scared out of her wits by the deadly security measures she encounters. Reed, Sue, and Ben rush to save the woman, and when Mr. Fantastic angrily enquires about how she was able to get into the building, she tells him she was given a clearance card by Johnny Storm. Apparently the young woman, who reveals her name to be Amy Brys, needs to talk to the Human Torch about some a very serious matter. And of course Johnny, being the giant cad he is, has been avoiding Amy's calls. Reed covers for Johnny, saying he must be in the Negative Zone or something, once again proving that having the world's smartest man for your brother-in-law pays off in new and fun ways all the time!
After Amy leaves, Johnny reappears, having been shielded with invisibility the whole time by his sister Sue (man everybody's helping him avoid this chick! Now that's FAMILY). The Invisible Woman begins to chide her brother's womanizing ways, when suddenly an alarm goes off. The alarm goes off because it detects a special kind of energy. Apparently the signal the alarm detected was a "variation" of the cosmic energy that powers the FF. This "variation" is the same energy that almost killed Sue when she was pregnant, meaning someone who was just in the room is pregnant with a cosmically irradiated Fantasti-baby. Since Sue knows it's not her, the Thing had his tubes tied, and Reed and Johnny are hot blooded super studs who are too masculine for pregnancy, it must be someone who recently visited that set off the alarm. It becomes very evident why miss Brys was had such an urgent need to talk to the Human Torch- she's about to be his baby mama.
Johnny flies off and finds Amy down the street, looking to discuss the situation (as well as a weekend visitation schedule I assume). But before you can say "shotgun wedding", the two are attacked by machines with robotic tentacles.
The FF break the robots, save Amy's bacon, and fly off with her in the Fantasti-Car. The team takes Amy to the Baxter Building, and place her in an examination room to do an ultra early paternity test. Since Amy was with Johnny only 2 months prior, the only safe and logical course of action is for Sue to shrink down to a molecular level and get a D.N.A sample from the fetus. Look, I'm no doctor, so I won't argue too much, but really?
As Reed and Sue chat with the mom-to-be, Johnny and Ben have a "man-boy to rock-man" discussion in the other room about fatherhood. The only thing is, Johnny swears he didn't even kiss the girl, let alone get freaky deaky (his words, not mine...ok, you got me!). This leads Reed to send Johnny and Ben back to da club where Johnny and Amy met with a chornal scanner (It's like a viewmaster that shows you what happened in the past) to look into back in time and figure out what happened...Ah, comics.
Reed Sends Sue into Amy's womb, which makes my mind wander to disgusting jokes about both Storm siblings venturing there, and Sue indeed encounters one of God's greatest miracles...life!
Meanwhile, in a less miraculous place, Johnny and Ben use the Viewmaster of Time to see what the Human Torch and Amy were really doing on the night in question. It turns out that both Amy and Johnny were not in the champagne room getting hot and heavy, but instead getting violently ill. Ben uses the Viewmaster of time to scan the residual images of Amy and Johnny's bodies, and finds out a darkhaired woman used some microscopic bugs to infect the two young clubgoers and then disappeared, most likely inside of Johnny. Man, that chronal viewer can do anything!
Sue, still up in Amy's business, finds out that she's is trapped by some kind of force field. It turns out the same tentacled robots from the street earlier are hanging out inside of Amy too. Sue destroys them, and the team reassembles back in the lab. Reed discovers that the microscopic bugs that affected Johnny and Amy in da club had a very specific mission- 1.) Go into Johnny, get some Man juice 2.) Leave Johnny, go into Amy's nether region 3.) Inseminate Amy with the man juice, making Johnny Jr. We find out that the whole ordeal was a great success and that Johnny is in fact going to be a daddy. Unfortunately this doesn't answer who that lady who disappeared into Johnny was. The team decides to go inside him to find out. Do you kind of get the feeling Reed just likes shrinking people and putting them inside other people?
As Sue and Ben explore the inside of Johnny, Reed remarks how there is something familiar about the design of the tentacled robots that have been plaguing them all day. As Johnny mentions that microscopic androids fit the Psycho Man's M.O. quite well, Ben chimes in over the com link and says they have company inside of Johnny. Apparently he has a visitor in his brain--
That's right, it's the Psycho Woman!
The Psycho Woman turns out to be the daughter of the longtime FF baddie, the Psycho Man. The Psycho Woman, who will be known from this point as P-W goes on to use her mind altering powers against Ben and Sue, and they lose contact with Reed. Apparently the P-W wants to use Johnny's baby to create an army of super warriors (????).
Being the all-American husband and superhero he is, Reed shrinks himself and has Amy inject him into Johnny's body (again Reed? You're sick, dude) to find the other members. After Reed is in Johnny's body, ANOTHER set of tentacled robots busts in to attack!
The P-W thinks she has the upperhand by inducing the emotions of fear, disgust, and envy in the 3 members she's up against inside the Torch, but Ben quickly overcomes these emotions and clobbers the yellow faced villain. The battle continues and ends up being so rough that it knocks Johnny out the window. As he falls, The Thing knocks out the P-W and finds the heat shield that she was using to stay inside of the Torch. The three inside of Johnny get in a force bubble and Reed tells the freefalling Johnny to flame on, but he doesn't want to incinerate his family. Johnny eventually turns his flame on, and burns the robots that we're following him, and presumably the Psycho Woman.
The major problem (besides the fact that there is a Johnny-spawn on its way into the world) is now that the Human Torch can't activate his flame powers, because the intense heat will melt the rest of his teammates inside of him. The Torch and Amy avoid the tentacled monsters, as Reed, Sue and Ben fight against the P-W. Unfortunately the battle inside of Johnny ends up hurting him, and the FF is in a tight spot.
The P-W thinks she has the upperhand by inducing the emotions of fear, disgust, and envy in the 3 members she's up against inside the Torch, but Ben quickly overcomes these emotions and clobbers the yellow faced villain. The battle continues and ends up being so rough that it knocks Johnny out the window. As he falls, The Thing knocks out the P-W and finds the heat shield that she was using to stay inside of the Torch. The three inside of Johnny get in a force bubble and Reed tells the freefalling Johnny to flame on, but he doesn't want to incinerate his family. Johnny eventually turns his flame on, and burns the robots that we're following him, and presumably the Psycho Woman. Johnny thinks he just burned up his whole family, and Amy consoles him. Just then, the three other members of the team enter the room and reveal they were able to get out in time. The question shifts to what to do about the baby, and the team decides to go back in time and stop the Psycho-Woman before she can even impregnate Amy, effectively giving time and space an abortion (Ben calls it a "morning before pill"). Johnny vetoes the idea, but Amy tells him it's too dangerous for him to have a child, due to all his foes. To protect the child, Amy ganks the time remote control from Johnny's hand and jumps in the chronal portal. 
Of course the FF could find her somehow, but Sue says that Amy made her choice. The issue ends with the Human Torch reflecting on the fact that she could have gone anywhere in time and given birth, and that his child could be out there somewhere.
What I Thought: After finishing this issue, I felt...discombobulated. Part of the reason I took my sweet time getting this review out to my adoring public is that I had to reread the comic like 4 times to really understand the main story. I'm still not sure I fully understand the Psycho Woman's motivations. She obviously wants revenge for the FF destroying her father, but why does she need to do all the stuff with the baby? Apparently she wants Johnny's tissue to make super warriors, so shouldn't she just knock him out and experiment on him?
As for the introduction of the Psycho-Woman, I will admit to being shocked by that reveal. I knew going into this book that the story somehow involved Psycho Man, and was a little let down to think the pregnancy scare was going to be another "it's all in their heads" kind of plot. To that end, the pregnancy being real and not just some faux hype Marvel made up to sell the issue was a good step towards truth-in-advertising. Of course, the whole idea of how to undo the pregnancy at the end treads so close to ground that a book like Fantastic Four just shouldn't go. Although Ben makes a somewhat good point that if you stop the Psycho Woman from engineering the ensemination, it's more like preventing a crime than aborting a child, but it still left me feeling weird. I was actually a little relieved that Amy made the choice she did, although it was a really awkward ending.
I guess the other two things that really stick out about this specific issue are the art and the format. Bryan Hitch is one of the best contemporary comic book artists of the past decade, and he really does great work with whatever assignment he is on. I quite enjoyed Hitch's tenure as the artist of the main FF book a while back, but this issue had a noticable difference in quality. While the writer Joe Ahearne gives Hitch a lot of splash pages and great action shots to play out, the inking of Hitch's work isn't as strong as previous outings. I believe it may be due to the fact that Hitch normally works with artist Paul Neary as the inker of his work ,and this time around Hitch himself and fellow artist Andrew Currie are responsible for the embellishments. It's odd to think a penciller could make his own art less dynamic by inking it himself.
Overall, I think this is one annual that deserved more varied material. I'm fairly certain editorial could have cut out some scenes, cleaned up some of the plot threads, and lowered the page count on the first story, opening up more space for another Fantastic Four related tale. While I generally don't advocate for the inclusion of filler material that tends to litter the back pages of annuals (the backups in annuals usually have as much substance as the final 30 minutes of SNL), I found myself wanting the pregnancy story to just get over with . Maybe a "Franklin Richards: Boy Genius" type comic strip or a "future foundation" backup would have been a nice way to offset the other story. I think annuals in general have gotten too far away from tying into the current continuity, and it seems like a missed opportunity with all that Jonathan Hickman has been setting up.
Wow. I'll stop here. Like Valentine's Day, I'm glad annuals only come but once a year! Until Johnny stops scammin on hotties in da club, vive la Fantastique!
God Bless America.
We cut to Reed Richards, talking to the "Future Foundation", his new think-tank of young super geniuses. The purpose of the group is to solve the world's greatest problems, and Reed and the "FF" are discussing the first issue they want to tackle. Reed mentions that he is surprised that the group chose the subject they did, and before the readers are let in on what this means Franklin enters. Reed, being the world's greatest father (to Valeria), gives his son the brush off in light of the group's work. He tells his son that Johnny will accompany the two, and the following soul crushing scene occurs:
Arcade, a former X-Men villain whose shtick involved placing heroes in elaborate death traps he controlled like a video game, scolds Johnny for behaving so brutishly.
Before Johnny can do any harm, the aforementioned annoying jade alien known as the Impossible Man appears and tells him no to be so confrontational. 
Arcade explains that he has given up games of murder, and that he and the Impossible Man are out to make some scratch by selling toys. The toys are made with little pieces of the Impossible Man's D.N.A., and have the same malleable qualities as Impy himself. As the kids in the toy store start clamoring for the toys as fervently as...kids in a toy store, Arcade decides that it's time for one more "little" death trap. 
The play things in the store start coming to life and attacking the patrons, and the little mutant Leech gets knocked out by some debris. Franklin, understandably upset, uses his recently restored mental powers to bring a stuffed dinosaur to life. He tells his uncle to fry the rest of the toys, and Johnny obliges. With the threat thwarted so quickly, the Impossible Man tells Johnny that he'll wrangle up Arcade. Case closed, I guess....
vs.
Positives: + It's Jack Kirby on art. They didn't call him "King" for nothing.
Here's Kirby's original work for the sane page (notice the missing panel that Ron Frenz filled in above)-
Negatives: - Thanks to this comic being a recreation of a deceased man's half erased notes, this plot gets jumbled. I know the creative team handled it with care, but the issue was still pretty convoluted.