Stying Current Annual Edition: Fantastic Four Annual #32

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!

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 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.

4th Posting Celebration!

Can you believe its been 4 posts already? It seems like it was just last Saturday that I started this blog.... Anyway, in honor of all things "4", I would like to deviate from my usual long-winded and pointless reviews to present a short list of Fantastic Four comics that stick out in my mind. For one reason or another, these are the FF comics that serve as mile markers in my decade + love/hate relationship with Marvel's first family. Maybe by examining these issues we can find why I so often return to a book that I so often swear off of forever....

1.) Fantastic Four #413 (1996)- I have no clue what possessed me to buy this book back in the day. It was probably the end of 6th grade (Jun. '96), and the whole Onslaught epic had been announced. Marvel was going to take some of its most famous characters- the Avengers, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and Captain America (and Thor too!), and totally redo them with a more modern flair. There was a huge sense of anticipation from the comics world, or at least from my 12 year old perspective, that this would be a make-or-break type of experiment.

But before this great experiment could take place, Marvel had to wrap up the current runs on all the books. The whole reason for the reinvention of these characters is that their continuity was out of control, and everything had either been written into a corner, or out into left field. Let's put it like this: At this point Iron Man had been de-aged to a teenager, Franklin Richards had been aged to a teenager, Wolverine had no nose and bone claws, and Susan Storm was well on her way to become grandmotherly. If ever someone needed to hit the reset button, the mid-nineties was the time.

Which brings us to issue #413 (1996). The Fantastic Four series was "ending" with #416, so longtime series writer Tom DeFalco had to quickly tie up the loose ends. I don't remember much about this issue, other than thinking the fact that Reed Richards' dad being a time traveler made total sense, and was incredibly lame. Also, and I think this is most why this issue will forever be stuck in my head, is that the most blatant, nonsensical retcons ever happens at the end of this comic. On the second to last page, Franklin Richards, who had been aged from a child to a teenager, is hit with a "time window" out of nowhere and suddenly becomes a kid again. The last page shows a child size Franklin in an adult space suit crying tears of joy for his mommy. As a 12 year old fanyboy, it was one of my first "what the heck?" retcon moments. It was like the first time I had the sense to pull back the curtain on the creative process of a comic and think, "there's no reason for this except to move the story into place for someone else." I kind of want to find that last page image again to prove to the world why this book needed to be rejuvenated. (Editor's note: X-Man graciously posted these 2 weird pages on his pics blog- Thanks, friend!)

2.) Fantastic Four #554 (2008)- This was one of my more recent attempts to enjoy the FF. I don't like Mark Millar's writing (or personality, not that I know the guy), and Bryan Hitch is a truly great penciller, but he's not enough to make me to buy something. Those are probably the reasons that I waited for about 3 months after this issue to come out to buy it. I remember the day, because my brother (who didn't like comics, but was just tagging along) had come with me to the comic store, and I really didn't have anything in mind to buy, so I felt like I was really wasting his time. I kind of just grabbed it on a whim (and because I had some idea that it was supposed to be a cool new direction), and was astonished to find I enjoyed the story enough to pick up the next issue. But then money woes came and I didn't buy any more issues.

I really thought Millar and Hitch were going to do something special with the book. After reading one of those Marvel promotional interviews in the back of one of my other comics, I kind of bought into the hype. All writers say they want to go back to the "Stan and Jack" mentality for these characters, and I thought maybe Millar could do it within the parameters of the actual Marvel Universe. But I didn't stick with book, and then all those delays happened, and I didn't care anymore. I finally got the trade of these stories, and I'm kind of glad I waited. The book was just sort of a letdown after awhile, and delays never help that.

3.) Fantastic Four #1 (1997)- As stated above, the FF comic was rebooted in 1996, as part of a great experiment to update the Marvel characters. Titled "Heroes Reborn", 4 Marvel titles were restarted in a universe that was separate from the regular marvel universe. Well, the experiment failed. The books were horrendous, fans were rightfully upset, and the heroes who were reborn quickly returned to the regular Marvel Universe. Fanboys put down their torches and shotguns, and peace returned to the land.

To further smooth relations with their fans, Marvel smartly put actual honest-to-goodness creators back on the big Marvel books. Kurt Busiek wrote the Avengers and Iron Man, Mark Waid went back to Captain America, and Scott Lobdell and artist Alan Davis came aboard for the Fantastic Four series (Thor even came back too!).

Although Scott and Alan only stayed on the book for 3 issues (ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? 3? Chalk it up to creative differences) , the excitement I had for this issue still remains today. I first read this comic on the campus of Michigan State University while waiting for my mom to get out of one of her Masters courses. I was in the lobby of one of the Halls feeling really out of place (since I was about 13 at the time), so I just buried my face in comics for like 2 hours.

There was just this feeling that with these creators aboard, the FF was going to be a real family oriented action-adventure book again, and not just some creative revamp for Jim Lee to play with (which is what Heroes Reborn was). The issue's opening scene has Ben test piloting a new invention for Reed, and then driving it into a snow bank and the Torch making fun of him. At the time, I loved it so much, and it was the best rendition of the Thing I had ever seen. I think Alan Davis is my favorite FF artist ever. Maybe even moreso than Kirby, which may be comic book "blasphemy."

However, years later, I bought the comic again for a dollar and I thought the story was kind of weak. But at the end of the issue, the FF saves France and the people yell "Vive La Fantastique!", which is the battlecry of this particular blog...a little bit of trivia for you, there.

4.) Essential Fantastic Four Volume 4 (published in 2005, purchased in 2006)- I had not bought a comic in about 7 years, due to the fact that I gave up on them during high school and a better part of college. I had moved to the campus of a university after attending a community college for a while, and I was looking for a hobby. I had been wondering whatever happened to all those old characters I used to read about, so I looked them up on google. After looking some stuff over on the ComicBookResources site, I brushed off the notion of reading comics again.

But as time went by, I started to look up more and more comics stuff online. I was intrigued, but disgusted by the price of comics. $3? Really? I told myself that they weren't worth it. And then one Friday night, I rode the bus to downtown Grand Rapids, and went to a quaint little bookstore (that was about 2 weeks from going under). It was there that I discovered the idea of a Marvel "Essential" volume- a collected edition with a lot of comics for a relatively small amount of money. The volume was $17 for about 20 issues, so I bought it, hoping that the Galactus story might be included somewhere. Well, I never did finish that volume (because old comics are really boring- I don't care what anyone says), but it did snowball me into buying NEW comics. So in a way, the FF brought me back to comics. I don't know if I should thank them or not, but that volume of comics has significantly directed my life for the past 4 years....

Wow, I'd never connected my purchase of that volume to my current state of existence, but it's true. Well, that's it for the personal stuff. I hope you have a clearer picture of why I would buy a box of 163 non sequential comic books featuring characters that I sometimes despise. Until next time, Vive la Fantastique!