Review: Midnight Fantastic Four #1 (Marvel)
Updated: 14 hours ago
Tripping the light fantastic.
Midnight Fantastic Four #1
Writers | Ben Percy |
Illustrators | Kev Walker |
Colorists | Frank D'Armata |
Content Rating | T+ |
Publisher | Marvel Comics |
Spoilers Ahead
Reed Richards the pill popper: welcome to Midnight Fantastic Four. In this dark reimagining of the Marvel Universe, the Midnight imprint takes familiar characters and premises and infuses them with the macabre, the grotesque, the grim. And two books in (I reviewed Midnight Spider-Man #1 right here), I have to admit that this imprint is really growing on me.
The Fantastic Four has traditionally been one of my favorite comic book series, dating back to Heroes Reborn, taking root with Heroes Return, and cementing itself as a top-five comic book franchise in my mind with the Mark Waid/Mike Wieringo run. I have fallen off in the time since Dan Slott came on as writer, with none of the runs since, including Ryan North's bastardization of the series, worth reading. Midnight Fantastic Four, however, was an opportunity to not just get a little FF back into my life, but also to see the team in a whole new light.
It's a dark light, but I'm not complaining. Writer Ben Percy introduces readers to a very different take on the quartet of people who will eventually come to comprise the Fantastic Four. Reed Richards is a brilliant scientist plagued by addiction; Sue Storm is a billionaire with aspirations for space travel; Johnny Storm is the test pilot this time around, crippled by a prior accident and adapting to being legless; Ben Grimm is Sue's bodyguard and security lead. Sue and Johnny's relationship is familiar, but the rest, not so much, in particular Reed and Ben, who aren't even remotely friends here, but are instead total strangers.
Midnight Reed seems to have the best of intentions, but like the 616 Reed he can be selfish. However, where the mainline Reed might skip out on story time because he's running an experiment, this Reed's avarice can prove deadly. Early in the story, we meet a familiar face: Victor (presumably Von Doom, but perhaps not), who is not Reed's peer in this comic, but instead a grad student and lab assistant working under him. Reed wants to finish an experiment he was running before being fired, which appears to open some kind of portal. As Victor comes to help Reed finish their work, he asks Reed to pause a moment so he can make a last-minute adjustment to the device. Reed, lost in thought, activates the machine anyway, mutilating Victor and, ultimately, killing him.
The scene of Victor, mauled and broken on the floor, is haunting enough, but perhaps worse is how Reed doesn't even seem to care. Instead of apologizing for hurting Victor, Reed asks if he saw anything while the portal was open. That's a far cry from the usual, good-natured Dr. Richards fans know and love, but it's nonetheless compelling. We've seen twisted versions of Reed before, most prominently the Maker, but there's something different about Midnight Reed. He's perpetually in a fog, hallucinating about tentacled monsters, and seemingly surrendered to his addiction (stating at one point that the pills are how he makes his scientific breakthroughs). He's dangerous in new ways, and I'm curious what his actions will lead to next.
Similarly dangerous is Sue. She seems fully aware that there's something very wrong with Reed. After Reed is jailed for his actions at the lab, she buys off the university by agreeing to pay for a new science building, which prompts them to drop the charges so she can sneak Reed off to her headquarters outside of San Francisco. At various points she sees how deranged Reed is. He's scribbling formulas in blood on his cell walls and lunges for his pills when she dangles them in front of his face when they first meet, and he begins to shove his hands in his mouth when he imagines a creature is inside of himself while eating once she gets him to her headquarters. Yet, despite all this, she wants Reed to help her with her rocket problem.
Sue is trying to get her rockets to go beyond 40,000 feet. Whenever they hit that height, the ships explode. She reveals to Reed that the site she's using is where the original nuclear bomb testing occurred, and that she has footage showing there's an extra-dimensional being that's stopping the rockets from going past that height. She believes that the nukes opened a rift into the Negative Zone and she wants him to help her get through it. Once again, we see Sue is wanton in her ambitions, not caring what the Negative Zone might lead to or what it could lure here. And she knows all too well that Reed will do anything to find out what's in there, too, to finish what he began in his lab.
Considering Reed and Sue are a couple in the 616, this has all the makings for a match made in hell. But it works. I actually really want to see what happens if these two become romantically paired because, at least in this first issue, they're both pretty screwed up people. Less screwed up is Johnny, who seems to be doing what he can to recover from his accident. The man has already lost his legs, so what will it mean for him to become the Human Torch, if that is indeed his fate? And what about Ben, who comes across as a cold, cruel man in this issue. Is his transformation into the Thing more of a universal atonement this time around? Lots of questions, but there's one last big mystery: who is the lady in Latveria?
Towards the midpoint of the comic we see a castle in Latveria. Inside, a lab where the corpse of Victor, now sewn up like some kind of Frankenstein monster, is being brought back to life. His benefactor? Victor's mother, who looks strikingly familiar in her green hood and armored face mask. It would appear that the Midnight universe is home to a Lady Doom, one who is very curious about the experiments her son and Reed were running in that lab. With her son deformed and killed by Reed, she'll likely have an axe to grind with the FF at some point.
Bolstering all of this delightfully sinister storytelling is artist Kev Walker. His style is slightly cartoony, in some ways reminiscent of the aforementioned Mike Wieringo, and it's a great fit for the series. Plenty of heavy shadows fill these pages, creating a moody atmosphere that perfectly compliments the thematic nature of the material. There's one particular shot of a lighthouse at sea that is just brilliantly rendered. Frank D'Armata is on color art duties and his work is a perfect mesh with Walker. D'Armata is a legend, so it's a real boon for Midnight Fantastic Four to have him aboard as colorist. I hope this duo is onboard for the long haul.
One quibble I have is that this series also has data pages. I already know that Midnight X-Men has them, and I saw them in Midnight Spider-Man, so it wasn't too surprising to see them here. That said, I don't know that every Midnight book needs to have them. It starts to feel gimmicky at a certain point. If they serve a purpose, cool. If not, they just feel like they're put in there as a superfluous way of making the Midnight line seem "different." It's unecessary, though, because the tone of the books is already doing that. I will say that the notebook page from Reed was the more interesting, although I would have chosen to make it look like an actual handwritten page instead of just typed. It would help make Midnight Fantastic Four's data pages feel distinct from the others series, if nothing else.
Like Midnight Spider-Man, this issue left me totally excited for issue two. It's a twisted, eerie interpretation of the Fantastic Four mythos. It's familiar enough that I'm invested in the characters already, but also different enough that it has my mind racing wondering about all of the possibilities. I don't really see what could turn this Reed into a hero, but it will be nonetheless interesting to see his journey, and the journey of the rest of the characters in this issue. Definitely worth a read for FF and horror fans.
