Wednesday's New Things: Fantastic


1. This is the second Fantastic Four reboot in as many years. That's not a good or bad thing, necessarily, but I liked the direction that Matt Fraction was moving, even though the individual plots weren't always quite coherent. It's a shame that he gave up on the First Family to focus on Inhumanity, a project that is no longer his. Here we are, anyway, with James Robinson and Leonard Robinson taking the series up; Robinson's pencils, take a peak here, don't have a line out of place, and they stake a nice spot between photorealism and stylization. He's well respected from his work on that Captain Britain series he did with Paul Cornell five or six years ago; from the preview, it doesn't seem that there's anything particularly exciting about it, but it certainly gets the job done. As to Robinson, well, Starman is one of the most fondly remembered series of the nineties. That's not a high bar, but it is really good stuff, and it holds up. He hasn't been quite as good since, but I've heard intriguing things about the Earth 2 series he was doing for DC, and my understanding is that he's been generally solid. Obviously, he'll have to do something wild to step out from Jonathan Hickman's shadow here; starting with a story called "The Fall of the Fantastic Four" is certainly one place to start. I'm always suspicious of stories that give away the conclusion in the title, but there's certainly room for something interesting in this new phase of the world's greatest comic magazine. 

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