Category: Fantastic Four
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If Herb Trimpe spent as much time on his figures as he did on the shading lines, his Ka-Zar story might not have been hideously ugly. It’s actually passable–ambitious at times even–until the dinosaurs show up. Trimpe can’t draw dinosaurs. Roy Thomas scripts the story, which is an extended chase and fight scene. The narration’s…
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And it’s a happy ending for everyone not looking at Domingues’s art. Seriously, it’s really bad. But the final issue has a lot of charm–even if the ending is too short and Cornell wastes the cast of The Wind and the Willows. Having Toad run around with Johnny Storm seems somehow perfect and Cornell only…
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The third issue has some very weak moments–oh, the Austen characters are from Sense and Sensibility–but it ends with the Fantastic Four all dead, shot by firing squad. Along with the little kid from Sense and Sensibility. So Cornell gets some respect for shooting a little kid. Even if it’s not shown on panel (Domingues…
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Well, if it weren’t for Domingues, Cornell might really have something this issue. Cornell tasks Domingues with drawing various literary figures and he comes up with something out of a “Scooby Doo” cartoon. The artwork here does not cut it–Marvel should be embarrassed. Domingues’s style is unfinished (they should have given him an experienced inker…
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I really wanted to love Fantastic Four: True Story, but Cornell just isn’t able to make it precious enough. The concept is somewhat complex–Sue is suffering from melancholy and discovers it has to do with not wanting to read fiction. It turns out the whole world is suffering from a similar melancholy (a major problem…
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I’m not even sure where to start. About half the comic deals with the Living Pharaoh’s origin and his escape from prison. It’s a strange origin; he seems a lot like an Egyptian Peter Parker for a bunch of it (you know, if Peter weren’t a college dropout or whatever). Michelinie does everything he can,…
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I read this series when it came out, but I barely remembered anything about it besides it being really good–I didn’t, for example, remember the crimes against the comic book medium the colorists perpetrated. Suffice to say, I didn’t remember this issue. This perfect issue. I mean, it’s a perfect close to this limited series,…
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It’s a cute issue. It’s set during the black costume period, when Spidey was with the Black Cat. I sort of remember reading these comics as a kid and, from just the Secret Wars II crossovers I more recently read, they aren’t cute. It’s a strange approach for Slott to make–it’s an all humor issue.…
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And the coloring problems return. Not quite as bad, but whoever’s doing it–there’s no name just Sotocolor–thought adding three dimensions with color shading was a good idea. And is wrong. But it’s hard to care, because the series just gets better issue to issue. Here, Slott marries two very disparate elements of Spider-Man history–he relieves…
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Now, this issue doesn’t have the same coloring problems as the first. It has different ones, but they’re far less garish, thank goodness. This issue, for the most part, is a Human Torch issue. He and Spidey swap jobs for the day. Spidey messes up the Fantastic Four’s scientific exploration while the Torch takes on…
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Who let this comic out with these colors? I don’t usually go nuts, in support or against, over colors. I doubt I even know a single colorist’s name. But Felix Serrano is a criminal. He took Ty Templeton’s lovely retro-artwork–it’s supposed to be in the Silver Age style–and added this glossy Photoshop slime to it.…
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Strangely, the John Byrne Beyonder does not look like the standard John Byrne male. No idea why he chose to do something different. Maybe it’s just the eyeshadow. Maybe he started with the Byrne male and then the eyeshadow ruined it. It’s an utterly goofy story, however, featuring some mind boggling continuity turns–the Dr. Doom…
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Holy shit. I thought Byrne was going to do some kind of responsible story about a kid lighting himself on fire to be like the Human Torch but he does not. There’s certainly an element of that story in this issue, but there’s no responsibility. Byrne turns it into A Christmas Carol (but with only…
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You know, when John Byrne said Hispanic women with dyed hair looked like whores or whatever, I figured he knew how to draw Sue Storm to look like a chick instead of a John Byrne dude with a crappy haircut. I grew up on Man of Steel so I think I always gave Byrne a…
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I watched Fantastic Four for a number of reasons (really). First, because I liked one of the previews to the second one. Second, there is a recently released on DVD extended cut. Third, I wanted to compare and contrast it to the unreleased 1994 version. Fourth, to give movielens a run for its money (it’s…
The Stop Button 