September 11, 2007
Review: The Last Fantastic Four Story
Creators: Stan Lee, writer; John Romita Jr., artist
Marvel, color, 64 pages, $4.99
So? Any time Stan Lee comes back to the characters that he kicked off the Marvel Universe with, it’s worth a look. While hardly the most original story, Lee manages to hit the classic notes just right to satisfy fans of the classic versions of these characters. For the ultimate FF story, Lee brings in a character called the Adjudicator, who’s passed judgment on the human race. The FF, as usual, manage to smash, stretch, protect, burn and think their way to a solution, with the timely assistance of both the Silver Surfer and Galactus. There’s still a bit of magic in this formula, even if just from the familiarity of it all, and Romita Jr. gives the book just the right mix of classic and contemporary. (This is yet another excellent argument in the case that Romita Jr. is one of the most under-rated and outstanding artists to ever contribute to Marvel.) What’s missing is a sense of closure here. This is supposed to be the final adventure of the team, but none of the characters appears to have aged much (Franklin is still a child, for example) and the “end” of the group is kind of tacked on at the end, in Lee’s typical, feel-good “the best is yet to come” fashion. Nonetheless, the book is a pleasant read, pretty to look at and has the bonus feature of Lee’s original plot, complete with comments and changes from project editor Tom Brevoort, who has a terrific blog at Marvel.com if you haven't already seen it. Grade: B
Sep 11, 2007 at 05:15 PM by Tom McLean in Reviews | Permalink
Comments
You're actually giving this story a B? Umm...this comic was forgettable garbage. "Oh we're all so tired and bored...let's just retire..." What a waste.
Posted by: Joe at Sep 12, 2007 4:24:56 AM
Actually, I kind of enjoyed it. I like the concept of the Cosmic Tribunal, some Celestial-level alien race that we've never encountered before (I particularly like Romita's depiction of several of them as just levitating shapes without manipulative limbs; after all, they're uber-telekinetics and don't NEED limbs), and I wish they could be kept around in the mainstream Marvel Universe so we could see how they interact with the rest of Marvel's cosmology. If the story were to be somehow incorporated into regular Marvel continuity (I'm sure it will not be), I'd like a simple retcon added saying that the reason for the Tribunal's decision to wipe us out is that we have all the moral faults they accuse us of, AND our planet is full of mega-powered superheroes, which makes Earth a very real threat to the rest of the universe--in fact, that was the premise of the "Maximum Security" storyline a few years back).
I agree that the "retirment" angle doesn't really work, chiefly because of the single panel at the end showing that Franklin is still a child. If the characters were all drawn to look older, with Franklin as an adult, the retirement ending would seem completely logical, without changing anything else in the story.
The dialogue feels like Lee's early style from his earliest books at Marvel, like his very earliest F.F. stories, and there's nothing really wrong with that, but there is kind of a jarring effect reading that dialogue juxtaposed with Romita's modern-style artwork.
The "mindless" destroyer guys seem very reminiscent of Dr. Strange's enemies the Mindless Ones, and I'm not sure why they aren't just identified as such. Again, if there were going to be any follow-up stories to this, that would be a very simple retcon to do.
Yeah, it's far from being Lee's best work, and it's very derivative of his earlier work, but even so, I kinda like it.
Check out my webcomic, The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! at http://bobadventures.comicgenesis.com
Posted by: Jim Cleaveland at Oct 24, 2007 7:40:41 PM
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