I keep hoping that Kirkman's next Marvel project will be the one that captures my attention the way he captured it with Image projects like Invincible and Walking Dead, but Fantastic Four: Foes isn't it either. Don't get me wrong, this is a solid enough basic Fantastic Four story, but like the multiple X-Books, a solid story isn't enough when you're competing with so many other books. Ostensibly a focus on the Fantastic Four's foes, this series instead features a new scheme by one of their foes introduced on a few page but mostly focuses on the same characterization of the main characters that we've seen before.
Not surprisingly given the writer, Fantastic Four: Foes mostly reads like Fantastic Four done in the style of Invincible. This means that in the sequences where Kirkman is focusing in on more unexplored territory, as he does in the pages of Invincible, Foes is pretty interesting. The three-page opener on a guy who works in the Baxter Building is intriguing, but what exactly his story is and how he ties in remains to be seen in future issues. The notion of the Mad Thinker and Puppet-Master teaming up for some grand scheme is certainly a neat idea, and it's always fun to see the villains having a meeting or something else that is incongruous with their supervillain modus operandi, used for humorous effect.
Where Foes goes wrong, however, is in focusing too much on the Fantastic Four themselves. There are currently three monthly titles focused on the team, and in every one of them, we get the rivalry between the Torch and Thing, the difficult relationship of Reed and Sue Richards, the Torch's flighty relationships with girls and all that kind of thing. So while Kirkman has some fun gags with the Thing and the Torch or he captures the Reed/Sue relationship well, it's very familiar territory, and doesn't really merit a separate series. The cliffhanger at the end is somewhat intriguing, as I'm curious to find out what leads Reed to his pronouncement, but in general the less we see of the Fantastic Four in these pages the better I think the book will be.
Also, while the style of art that Rathburn employs has worked well for the Image books he and Kirkman have worked on, when applied to the Fantastic Four, it just looks kind of sketchy, especially in comparison to Cheung's beautiful cover. Which isn't entirely fair to Rathburn, because his work here is certainly solid enough in terms of storytelling, but in general when you look at what Rathburn and Crabtree have done, it looks kind of flat and lifeless when compared to the other Fantastic Four art teams. There are some panels I really liked, such as the one where we see the room full of the Four's foes, where the work reminds me of a less detailed version of Scott Kolins, but in general, the art just looks kind of stripped down for my tastes.
If you look at the review, you'll note that many of my problems with this book come largely in comparison to the other Fantastic Four books. Fantastic Four: Foes generally revisits familiar territory, not just from the modern titles but from previous stories, and as such, it lacks the inventive edge that Kirkman has brought to his non-Marvel work, but the larger problem really is one of context. As the Fantastic Four title, this would be a solid if unspectacular outing. As a companion book to three others, it's a bit of a disappointment. 5/10
